News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by bko on Friday October 26, 2018 @09:43AM (#18309102)
Presumably the residents there use Google services. They likely want Google to exist, but just not in their back yard
Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by eropple on Friday October 26, 2018 @09:45AM (#18309119)
"You use the services that have functionally become required for daily life regardless of whether you like them or not, so it is in some way hand-flappingly hypocritical not to let them step on your community too" is not really the winning argument here.
Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by eyeinthepyramid on Friday October 26, 2018 @10:24AM (#18309461)
What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have competitors?
Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by eiaoa on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:09PM (#18310541)
> What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have competitors?

Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's practically requred to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are practically required for modern daily life.

For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.

Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by mehrdadn on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:47PM (#18310908)
> For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.

That's a great example, thanks for mentioning it. I'll probably use it from now on.

Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by mehrdadn on Friday October 26, 2018 @09:50AM (#18309167)
It's not about whether "they want Google to exist", that's just reducing the whole thing to absurdity. It's not about mere existence. It's about whether they're fine with the approaches taken by the company and whether they're suddenly opposing it when it directly affects them.
Re:Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests by cyphunk on Friday October 26, 2018 @01:32PM (#18311289)
Actually a large faction of the protest has been getting local businesses off of google services and educating a thirsty public about alternatives. Most people in kreutzberg already thought of google as evil. their foothold organized people around removing it from their lives, regardless of how impossible that is