Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
It’s also privately owned by one guy, so it doesn’t have to submit to investor pressure.
Steam, for example, is basically a monopoly for PC game sales, but hasn’t enshittified because it is privately owned.
While I agree that this does avoid enshitification, it’s always possible for a privately owned company to IPO. That’s why all of us are even here to begin with
It’s also certainly possible for a privately owned company (even one owned by a single individual) to undergo enshitification, it is only (if anything) less likely.