Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Jeff keeps saying, where is the consumer harm with Google paying to keep other search engines out of the market, he likes Google and doesn’t want to use another search engine?
That is the whole point, he likes Google, because it is the best. It got its initial monopoly by making a great product, back in the early 2000s. Once it got the monopoly, it was paying others to make it the default, and we all know the tyranny of the default.
That meant most people didn’t realise what search engine they were using, or that there were others available. It starved those other search engines of user share and therefore funding, meaning they could never reach the heights of Google’s search engine, and because of that position, it allowed them to deteriorate the experience over the last decade, putting in ads, pushing up paid for results, not useful results and basically enshitifying the Google search experience.
I use a mixture of DDG and Brave search these days (I think I’ve had to drop back to Google search maybe a dozen times in the last 6 years). In some ways, they aren’t as good, but they aren’t as enshitified as Google.
That is the consumer harm.
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If you’re referring to the Apple deal, it isn’t keeping other search engines off the market. I use DuckDuckGo as the default on all of my Apple devices. No one prevented me from doing so.
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Google Chrome has a double digit lead on MacOS and you can’t buy a Mac with Chrome preinstalled.
Source: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2023-q2#id-7-market-share-by-os
Also, Google has an 80% share on Windows where Bing is the default.
There is no evidence of consumer harm in this case that I have seen.
I think Leo was overstating the consequences from the MV3 transition. There will be MV3 compatible ad blockers, and they will be “good enough” for most people who want them. uBO Lite already exists and it’ll work fine, especially if you give it full permissions. They’re using a similar API that Safari has had for years, where content blockers also exist and work very well.
Sure, Google’s an ad company, but if they wanted to actually shut down ad blockers they would’ve have made all the modifications they’ve made to MV3 (including delays) since the original announcement all those years go.
Or maybe I’m wrong and Brave & Firefox will see huge boons in new users. I honestly doubt it though.
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I was really intrigued by Father Robert’s statement that the Catholic Church is the world’s largest IT organization. Of course: who would ever doubt a priest’s words? But it still seems like a stretch of the imagination. I just googled it and could not come up with any support for that claim. Any idea on how to verify or provide further detail? I mean - it’s also very convenient not to be able to speak about it any further. 
Alright, they dive into the subject a little later. My first take is that the Catholic Church is WAY TOO BIG. But, of course, that’s a personal opinion. And, granted, it has nothing to do with tech. However, they have spoken in detail about organizations that are too large not to come into question of monopoly. Granted, there is of course no faith monopoly, but it’s still an interesting comparison: Google and the Catholic Church (in the Western World).
It’s hard to believe the Church’s IT operation is bigger than say AWS which is supposedly spending over $10B a quarter on capital expenses and employs over 100,000 people.
… that, and: That’s a for-profit organization which invests EXTENSIVELY into their infrastructure because it’s the backbone of their profitability.
Of course, churches are not for profit. You might argue they are there for welfare. Thus, why does the Church need more IT infrastructure (possibly even spending more than for-profit orgs) to … provide welfare? It’s the same thing with the Church being one of the biggest real estate holders on earth.
Sell it. Feed the poor. Teach them how to fish. Idk, do something else than real estate and IT, TV-stations, etc. Granted - way off-topic, but still.
On the other hand, they have more “outlets “ than Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. They have tens of thousands of churches, thousands of schools, thousands of seminaries etc. in terms of servers, who knows how big they are, but all those churches have at least 1 PC, I would think, schools will have dozens to hundreds of devices etc. so in end user terms, they probably are one of the biggest, if not the biggest.
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I assumed Fr. Robert was talking about number of seats. NHS here employs around 1.4 million people I think. Walmart is over 2 million.
I agree with the size of the operation. What I’m doubtful of is rather the degree of organisation. In my mind, no thousand churches or other smaller welfare institutions actually need one integrated IT infrastructure across the world. They are not - at least in my mind - all smaller units of one large corporation or army that needs to be able to convey and implement competitive tactics or weekly goals, performance reports or KPIs. A local church might need excel for book keeping, word for writing a flyer and some letters, and a sermon.
It must be that my sense of church admin might be dated. I’m imagining an elderly lady named Gudrun who comes in two afternoons a week and takes good care of expenses tracking. I don’t imagine (or at least hope it’s not that way) ten high tech skilled, super efficient, competitive management types who push their IT infrastructure to the limit while plotting the turnaround of the Catholic Church in their neighbourhood through super effective social engineering strategy by doing highly demanding digital collaboration with tens of thousands like them around the planet.
Gudrun might send and email every once in a while to the other church lady in the next town. She uses her own Gmail account since it’s what she has and it’s not confidential anyways. Ingrid, in the next parish, uses Outlook Web because Bill Gates will always be her tech hero. A complete patchwork of independent systems, hardly even organizational. Not much need for anything else.
But all of this, i realise, is much more indicative of how romantically inefficient - nay: decentralized - I imagine (and kind of hope) church admin to be. Suggesting that any faith is so centrally and efficiently organised to warrant the world’s largest IT system really makes me shudder. I mean: that doesn’t mean they put it to efficient use, but… why would they need that?
Just thinking that Father Robert’s denomination - the Jesuits - have hundrets of educational institutions. And they all are on one IT system? How? Why? Where does the world wide tech support live? How do they swing by if a plug falls out of its socket? Are they really that integrated and do they benefit that much from constant interaction or centralised steering? I mean, I do get that the Church is one of the most centralised concepts on earth and likely has many people who enjoy following a central gospel, but… this seems just a stretch of the imagination. Either that or it seems somewhat scary how technically efficient a faith group might be. Pointing to the question of what all of this centralization might generate for them? It does not seem to be a growing nor a particularly effective institution.
That said, maybe he meant it more in an emergent, decentralized, and unmanaged way: “We have many tens of thousands of little branches, every branch has 10 nodes, all of them need Internet - et voila: the biggest IT system on planet earth.” Or some mix of that.
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We have multiple sites around the world, they are all joined together. I could see the Catholic Church being similar.
They probably have central and or regional mail servers, they won’t be using web.de or Yahoo! Mail, for example. Likewise, theological databases, databases of sermons etc. are probably a thing. I know they do a lot of work with podcasts and video streaming etc.
I could see them having a central Vatican (run) datacenter and then regional ones, plus the different order having their own infrastructure. For the schools and seminaries, I suspect they are at least connected to a regional datacenter with resources.
Just because school districts and governments can’t seem to organize getting drunk in a brewery (putting it politely), doesn’t mean that the Catholic Church doesn’t have organizatory power to do so.
Father Robert has been helping to set up large networking shows and their infrastructure for years (thousands of devices accessing the network of the event). That isn’t something you can do without having extensive knowledge of setting up large networks.
As for support, again, I suspect they have regional centers that are responsible for providing support, they won’t all be calling the Vatican.
I’d certainly be interested to see, at least at a high level, how they are organized.
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According to the transcript from Apple Podcasts he said:
“ “No, no, in terms of no’s, in terms of users, in terms of seats, in terms of services, in terms of expenses, we are the largest on the planet.”
From This Week in Google (Audio): Aggiornamento - Google’s Monolpoly, X Sues GARM, AI Dentist, Aug 7, 2024
This material may be protected by copyright.
Seems unlikely to me.
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I use DDG also on my iPad, iPhone and Macs - 
You might used DDG, but 95% don’t change the default. Many aren’t even aware there are other options, for them Google is the Internet, if Facebook isn’t the Internet…
If they were getting this level of usage purely by users selecting Google as their search engine, that would be fine. But they are forcing Android manufacturers to make it the default and paying Apple and Mozilla to make it the default. If users had to select their standard search engine, that wouldn’t be a problem. Paying more money than all their competitors together earn from search to force the default on users is what is wrong, they got a monopoly by being the best, they have kept it by paying insane amounts of money, whilst making the experience worse and worse…
The issue that I have with the “tyranny of the default” argument is that at the end of the day, people who buy devices just want them to work out of the box. They don’t want to have to sit through a dozen ballots - one for their browser, another for their search engine, another for their maps app, etc.
There’s also ample evidence that these ballots do nothing. People just choose the incumbent anyway.
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I agree with you on that point. The question is, how should people be informed there are options. A few in the IT industry will have swapped and some who are paranoid about big business will have taken steps to “keep their information private”, but the average user has no clue and most will use whatever the default is, or if they have been using Chrome elsewhere, they will install Chrome, and thus by default Google, on their new device, if it isn’t already installed, because that is what they have always used.
That isn’t the problem, as was discussed on MBW, Google pays Apple so much for the default that Apple actually shelved their own search engine (testimony at the trial from Eddie Cue), because it doesn’t make financial sense… They essentially pay Apple not to develop their own search engine.
With this verdict, it might cause Apple to take their’s out of mothballs and look at it again.
The big loser will be Mozilla, if Google has to stop paying them.
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Yeah, that’s a tough one. I don’t have a good answer. I do think that at the end of the day, spending resources in educating consumers might be worthwhile.
Google pays Apple so much for the default that Apple actually shelved their own search engine (testimony at the trial from Eddie Cue), because it doesn’t make financial sense… They essentially pay Apple not to develop their own search engine.
I am curious to see what Apple does if the Google deal is shelved. If they develop their own search engine and make it the default, that will also bring a ton of regulatory scrutiny which might be a reason why they shelved the idea.
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Apparently the 80% of windows users who use Chrome instead of Edge change the default.