Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet

Turns out RMS has always been right. How surprising.

Last time this happened we got a bunch of Google employees downplaying the impact of WEI and calling it a nothingburger, that people were being hysterical. I just checked, and everyone I saw defending it has since left the company. I'm sure another wave of Google managers, keen to appeal to the higher-ups, will be here to defend this new initiative any minute now.

Don't you see it closing all around you?

It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us:

https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...

The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched).

Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant.

Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record.

Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge.

Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing.

A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones.

HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.

> rapidly becoming

Always has been.

Google was creating cartels like the "Open Handset Alliance" literally decades ago.

Via their control of Chrome and Search which are both monopolies, Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.

I'm amused at how thoroughly Google adopted Microsoft's playbook. Chrome supplanted Internet Explorer by embracing the open web. But then Google immediately started on extensions, and now they're trying to extinguish the open web with nonsense like Cloud Fraud Defense. All very smoothly done. I mean, people are actually _asking_ for this junk. I'm impressed.

what alternative to WEI do you propose? it solves a bajillion Internet-existential problems. it is definitely a crisis. the bot problem is at least as serious as facebook, gmail serving without https.

the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real...

that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.