Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.

I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.

The enshittification of the internet shall continue.

We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.

Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding "reddit" at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.

And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.

So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.

What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.

Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.

Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.

Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw

Check out "enshittification"

Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube's inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user's and drain their wallets.

Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.

AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.

Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?

And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don't care, we get what we deserve I guess.

Let's just hope this doesn't go through.

Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this "Web DRM".

My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).

Please drink verification can

It doesn’t seem to be targeting ad-blockers in particular (or other page customizing extensions), although that may result eventually.

That's just because they've learned not to say the quiet part out loud.