this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Technology
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I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area, but this seems like it should run afoul of antitrust regulations?
That was my first thought too. Yet another reason to vote for Dems this November - only one party actually gives a shit about enforcing antitrust regulations!
are you absolutely positive the democrats give a shit about antitrust regulations? Biden did actively strike break.
This is true, and it was a black mark against his record in my mind. But antitrust is not the same thing as pro-worker.
He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.
Oh yeah you're right we should just not even bother voting and let the right wing win.
Where did I say that? Of course we should vote blue. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking they already agree with us on issues we're going to have to protest for.
Who should be regulated, Google or Reddit? Reddit updated there robots.txt to disallow everything. As it's their site, I guess it's also their right to determine that. They then made a deal with Google, which I guess is also not abusing a dominant position by Google, as Reddit could have made a deal with anyone.
Yeah but reddit made a deal with google because google’s the big player.
It’s hard to say, but I’d lead toward Google on this one. How does reddit benefit from only being indexed by one search engine? Google must have offered them something more, to make it in reddit’s best interests.
In other words, this deal naturally benefits only google, at the cost of value to reddit and to the public. So google must be doing something that makes it worth it to reddit. Could be threat of punishment: “You give us exclusive crawl access, or we don’t crawl you”.
In 2023, Reddit decided to start charging exorbitant amounts for API access, making it non-viable for free 3rd party apps to access its content, citing things like AI crawlers "stealing" their (users') content.
In 2024, Google announced an agreement with Reddit to access the API, citing things like enhanced up to date search results. I don't recall having seen whether they pay for it, or how much, but possibly they do.
It would stand to reason, that if Reddit has managed to get a single dime for API access, and they keep thinking free access to their users' content is "stealing", then Reddit would be interested in making it as hard as possible to access the content without paying.
That could've been part of the agreement: "You give us cheap/free API access, or we don't crawl you".
Reddit tightening things down while trying to sell API access, just happens to benefit Google.
Given lawmakers that understand how the internet works, I think it would be. To me this isn't any different than a handful of years back when ISPs were throttling websites to give an advantage to the certain ones that paid them to work faster.