Hacker News Reader

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

This comes off as comically evil. Disabling the AI summaries in search results is trivial, so them refusing to do so and blocking search entirely feels like a blatant attempt at coercion. Isn't it an abuse of monopoly power?

View on HN

That would make sense if the AI summaries from Search were a different product.

These summaries have been trivially bolted on, they're entirely self-contained, they can be easily turned off.

Some results also have thumbnails. They could easily be turned off. That doesn’t mean thumbnails are a different product, or an abuse of monopoly power.

It does if the thumbnails are harmful and you're as market dominant as Google with the incalculable levers of coersion like turning off your email or drive which they spend 20 years actively doing everything possible to get everyone to use.

Whether the AI summaries are harmful to users of Search has no bearing on whether the AI summaries are an abuse of monopoly power.

They are both, but one is the only reason the other matters.

And sometimes they just fail to generate, while the search still shows the usual results.

Possibly they want to evolve the feature to be _not_ bolted on.

Why is everyone carrying Google's water for them?

If I could write an extension right now that would remove the AI summary, then I think Google could add a toggle for it somewhere in the admin settings.

I'm sure they will rethink this when Trump's term ends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com