Normally when the people rise up they’re slaughtered. When rich countries go through major changes normally there’s a lot of chaos and blood before things get better. If you’re someone who lives in one of those countries it’s better if you can ride the chaos out somewhere else. In fact, in a country where things are getting bad, it’s generally a good idea to get out long before the chaos starts.

Let’s say that Trump doesn’t manage to cancel or subvert the next couple of sets of elections and that in 2029 the US has a democratic president and a democratic congress. Let’s also imagine that the next president cares about monopolies and puts Lina Khan back in charge. I wonder if there’s anything that they can do about decisions made by Trump’s FTC. Or is Netflho just now legally in place and we’re stuck with them unless the FTC can prove they’re abusing their monopoly?

Content will eventually be produced by the masses

And it will be owned by one of the many monopolies.

Barring that, local community theatre productions.

Put on in a theatre owned by Ticketmaster.

Yo ho ho.

I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.

I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth

Even if it is just a scam?

He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.

His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?

In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.

Do you mean “almost completely”?

What makes you think Google didn’t influence their decision making process? (Assuming that’s what you’re saying)

Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.

For now. Google probably isn’t too concerned since they have a more than 70% market share, and nearly 90% if you count all Chromium-based browsers. Firefox has managed to do what Google wants, which is “exist” and “not meaningfully compete with Chrome”. If that changes, Google might lean on them harder.

“Partly funded by”?

Google contributed roughly 83% of Mozilla’s income from 2020-2023, and 89% of overall income since 2005.

https://windscribe.com/blog/windscribe-expose-mozilla/

I imagine the reason that Cloudflare is doing this now is that Google just got off with no punishment from their antitrust loss.

Anybody who competes with Google now has to worry that they’ll do to them what they did to Microsoft. And, with Trump’s DOJ, the government will probably just ignore it if Sundar Pichai shows up with a shiny bauble for Trump. So, I’d imagine that Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon (AWS, Twitch), and Meta, among others, might all decide to fund an alternative browser.

This is very encouraging:

Ladybird uses a new browser engine called LibWeb that is being created from scratch by the development team.

Browsers that rely on Chromium / Blink rely on Google. Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google. If they can make a browser engine that has rough feature parity with Chromium but doesn’'t rely on Google that’s very healthy for the web.

I don’t think I’m the confused one here, to be honest with you, as shown by the other answers and upvotes in this thread

Yes, other people were confused. That doesn’t mean that you’re not confused.

The question is clearly asking if Americans are aware that they’re now a rogue state, and I answered appropriately.

No, what you answered was “How do Americans feel about being a rogue state?” That’s a completely different question, even though it’s the one most people answered.

I fully understand and acknowledge that we’re seen as a rogue state externally

The question was whether Americans in general understood and acknowledged that. I would say no, because most Americans don’t follow foreign news sources. People who are getting their news from Fox News, OANN and Newsmax are probably not aware of that. Instead, they probably think the US is even more respected than ever.

How can you be this confused?

You’re basically proving the point of this meme.

The question is basically “Are Americans aware of how the world perceives them?”

Possible answers to that question are: “Yes, I read DW news in English, and BBC news too. I’m aware of how the world perceives the US.” Or “No, I can imagine how the world must view the US, but I only read US news so I can only guess.”