Quite so. And my point is not that people should somehow give Google a pass; it is that in their focus on maligning our motives, people not only fail to level serious criticisms of the consequences of our actions, but make it less likely anyone will be willing to listen to those criticisms.
Privacy advocates say Manifest v3 is an attempt to wipe out ad blockers. Google claims it's about security. But which side is right is not only unprovable, it's irrelevant; what matters is what the actual consequences will be.
If you don't like what Google is doing, by all means speak up. But please, stop claiming you know why some team is advocating for some position, and focus on the effects that position would have in practice.
Google's size and power mean that causing harm is exceptionally easy. We need to listen to cautionary voices. Having a mob of posters yelling about how evil we are even at the times we were trying our best makes that more challenging.
the issue is that Google uses its engineering staff as foils to spread their lies instead of putting forward the product managers, who would explain why breaking the web is good for profits. I don't blame the engineers.
"I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!"
or
"I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!"
or
"Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?"
Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
I don't know what you're referring to with the first two. On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay discussions and there's never been any discussion of preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a lot of discussion of unintended consequences and workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held. Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it was because we loved ads.
My memory or the auto-play thing is that some withgoogle.com functionality broke, it was quickly put on the blessed list, and then it was working again. Sadly the rest of the web that was broken by that change didn't get such treatment.
