Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
It’s taken me about 2 years to degoogle as much as I have. I’ve moved google photos to dropbox (soon NextCloud), gmail to fastmail, search to Kagi, music to Tidal, docs to NextCloud, and (most recently) youtube to Invidious/Freetube. None of it was particularly hard, though switching from gmail took ages. Still using android, but that’s next on the chopping block.
Invidious and Freetube are still YouTube though?
Yes. I see it like using a custom android ROM, it couldn’t exist without Google but its the most private I can be while not going without. I do watch as many creators as possible via Nebula, though.
And it is getting easier as we are getting ecp system of privacy first services