I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment though. I think we are all in agreement that Zuckerberg is not a "cool dude". But that seems relevant for a different thread and not a response to what I wrote.
Google has a lot of failures of their own but they seem at least semi-committed to an open internet (with actual ethical standards), something I can't exactly say for Zuckerberg
meh, Google is "more open" than others e.g. Apple and even when they're forced to weird a stick, they do it reluctantly.
Instead, like the US government, Google have developed mastery of "soft power" making it statistically-rare that they conduct Putin-like tactics. They know that heavyhanded tactics force heavyhanded responses and are actually a sign of weakness, not strength.
To be fair, if their business model came under _material_ pressure to be locked down, I'm not convinced they'd stay open.
As an example, look at Chrome vs adblockers - they could've shut them down years ago, but only acted when adblockers ate materially into the business and they were forced, again recognizing that they'll lose some users to Firefox and Brave.
I think you are using "open" in one sense (open source) whereas the original meaning may have been in the sense of "more open use".
Obviously yes, Google is more open source than say apple, but clearly less than say red hat. That's not to say Google is "completely open source" but objectively it's "more" than some.
In terms of usability though Google is pretty open.
You can install any software on your android phone, whereas apple controls everything you do on ios.
You can access pretty much all Google services via an api, Facebook and twitter much less so.
In general, Google is more open in that sense.
In the sense of open source, Google is more open than some, but generally would not be considered an "open source company". Other than android there's not much offering there.
How so? You can not profitable sell an Android phone without the closed sourced Google Play Services in any country outside of China any more than you can sell a phone running Darwin.
As you said, they can sell without Google for China and technically it's possible on other market (see Amazon Fire, Meta Quest) and widely used for embeddeds, thanks to open core OS. AppleOS device is by 3rd party strictly impossible.
Yes if you have the resources of a company worth over 1 trillion dollars you too can take advantage of the crumbs bestowed on you by Google to make a successful platform in the West…
You can see other non big tech examples like DJI controller, and don't miss embeddeds like credit card terminal. Anyway no 3rd party can make AppleOS device, period.
And yet Meta was involved with things like Free Basics, or forcing the Oculus account with a bait and switch, and repeatedly lying about Whatsapp - but I'm sure this Instagram thing is much worse, somehow
I'm seeing a few posts here that basically they have to do this because it's an ad service, it's for shareholders, etc. When are we going to blame Zuck and his unique brand of dishonesty and lying to everyone? They've misled their own investors and advertisers, at what point do we stop saying "with anyone else at the helm it would be the same" and recognize his character issues?
Have you tried clicking the Instagram logo at the top left lately? It should open a drop-down menu where you can pick “following”, though I’m not sure if this has rolled out to everyone yet.
