I'm still confused at what exactly they're trying to accomplish.

So youtube and google drive basically die, some of the most useful free services available right now. I think this does more bad than good and I don't think any American citizen would support this given the effects.

YouTube is taking a lot of ad money that would go to cable and newspapers. People's attention is finite. Less competition for eyeballs.

I don't really want to go back to watching ads for heartburn meds and Chevy pickups. At least Google shows me something I might be interested in.

I'd rather have people pay for decent financially sustainable products rather than fueling surveillance capitalism and monopolies with their data.

You can pay for YouTube and it will remove ads. i don't think drive has ads to begin with.

..and you still tracked and your data is mined like anyone else.

There is just no incentive to pay money to big corporations now. I was paying $14.99 for play music and youtube red (ad free). At this time, I don't want my data to be collected and profiled against. But that is not possible. Same thing goes for Washington Post and NY times.

I canceled my subscriptions and enabled ad block via Pi hole.

If you wanna take it a step further, setting up Wireguard on a Raspberry Pi is super easy. it gives you remote access to your PiHole. Look up PiVPN.

I think it's time for tech to flex it's political muscle a bit. We're talking about humongous corporations with billions of dollars in cash silently giving to both Republican and Democratic super PACs since forever and the only political drama we had is Msft vs Amzn for the defence cloud contract. Media companies are puny by comparison.

The tech stance so far has been don't bother us and we'll continue to innovate, grow earnings and help users do cool things and investors make some money in the market. That has worked tremendously well for both the companies and their customers. I don't think changing that is in the users' interests at all.

I don't trust big media to provide accurate reporting here because they don't have the best of the relationships with G / FB.

Let's have privacy laws or platform regulation laws regarding censorship / free speech. Breaking big tech up is pointless.

Google is heavily involved in politics. You seem to be under the impression that they stay out of it but that isn't the case.

Need some references then. Other than some ineffective immigration lobbying, I don't see them doing much.

What laws were passed to help G? What regulations changed to favor them?

I think you’re missing the bigger picture here, google customers are marketers not gmail users.

The worst thing that google does imho is to subsidize YouTube, Gmail and other products using advertising money. They’re effectively selling your data to marketers while killing competitors.

It's the businessman siccing the government on his competition. It's nothing new. Uncle Sam needs to stay out of it.

Why couldn't Youtube just keep selling ads to the Google ad network? Existing websites make money off of advertising revenue that they get from Google, how would this be different?

It would accelerate the path to the google graveyard is all.