1075
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
1075 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59197 readers
940 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The judge in question is 51 years old. He’s not old enough to be this clueless about basics like the difference between a search engine and a web browser and popular examples of each.
Lawmakers and judges should not be allowed to make decisions on something they know nothing about. This is a huge problem with people not even wanting to educate themselves, and then deciding how the rest of us get to interact with the internet.
That being said, Firefox is only popular with tech folk. They have just over a 3% market share. I’m a developer and I don’t know anyone but myself that uses it. My mother would think I was talking about a cartoon if I brought it up. A lot of lemmings use it, but o would not call it a popular example.
Experts are supposed to break it down to them. But yeah, this is a flawed system but I fear the honnest take is that most humans know nothing about most things (even if we're tempted to believe otherwise), so you'd be running out of avalaible judges real quick.
That’s a fair point. This case is even more complicated, as either the author of the article doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or a word was missing. The article says the judge wasn’t sure if mozilla was a browser or search engine, and Mozilla is neither.
I still hate the confidently incorrect assertions people in charge are making to negatively impact the way the largest and most complete telecommunications and information system works. Just look at facebooks trial where zuck had to explain how the internet works to the people who were deciding if his company was doing something wrong.
That just...seems so wrong. My mentally declining grandmother used firefox back in the 00s era (though now that I think about it, my uncle is a developer, so maybe he set up the computer). How have we backslid since then to where so few people know/use firefox?
Actually yes. Around 2010 Firefox still had like 60% market share. Now, chrome dominates the market and Firefox is in single digits. Chrome gives you so many conveniences, and only a small amount of people care about what you give up for those conveniences. “My data isn’t important. Who cares about what I do?” Is a common response to data mining and sharing.
Most people don’t want to put the time and effort into researching these things. Most people just don’t have the energy.
But again if you don’t know anything about a topic you are asked to make a decision on, you should recuse yourself. It’s unfortunate that most people making decisions about tech know very little about it.
Another thing not being considered by all the "judge doesn't know anything" crowd is that they're failing to consider that this case isn't really about search engines or Alphabet as a company.
It's about monopoly laws. In this case, pertaining to Google and Mozilla, but monopolies nonetheless.