The big problem with Google is that they are in, or a part of, almost everything on the internet, and it all funnels users back to them one way or another.

Their search favors their own things, so if you search for anything, YouTube will come up most of the time. This by itself is enough to kill competition. Their search also recommends their browser heavily if you’re not using it, which is how they became the most-used browser, which defaults to their search, which by default recommends YouTube in most searches.

Even if you don’t use Chrome, don’t worry because they will pay absolutely nuts money to be the default search on their competitors browsers, which is again more people to YouTube. And if that isn’t enough, most browsers are built on Chromium, which Google maintains, meaning they can sway the course of their competitors browsers over the long term, which they are doing by selectively killing and bringing in certain technologies over years.

Android, which is also Google, I believe has YouTube installed by default, or at least all of my phones have had it. Trying to compete with defaults is almost unachievable. It’s easy to think that people will change settings, but most people don’t.

I agree that the technology and infrastructure needed to run YouTube is huge, and it’s amazing, but that’s only part of the story. Google has so much control of so many things that even if you could build the same thing, that’s only the beginning.

But it’s not only YouTube, it’s the same for Gmail. Gmail has so much market share that they can kill competitors by making another email service seem unreliable. And all of their services point back to Gmail.

It’s not just that they have a monopoly on video, they have a monopoly on the whole internet.

Sure, but Google has created a monopoly where no one else can even compete.

The chance I’ll ever go to China is very small, but the chance I’ll go to the US is pretty high. Surely the US spying on me is the only one to care about?

Some VPNs use ports 443 or 80 which won’t be blocked. There’s also some which disguise the traffic to appear as HTTPS. It’s a cat and mouse game but I don’t see the cat winning.

I always use the audio for Lemmy captcha because some of the letters are ambiguous

They steal people’s domain names, there have been many reports over the past couple of years. If anyone has a domain with them it’s recommended to transfer away. They used to be good, but I assume anyone still recommending them isn’t up to date on their behavior.

I looked on Amazon and you can get a set of 14 for £4. There’s no need to act like this is unobtainably complex.

Nvidia Optimus and the selector I’m using is MATE Optimus

On my Linux laptop with a Nvidia card, there is a Nvidia program which lets you switch between dedicated or on-board graphics, or on-demand where applications can request the graphics card. Before that the dedicated card was always on. I’m on mobile at the moment, but there is an official Nvidia website with drivers and other programs to control this. I assume the same for AMD, but I haven’t checked.

I can’t speak for everyone, but they increase the security and performance of websites for free. I’m sure a lot of people would like to move away from Cloudflare, but every time I try to find an alternative, none of their competitors even come close. Let’s say I moved one of my websites to Bunny CDN and transferred 1TB per month, that could increase my website cost by $120 per year.

The sad reality is that Cloudflare can basically do whatever they want until another competitor offers a good free alternative, which is unlikely because Cloudflare has a monopoly. We would effectively be asking millions of websites to pay to use a service with less features.

I’m still looking for a good alternative, so if anyone has one then please let me know.

Yes because it makes them billions of dollars. It’s disgusting.

You don’t even need to click for them to recommend it. If you look at it longer than another thing, or take a screenshot when it’s on the screen, it’s a signal that you might spend more time on the app if they show those kind of things. And the chance of you spending more time on the app means more money for them through ads.