Google's anti-ad scripts are breaking browsers and privacy plugins. It could get worse because Google controls the ad market, Chrome, and the extension store.

Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.

This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.

This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.

    • @Ashyr@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8•2 years ago

      Two reasons:

      1. Because no one else occupied the same space in a meaningful way.
      2. Low interest rates meant they were able to get massive investments without the burden of profitability.

      Now you’d need to distinguish yourself from YouTube in a meaningful way as well as provide a sustainable revenue model, such as advertising, in order to gain access to a similar amount of venture capital.

    • DarkenLM
      4•2 years ago

      Did youtube at the time serve millions of users daily and stored a gargantuan amount of petabytes worth of videos?

      Even if a competitor rises, they will need money somehow, and in this hell of a capitalist world, only big corporations have it.

    • xapr [he/him]English
      1•2 years ago

      They were big through investors throwing money at a money sink for years. Youtube was losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a long time, before it finally became profitable.

      A new competitor wouldn’t get such favorable support from investors.