That was never Google's job anyway. It boggles my mind how there is very little public investment in maintaining information, while tons of money is being wasted keeping ancilarry things alive that nobody uses. We should have multiple publicly-funded internet archives, and public communication infrastructure fallback, like email.
Part of the ideas behind the EU’s “very large online platform” rules. Basically saying that if your platform gets big enough where its basically important infrastructure, that then comes with responsibilities.
I would welcome some rules and regulations about this kinds of stuff. Can you imagine that google wakes up one day and decides to kill gmail? It would cause so many problems. It’s already impossible that even as a paid gmail user you can’t get proper support in case something goes awry. Sure you can argue they can decide what ever they want with their business. But if you have this many users, I do think at some point that comes with some obligations of support, quality and continued service.
As a private sector company their job is maximizing revenue forever.
There old slogan was "don't be evil"
they have a new slogan, which is "vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears"
I see your point with Wikipedia, but the writing is on the wall for LLMs: since they are replacing search engines for some users, it's only a matter of time before that experience gets polluted with "data-driven" ad clutter too.
Most people want to know what is happening here and now, and if they want information about the past they prefer the latest version. Archival is a liability, not an asset, in Google's case
