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Comment by BrunoBernardino | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively, we can collectively "fight back" by not using Google and teaching others around us to do so as well. There are plenty of decent [1] and great (better) alternatives, where you're not the product [2]!

[1]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=fr...

[2]: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/?license=co...

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I can recommend https://noai.duckduckgo.com. It works pretty well.

We can fight back better by falsifying information when the crawler is detected to be Google.

You can make this particularly juicy by targeting information that could cause legal/financial trouble for companies.

Incorrect legal advice, incorrect critical statistics or incorrect compliance information.

Make it a genuine liability to rely on the AI summaries.

There is actually another way that was just hinted at a few days ago demonstrated by the EU courts reaffirming a law from 2019 against Meta, just force google et al to compensate publishers:

https://www.epceurope.eu/post/epc-welcomes-landmark-cjeu-rul...

That translates to "Force Google to give money to these specific organizations and newspapers which EU leaders wish to benefit". It won't help any individuals who has made great websites with important and popular information.

Well that's just an example, You could mandate an API to allow bots pay their fair share; could ban google from using content it stole without compensation; could shatter google into a thousand pieces.. There are music rights organizations with small time artists to huge celebrities, they are strong organizations that collect revenue from big platforms and redistribute it to all artists as well. Lots and lots of ways to address this problem.

My appeal is just to realize that our implicit assumption that we can't do anything ever at all besides appealing to completely ineffectual individual action is in and of itself a strongly ideological and politically radical position to take.

It's possible to do that easily: By putting your content behind a paywall. Google can't access that legally. That's how book authors have won in court against both Google and the AI giants.

That also requires new ways to think about how you sell content online. Mass syndication has been very successful for music and video content, and much more.

That's a horrible solution:

- It assumes google should be the arbiter who gets paid.

- It assumes the only damage here is financial.

We have more than enough of these misguided schemes that just enrich small interest groups while inconveniencing everyone.

Fighting back is stupid, these things are inevitable, and honestly probably for the best over the long-term.

Nothing is inevitable, and long-term effects of google's move are unknowable.

Well I’d like it to be inevitable.

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