Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️

Google’s got a secret. Join us today in our fight to rein in Google's monopoly and defend the open web.

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

We're fighting back against Google! We've been investigating Google's monopoly on web crawling for two years and our work was recently featured in The New York Times and cited by Congress. Read the report Google doesn't want you to see https://t.co/3WKyd8Licc

[vint serp @ZackMaril]

here's a short comment on hn I wrote about how it's very clear from the robots.txt data that website operators are blocking crawlers from chatbots (and why Bing and Google give their owners advantages in the AI race).

https://t.co/EbzEOBEHyS

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

Here is an excellent piece by @danielahanley that lays out how the Biden administration can use compulsory licensing to open up Google's private index of the web and fight Google's monopoly power. https://t.co/kXiO4V74Me

[Luther Lowe @lutherlowe]

Greenwashing at #GoogleIO ignores key source of Google's carbon footprint: crawl.

Continually spidering "hundreds of billions" of 3rd party web pages to keep its 100,000,000GB index fresh adds up.

1 annual refresh = 42,000 trees to offset per @gerrymcgovern. Ofc its WAY higher.

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

@BernoulliSays You are very welcome, glad you found it and enjoyed it.

[Mo Bhasin @BernoulliSays]

Google Reader was our company's post-lunch ritual. A way to balance a mornings worth of engineering effort and soporific pad thai with a jolt of fresh news and virtual office banter.

No reader since has come close.

https://t.co/niXEOcxLXn

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

Ya have to be on Facebook because everyone else is. But what is the source of Google's monopoly power?

As @ZackMaril of @KnuckleheadsClb explained to lawmakers. Google's kryptonite is the stock of 600 billion webpages indexed by its crawling-bot: https://t.co/m5fvLCPBcI

[Colin Hayhurst @ColinHayhurst]

"Opening up Google's web index is how the United States can catch up in the international race to regulate Google."

says @ZackMaril of @KnuckleheadsClb
https://t.co/yZQ9DgFcSm

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

There's power in a union and it's incredibly heartening to see Alphabet workers get together and organize. Congratulations and Solidarity! https://t.co/axR0wXVwCt

[Alphabet Workers Union (AWU-CWA) @AlphabetWorkers]

We're Alphabet workers. We’ve been organizing for over a year, & we’re finally ready to share why.

This morning, we're announcing #AWU, the first union open to *all* workers at any Alphabet company.

Every worker deserves a union—including tech workers.
https://t.co/m2Qmjwz32V

[Colin Hayhurst @ColinHayhurst]

Is the Google crawler given more access than everybody else?

Yes, says this new independent club, with evidence.

Indexing is a bigger challenge than crawling but still; this is important work that merits and gets my support.

https://t.co/rz2HnRncd3

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

@nainforuan Thank you!! We got lucky that nobody had claimed it honestly.

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

@nainforuan :) it’s a good name and we were quite surprised the https://t.co/hKlCuEwLcM domain wasn’t taken.

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

@nainforuan Hi, that anime wasn’t the inspiration for the name, but that’s a very funny coincidence and fits well, so the answer to your question is yes.

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

@swagveronica Nani??

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

We're fighting back against Google! We've been investigating Google's monopoly on web crawling for two years and our work was recently featured in The New York Times and cited by Congress. Read the report Google doesn't want you to see https://t.co/3WKyd8Licc

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

We're feeling lucky. This past week was a wild week to launch a new think tank focused on regulating Google and we're glad that we have been able to the word out about Google's web crawling advantages. https://t.co/2lszUCRtmb

[John Gruber @gruber]

@ejc3 And the main point of the Knuckleheads’ Club endeavor, along with yesterday’s linked-from-DF NYT piece, is that Google has a much stronger monopoly on indexing the web than on presenting search results, which is a difference worth considering.

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

@ScottCDunn @Econ_Marshall Thank you!!

[EU TechComp @EUTelecoms]

A key aspect of Google's dominance is the power of its crawler Googlebot that includes about 500 billion to 600 billion web pages, compared with 100 billion to 200 billion for Microsoft https://t.co/de9BQn5Z0x 1/n @UGambini @arcapde @Sally_Hubbard @Caffar3Cristina @a_maehl

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

Google refuses to answer whether they have ever denied competitors access to the web index, which would would be clear evidence of an antitrust violation. They refused to discuss it with both Congress and the New York Times. For more, read https://t.co/lE5LDUlDdm

[Knuckleheads' Club 🌹♣️ @KnuckleheadsClb]

We absolutely agree with AG James.

Google's "disproportionate control over our data and information," including the index resulting from Google's monopoly over web crawling, demands investigation and regulation.

For more on this checkout https://t.co/3qzuqHC4pW

[NY AG James @NewYorkStateAG]

#BREAKING: I'm filing a lawsuit against @Google with 37 AGs to end its illegal monopoly in search services.

It doesn’t take a web search to understand that unchecked corporate power shouldn’t have disproportionate control over our data and information.