Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
I’m always a bit shocked the worlds governments don’t start offering free email/hosting to their citizens. It’d give them a cheap way to surveil that was “opt-in” (but would probably catch a lot of dumb people) and everyone would have a “verified” email for official stuff too. It seems like a good investment to me.