brunchyvirus

I think right now companies are competing until they’re only 1 or 2 that clearly own the majority of the market.

Afterwards they will devolve back into the same thing search engines are now. A cesspool of sponsored ads and links to useless SEO blogs.

They’ll just become gate keepers of information again and the only ones that will be heard are the ones who pay a fee or game the system.

Maybe not though, I’m usually pretty cynical when it comes to what the incentives of businesses are.

I think one the biggest sells, especially for these custom rom’s is privacy to be honest. I don’t really trust Google or Apple with the data they probably collect. During COVID parents were being reported to law enforcement for CSAM when sending pictures of there kids medical issues to doctors(Archive Link).

One I guess could argue that sure shit happens when it comes to that scenario, but with the political climate in America combined with the fact that some of the largest tech companies seem to be kowtowing to whatever the current administration is doing, probably makes a lot of people rethink privacy and to find alternatives.

Back when I worked in web hosting I would occasionally get calls mostly from certain European countries and websites mainly doing online gambling which was illegal in those countries. They would always try and demand I hand over the owner of the website and to take it offline.

My response was always the same unless you have a court order from our government than fuck off.

The ones that did have court orders were always interesting cases though and the crazy ones were the ones with court not to take down the website but to plugin a device to monitor all the traffic and every year they would send a new order to let them monitor it for another year

There is a great talk from the Lavabit CEO who discusses what happened to him and his company when they found out Snowden had an email at his company. I won’t link it since it’s YouTube but it’s an hour long but he talks about his experience with the FBI and the courts. You can search for M3AAWG 2014 Keynote, I highly recommend it.