As the old saying goes, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you." That goes double for Microsoft, especially when it comes to security promises.
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That's how Google can piss away $80b on a stock buyback and fire 12,000 technical employees at the same time as its flagship search product (with a 90% market-share) is turning into an unusable pile of shit:
The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" - instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:
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Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:
Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:
Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):
Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:
This is huge: yesterday, the FTC finalized a rule banning noncompete agreements for every American worker. That means that the person working the register at a Wendy's can switch to the fry-trap at McD's for an extra $0.25/hour, without their boss suing them:
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But over and over again, the courts refused to believe that Congress truly wanted American workers to get legal protection from the wealthy predators who had fastened their mouth-parts on those workers' throats. So over and over - and over and over - Congress passed new antitrust laws that clarified the purpose of antitrust, using words so small that even federal judges could understand them:
Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."
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But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical conversion of greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its comorbidity, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:
Using Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Doordash, or Uber doesn't make you lazy. Platform capitalism isn't enshittifying because you made the wrong shopping choices.
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When blame corporate power on "laziness," we buy into the corporations' own story about how they came to dominate our lives: we just prefer them. This is how Google explains away its 90% market-share in search: we just chose Google. But we didn't, not really - Google spends tens of billions of dollars every single year buying up the search-box on every website, phone, and operating system:
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
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Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:
BREAKING: The right-wing House Freedom Caucus has issued a statement ripping Mike Johnson over the budget minibus, and has called a press conference tomorrow morning to denounce him.
Journalist Jonathan Katz fact checked Katie Britt’s horrific rape story from her over-the-top rebuttal.
Despite all the drama, it turns out to be a story that happened 20 years ago - and not in the U.S. but in Mexico. It’s a story that was recounted in Congressional testimony in 2015.
Katie #Britt lied when she blamed this on Joe #Biden’s border policies and when she said it happened in the U.S. #SOTU
@JaneDoeTheFirst@GottaLaff I'm told that's a $10,000 sub-zero refrigerator (whatever that is?), there behind the island. You know, like the 'average American family' has. #not
If you're running a business, you can either invest at being good at your business, or good at Google SEO. Choose the former and your customers will love you - but they won't be able to find you, thanks to the people who choose the latter. And if you're going to invest in top-notch SEO, why bother investing in quality at all?
But Google doesn't seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:
For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.
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Amazon's search results push down the best deals on the platform and promote results from more expensive, lower-quality items whose sellers have paid a fortune for an "ad" (not really an ad, but rather the top spot in search listings):
This is "Amazon's pricing paradox." Amazon can claim that it offers low-priced, high-quality goods on the platform, but it makes $38b/year pushing those good deals way, way down in its search results.
Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.
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The reality is that PE goons - like other financiers - are basically herding animals. Everyone's hit on the tactic of buying up beloved media companies - from the 150-year-old Popular Science to modern publications like CNet - and then filling them with spammy garbage in the hopes that Google will fail to notice and continue to award them pride-of-place on search results pages:
Today, Yahoo announces doing exactly that to Engadget: "...the changes paint a picture of an outlet cutting staff to focus on things like Google traffic, SEO, commerce, and affiliate revenue" 😔
…like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait.
I had no idea Popular Science had been PE'd to zombification. I wondered why I had started seeing them appear in search results again and just assumed they'd invested in their web presence, when the truth is much worse. A shame, because they were once a great publication.
A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
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The brains behind Trump's stolen #SupremeCourt have detailed plans: they didn't just scheme to pack the court with judges who weren't qualified for - or entitled to - a SCOTUS life-tenure, they also set up a series of cases for that radical court to hear.
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Bedoya's speech is a banger, and it reminds us that labor rights and anti-monopoly have always been part of the same project: to rein in corporate power and protect workers from the insatiable greed of the capital class:
In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers - not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
These people reason - correctly - that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?
apex predators ( mander.xyz )
"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." ( pluralistic.net )