Regulate the absolute living crap out of the these bastards. (But who’s going to when the folks who should be regulating are having drinks with them at the pub every evening and eyeing their next gigs at them?*)
Did you know Google’s lobbying offices are literally round the corner from the European Parliament?
@aral you seem to think we are having a lot more fun than we actually are. The first thing I'll be doing when I'm back in the office is calling Google and demanding an explanation.
@jmaris It’s possible, yes. However there is at least one piece of evidence (the screencast) of the wait going away when one person at least set their browser agent to Chrome.
That’s what I meant when they’ll likely say it’s accidental/a bug/side-effect. (They’re starting to block ad/tracker blockers like uBlock Origin in Chrome so it would make sense they aren’t checking for ad/tracker blockers there because they’ve made it impossible for them to run.)
@jmaris (Note that person in screencast had uBlock Origin running. Also, because Google can serve a different version of a page to anyone based on criteria only they control, it is very difficult to exactly reproduce anyone’s experience with any level of certainty. This is why we need algorithmic transparency.)
@aral that does sound like it is on purpose. Do we know if chrome communicates installed add-ons to any of Google's sites ? They might eliminate the wait when chrome reports no Adblock
@aral I saw this. Just goes to show we have let Google accumulate way too much power over the web. We're lucky it is just chrome now, and not the chromium engine, but I suspect it is just a matter of time...
@jmaris Indeed. And not just Google. Surveillance capitalists in general.
(And the solution isn’t to have surveillance capitalists of our own in the EU. It’s to ban their surveillance-based, extractive, and exploitative business model and fund technology from the commons for the common good.)