The consumer, who have never paid google a cent despite using their services daily for the last 20 years, likley spending a solid portion of their waking life on one of google's platforms, has never benefited?

And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?

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ang_cire 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You have paid a lot, if not in money. You paid with your data, that Google read from your emails and searches, and sold for money.

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WarmWash 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You load google's ads and trackers?

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ang_cire 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If you use Google search or Gmail, they read everything you write, and aggregate that into data packages not just for ads to show you, but even aggregated demographic data to sell for ad targeting.

Regardless of whether the ads reach you or not, you as a data point add to the count that make the package enticing to advertisers, so you're helping them sell the package anyways.

	▲	WarmWash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If google gives you full access to all their services for the $0.001 annually they get from you being part of an aggregate dataset of trillions of points, that's...a cause for outrage? Ain't nobody buying user data on users who block all ads and trackers, it's worth almost nothing (what are you going to do, show them ads?). Fun aside, the reason why people get so many awful scam and malware ads when they turn off their ad-blocker is exactly because no other advertiser will bid on them, because they have no ad-profile/ad-value.

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vrganj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Has the cattle benefitted from the free food the rancher gave it? I suppose it's a question of perspective.

And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.

	▲	WarmWash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How many of those cattle have been slaughtered in the past 20 years? Unless seeing a Coca-Cola ad counts as slaughter. I suppose some could feel that way It's also great that European startups have privacy services, I pay for proton myself, but none of these guys make any money compared to the ad model giants. The cattle are free to leave the farm and pay full price for their feed elsewhere and get guarantees. But again, so far virtually zero cattle have been slaughtered at the "free" farm in the last two decades, and the pay-for-feed farms are comparatively vacant.

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gowld 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Google doesn't make money from you "paying a cent". They make money from you paying advertisers who pay Google. So the relevant metric is how much you spent on Google advertisers.

	▲	WarmWash 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Raise your hand if you have ever intentionally clicked on a Google ad. Raise your hand if you use an ad blocker. I rest my case.