Important recommendations from the article: don't eat, drink, or put in the eye most parts of a Covid test. The article doesn't mention the paper package, you might be safe eating that.
675 karma · joined September 12, 2013
It's impressive how this framing has gotten so much acceptance. The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are, and they are paying their ISPs to be able to do so.
But it's inevitable. Some form of UBI will have to be instituted, by consensus or force, and at that point, a large part of the population will find itself with lots of time on their hands and no need for knowledge in any productive area. Then, most majors will be in philosophy, literature or art.
What it does want is to make self-driving cars widely used, because that would mean that the time currently wasted in commuting by car could turn into increased internet usage, which drives Google's revenue. That's why Google was an early investor in Uber. Its efforts in building self-driving technology are intended as a catalyst for the industry, in which case it seem to have been a success.
I think they've been quite focused. Put yourself in their shoes: almost all their money comes from ads and a large chunk from paid search. What do you do when you have 80% of the market in your main business? Trying to get the next 20% is expensive, maybe impossible since these users may not even have a choice of search engine (locked down company computers with IE, etc...). It's easier to grow by increasing the time their 80% of users spend on the net, searching and receiving ads.
Most of their projects are aligned with this goal. Android is about everyone having a conduit to browsing and searching at all times, even while driving or watching TV. Glass attempts to keep you connected and searching even when your hands are busy. Self driving cars are about converting wasted time during commutes into more time on the net. Their recent robotics companies acquisition spree is the same, less time doing stuff that can be delegated to a robot, more time online. Fiber and wireless are about reducing the costs to get you online and searching.
If all their goals with these projects materialize, people would be generating revenue for Google during almost all their waking hours.
I'm fully aware that with the ad-based model, multiple companies are tracking my page views as well, including largely Google's DoubleClick, but there are two important distinctions. Paradoxically I feel safer being tracked by an entire ecosystem rather than a single company. And my lack of explicit consent while simply visiting sites limits what they can do with my data - something tells me that this consent will be in the ToS of this product.