On: Only Google is really allowed to crawl the web

[dmitriid]

Google was/is also the largest sponsor of Mozilla. This doesn't stop Google from sabotaging Mozilla.

2 mln is probably Google's hourly profit. For that they get one of the biggest knowledge bases in the world. It's basically free as far as Google is concerned.

The instant Google becomes confident they can supplant Wikipedia, they will.

[jedberg → dmitriid]

> 2 mln is probably Google's hourly profit.

You don't have to guess, their numbers are public. In 2020 they made $40B in profit, so it takes them about 27 minutes to make $2M in profit.

[billiam → dmitriid]

NOT a sponsor of Mozilla. Google buys web traffic (as default search engine) for ~$300M and turns it into several times that $ in ad revenue.

[kelnos → dmitriid]

Not sure why you're being downvoted; I completely agree with what you're saying (modulo questionable usage of "sponsor"). If Wikipedia were to try to charge for this use of their data, Google would likely make it a priority to drop the Wikipedia blurbs, either without replacement, or with data sourced elsewhere.

[will4274 → kelnos]

> Google would likely make it a priority to drop the Wikipedia blurbs, either without replacement, or with data sourced elsewhere.

That's an odd way of phrasing things. If Wikipedia were to take away free access to their data, Google wouldn't be dropping Wikipedia, Wikipedia would be dropping Google. This line of thinking "you took this when I was giving it away for free, but now I want to charge for it, so you are expected to keep paying for it" is incorrect.

[zdragnar → kelnos]

Given the scale that google already operates at, I don't doubt that they would just take a copy of thr content and rebrand it as a google service, complete with user contribution.

Then, after two or five years, let it fester then abandon it. Nobody gets promoted for keeping well oiled machines running.

[dmitriid → zdragnar]

Remember Knol? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol?wprov=sfti1

It was actually good for writing stuff when I tried it. Never brought in enough traffic. Killed.

[magicalist → dmitriid]

> Google was/is also the largest sponsor of Mozilla. This doesn't stop Google from sabotaging Mozilla.

Google isn't a sponsor of Mozilla, they're a customer. Do people think Google is "sponsoring" Apple with $1.5 billion a year too?

[foobarian → magicalist]

> they're a customer.

The cynic in me thinks the product is anti-trust insurance.

[saagarjha → magicalist]

$1.5 billion a year? You're off by an order of magnitude; the number is thought to be over $10 billion a year.

[dmitriid → magicalist]

Google being Apple's customer doesn't mean Google isn't sponsoring Mozilla.

These are two very different companies with a very different relationship with Google. And very different influences on Google.

Google wants to be on iOS. It brings customers to Google. A lot of them. iOS is possibly more profitable to Google than Android even with all the payments Apple extracts from them.

Google needs Mozilla so that Google may pretend that there's competition in browser space and that they don't own standards committees. The latter already isn't really true, and Google increasingly doesn't care about the former.