An Ultimatum?
A recent article from OSNews pointed out an interesting conundrum from Google. A virtual ultimatum. You either let Google scrape your data for their AI training, or you don’t get to be in the search results. I’m not sure this is a smart move on Google’s part.
First and foremost, let me spell this out right out of the gate. I don’t care if this site shows up in Google search results. As I think most people are aware, I’m an admin for the Mastodon instance Fosstodon, and I don’t care if Fosstodon shows up in Google search results. Despite that, I think I’m probably not in the majority when it comes to this particular bout of apathy.
I think most people who have a website and want it to be successful will want to be in the search results of the largest and most successful search engine in the world. I think Google knows that too, so what they’ve done is tied something that people are less likely to be enthusiastic about to that search representation. They’ve combined the tool that scrapes for the search index with the one that scrapes for its AI LLMs. If you block their AI scraper, you’re not in the search results.
There’s a certain logic to this decision from Google’s perspective. They want to scrape your stuff and they don’t want to do it more than one time, so using the same tool for both functions makes sense. Also, they want to train their AI and people haven’t been super excited about letting them steal their content so Google can stir it up and feed it back to people.
Where this may come back to bite Google in the proverbial butt is the recent court case that found Google had violated the antitrust laws of the United States with its search business. There’s already been talk of Google being broken up into multiple companies. I know this won’t happen today or tomorrow or even in 2025. There’s layers upon layers upon layers of appeals left, and Google has more cash than it knows what to do with, so this is going to be a long process. I also know it very well could be “too late” by the time anything develops from the courts. If you’ve got enough money in your corporate till, you can break the laws and it’ll be years and years before there’s any repercussions other than some minor legal fees. Google is aware of this too. Despite that, it could be a case of poking the bear. If Google flaunts their monopoly power like this, when a decision finally does come down from the courts it could very well be much more extreme than it would have been if Google hadn’t been so flagrant in pressuring pretty much everyone to obey its will.
I guess it’s time to wait and see.
Day 5 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.
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