Watching large tech companies seemingly just destroy everyone's trust in them has been equal parts fascinating and depressing to see. People actually liked Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc at one point. Sure, they didn't like them all equally, (Google's reputation was usually a lot better than Facebook/Meta's), but there was something of an expectation that they did good work and offered good products/services.
Now it seems an increasing percentage of the population outright loathe them, and see them as basically everything wrong with the modern internet. Criticism of Google search is way more common now, criticism of Google shutting down products quickly is way more common, complaints about knockoffs and poor quality goods on Amazon are way more common, etc.
I think I had a set of wrong heuristics that were like, companies won't break the thing that made them rich. Google won't blur the line between search and ads, Facebook won't be creepy about things you share, etc, I predicted, not because they're saints but because they'll build their processes around protecting the thing that made them dominant. I now have the opposite heuristic -- if a startup has a unique selling proposition, that's the thing that will be cashed in when the founders cash out.
I think the "financialization" and the mindset it comes with is a major contributor to the ability of executives to sit in a board room and with deliberation choose to trade trust for money.
More old-fashioned and perhaps less "sophisticated" ways of doing business might just bluntly prioritize trust over many other things, and leave money on the table in the short term. It isn't just that they choose maintaining trust over making the most possible money, it is that they lack the toolset to even really conceptualize what they could make by breaking trust.
Not modern MBAs, though. They'll quantify how much trust you're trading away for how much money no sweat. Even if they're wrong about the exact values they sure are completely capable of conceptualizing the question, and if they notice the externality of transferring a general lack of trust onto the society around them, well, so much the better for being able to monetize an externality, which is the financialization equivalent of hitting the jackpot.
I wouldn’t entirely blame the executives though, there are 192 other countries in the world, and eventually their counterparts in at least one of them would do the same if they didn’t.
It’s a coordination problem since there’s no way to ensure honesty is 100% rewarded 100% of the time even within the US, let alone across the Earth.
News media is in direct competition with big tech companies for advertising. The more eyeballs go towards big tech and not news companies, the less market share and relevancy they have.
Even worse for them, when people want news now they generally go to aggregators, search for it on Google, or get it served up by a Meta property. It used to be that instead people would read the newspaper or go to a news channel on TV. So news media is furious that big tech controls their top of funnel and distribution channels, as consumers typically prefer it that way vs directly seeking out news by going to cnn.com. In some places they’ve pushed link taxes which tech companies strongly criticized for entirely legit reasons/threatened to pull services, which upped the animosity.
Also, because news is monetized through advertising they need stories and narratives that capture people’s interests and attention. Nobody would care about a story like “Google Scholar revolutionized research discovery and accessibility and improved geographical collaboration a billion %” or “Waymo actually works pretty well no complaints” or “most SF residents actually like Waymo”. But controversy like “Waymo ran into something” is more attention grabbing the more they spin it as evil. Additionally, “good thing continues to be good” is not news but “good thing is actually bad” and “recognizable company X did a bad thing” are news. Similarly “fall from grace” “David vs Goliath” and “these people made a lot of money so you should blame them for not having money” are consistently popular narratives people like.
So news media have literally every reason to drag big tech through the mud and pretty much no reason to ever say anything good about them. For sure these companies have problems but you don’t hear about the good things (IMO Meta has made huge improvements in organizational/data security, and their products drive a lot of commerce in developing countries; Amazon warehouses are usually in places where $15-20/hr is actually a huge step up for local inhabitants; big tech is much better than Microsoft and other old school players at fighting unreasonable law enforcement requests) and the bad things are often overplayed/slanted.
People definitely complain about Amazon in real life now, but is criticism of Google search something that actually happens outside of HN? It's not something I've seen.
It happens all the time, especially online. See lots of posts on social media sites about how Google Search is terrible now and how they can't find anything useful there. Heck, it's even gotta notable enough that even some of the folks most directly responsible for the issue (the SEO industry) are questioning Google's results quality now.
I recently had to explain to some Gen-Z folks what things were like ~12 years ago when I worked for Twitter. Their initial reaction was as if I said "Yeah I worked for the Galactic Empire on the Deathstar project a while back".
It was truly amazing that one could start / join a conversation with so many relevant and insightful folks (depends on the community; there was always useless noise). I remember trying to learn Erlang a bit and whenever I'd tweet something about it, Joe Armstrong himself would often start a short thread with me to resolve my misunderstanding.
I think the term "enshittification" really covers the process well [0] to explain what happened.
Now it seems an increasing percentage of the population outright loathe them, and see them as basically everything wrong with the modern internet. Criticism of Google search is way more common now, criticism of Google shutting down products quickly is way more common, complaints about knockoffs and poor quality goods on Amazon are way more common, etc.
It's just wild to see.