If I were an exec at Google, I’d have already made a move to buy out a small country. Tuvalu, Nauru or something with a minuscule GDP. Then proclaim the Google Republic, move HQ functions over, and be free of taxes and outside influences forever.
And being their own country, they could even have a full fledged military…
I think the lite versions don’t allow scripted blocking, only static or something. So a whole lot of the adaptive blocks for persistent ads you encounter on facebook, instagram and other shitty socials that behave like viruses will be hard to impossible to kill.
I’m glad I never had to deal with that as I have never used Chrome on desktop, but I’m pretty sure there will be many folks out there who don’t know how to switch.
Escalate it to the EU consumer watchdog, they got some real teeth.
https://commission.europa.eu/live-work-travel-eu/consumer-rights-and-complaints_en
Assuming you bought the Italian version because you’re living in Italy.
Best case, you get your money back.
I’m mostly downloading fairly recently released stuff, so there’s no shortage of torrents on public trackers.
I also don’t want any payment details associated with anything not explicitly legal, so that’d be a further deterrent from Usenet. Sure, I could use crypto, but even that links me to a wallet that might someday be traced back to me, so I’ll pass.
Many US based websites are no longer displaying content to Europeans, since they can’t legally harvest data. Youtube, Instagram and other websites/apps playing licensed content are also increasingly disregarding countries where licenses are expensive and/or revenue is low.
I’d really look into getting a good VPN. Mullvad ($5/month) is awesome, or else Proton in the free tier (can’t pick the server but get one assigned at random, might need to restart to get one in a useful location).
Takes away some of the anonymity though, even with domain registrar obfuscation etc., they’d probably disclose the owner to a request from whatever authority comes knocking. And if you’re based in a jurisdiction where piracy is explicitly forbidden, federating with db0 and effectively co-hosting links to prohibited content might open a whole other can of worms. And not everyone is technically competent enough to run and maintain an instance, even if the initial setup works out with one of the how-to’s.
Yeah Douyin is pushing educational content and is very fast to censor harmful stuff. Still full of garbage and racism though, just the sanctioned kind against people the government doesn’t like.