Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google
Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL. This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo.com.
The twist in this tale is that duck.com's prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus "consistently" confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)...
[...] [Calls] for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google's dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front. So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.
Also at Gizmodo.
Previously: Google Throws DuckDuckGo a Bone, Adds Redirect on duck.com Landing Page
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14 2018, @03:57AM (4 children)
It's called USENET.
Well, I was social there.
Fine, just watch me post about this on my MySpace page!
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday December 14 2018, @02:00PM (3 children)
As mentioned in a four-year-old review by Alan Henry [lifehacker.com], major home ISPs no longer include access to Usenet in the basic subscription. It's an over-the-top paid add-on, much like Netflix or NYTimes. How many users do you think Facebook would have if Facebook charged a $7/mo subscription like NewsDemon [newsdemon.com] or even $10 per 25 GB like AstraWeb [astraweb.com]?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 14 2018, @06:24PM (2 children)
A shame that we allow that... Damn ISP should be a common carrier.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday December 14 2018, @07:10PM (1 child)
In the case of Usenet, it's not an issue of blocking, fast-laning, or zero rating a particular destination, which are the ISP behaviors commonly associated with the net neutrality debate. It's an issue of it costing money to run an NNTP server with decent retention. Your ISP will let you connect to any NNTP server you want, but it doesn't have to operate one itself, and operators of other NNTP servers are free to deny access to those who connect without valid credentials.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 14 2018, @07:57PM
Your ISP will let you connect to any NNTP server you want, but it doesn't have to operate one itself
And chances are they won't let you operate one either, it's like telling me I can't use a fax machine on my line, or an answering machine, remember those days? It's another reason we need to re-categorize them. What I do with my paid for bandwidth is not their business.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..