A Cognizant spokesperson told Motherboard in an email, “We have received the Alphabet Workers Union’s request for a Cognizant bargaining representative. The request put forward was for both Cognizant and Google to bargain. While we respect our associates’ rights to unionize, we firmly believe Cognizant is the sole employer of our associates. While the joint employer ruling remains unresolved, we cannot bargain at this time.”

“Google refuses to just admit that they are our employer, and then Cognizant is just using Google’s legal appeals as a scapegoat,” Marschner said. “That, honestly, is exactly why we filed for joint employer status in the first place. We knew that if we just tried to engage in collective bargaining with Cognizant, that’s exactly what they would do.”

wut

2. That’s exactly what I mean by changing the protocol unilaterally, without changing the standard. The way I see it: if they play fair and work with community on extending the standard, that’s a good thing. If they start creating non-standard extensions, ban them
3. Don’t we want the fediverse to grow though, one way or another (a few large instances or several medium-sized)? If that’s the case, we’ll have to deal with the scale at some point
4. Legit question - is this really how it works? My understanding is: indexing public internet is fair game. Google scrape(d) Reddit and twitter and indexed with no issue. So I’m assuming fediverse will be indexed. The missing link for ads is knowing that buttface17 is “John Johnson” on Facebook - does this problem become easier if we federate with them?

In favor of federating

1. Presumption of innocence - until they actually push ads to ActivityPub, there’s no formal reason to defederate. The moment they do - cut the cord
2. Same thing with EEE - defederate the moment they change the protocol unilaterally, not before
3. It’s a stress test for Lemmy. What if lemme.world grows 100x and dominates the global feed - it’ll be sad if our only solution at that point was to defederate from them
4. Federation does not give Facebook more ads data: entire ActivityPub ecosystem is open and scrapable, they will still know that [email protected] asked a question about growing shrooms