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.
Nobody pays attention to anything beyond the current moment when it comes to shitty corporate behavior like this.
Every large company that isn't privately owned is going all in on this anticompetitive monopolistic bullshit. A few of the privately owned ones still care about customer good will, even if just for long term profitability. Anything on the stock market doesn't do anything for the long haul except for undercutting the competition early on before they were close to a monopoly, like youtube did.