Or create a new partnership with various like minded organizations and create a new index that each can use in their own way (perhaps those you mention plus DuckDuckGo and others that my brain isn't bringing to mind right now [maybe Wikipedia, EFF, internet archive, maybe Nebius would help...]).
I know this wouldn't be easy but maybe such an arrangement would be possible where there is some shared index and then the partners can each use it, extend it... in their own way.
I could see a collaborative open source web index run by the WMF, Internet Archive, EFF, GNU, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi being too big to simply ignore like a previous commenter suggested might happen to a new index. I could also see Qwant being interested
The last sentence doesn't make that much sense to me though. An agreement with Apple to be the lead AI partner would likely juice the IPO a great deal. The financial details wouldn't matter much for the IPO (as the initial financial commitments are going to be small but the halo effect would be real - I think it would in the market anyway).
I think Anthropic has real commitment to their way of doing things which can cause short term issues (and hurt the IPO). And they seem willing to keep those values rather than just making deals to pump the IPO. As you say Apple also sticks to their way of doing things even if it frustrates their partners.
I think not being the lead partner with Apple may well be good for Anthropic long term. But if all you cared about was the IPO just agreeing to Apple's terms likely would have been the best option.
These SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI possible IPOs are so extreme it is hard to make judgements about them; so maybe there are Anthropic IPO issues to an Apple agreement that I don't appreciate.
It depends on what Apple wants and what Google was willing to give. Google is in many ways the weakest player in the individual-user facing space.
It's a weird market and these companies want global domination. TBH, i don't have the knowledge or context to understand how to think in that mode and what the real facts are.
I wouldn't put much stock in the deeply held principles of Anthropic (or Apple for that matter). That's an appeal to emotion. I love the product, but they're happy to randomly rug-pull the product and how it works, both in the publicly available products and other contexts. It's just another company.
I agree that Apple (and probably Anthropic) don't hold to the expectations some have. But I wouldn't say they are "just another company." I care about privacy more than Apple. But I think Apple does more to help privacy than any other huge company (and I can't think of another huge tech business to consumer company that does less to invade privacy, but I would be open to evidence I am wrong on that).
Apple is far from perfect but that doesn't mean they don't have a position (say privacy) that they care about and give a lot of weight to when making decisions. But as a huge company they also have many competing priorities.
Caring about privacy or potential abuses of LLM/AI services does not mean that a huge company is going to perform on those areas the way those that want maximum privacy or... want.
I do also believe Apple's marketing reasons to promote their focus on privacy make sense. And even if they don't do as much as I would want they do make a big difference (on privacy) it seems to me. And I believe long term there is big value to Apple building systems to stop users private data from being abused.
Actually it was a huge tax addition in 2024 (from Europe over dispute about how Ireland had taxed Apple for many years). In 2024 Apple added 14.4 billion in additional taxes accrued over many years.
Car insurance costs more if you have bad credit score. My guess is that they have data to justify that. I think some states may have disallowed this practice.
Minor suggestion: I would make the home page feed show popular stocks (so that it is more interesting to new visitors and also engaging to regular visitors). You could just pick 100 stock symbols or combine that with something like what you are seeing people search for (I would manually check the popular search ones - some may not make sense to add to the home page feed).
It could offer a couple options. One being the main view is like you are there. You see the court in a huge view in your main view. Then, similar, but way better than in person, you have several big views off to the side, for replays, stats, maybe following a view of your favorite player...
I would think they we have a way to make it so your view (switches as the action on the court switches to the other basket). That will have to be a good design but just the idea of something like teleporting from your seat with a great view of this half of the court to now having it on the other half.
And for other sports even better I think. With say soccer/football and football (USA) you can have a big overview (like you are sitting at midfield) but then camera angles for closer view of the action...
I think sports viewing could really be incredible. Figuring out exactly how to do it well will take awhile. But it seems to me the kind of thing Apple could do very well.
I looked into subscribing because I don't mind paying to avoid the ads.
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
I'm afraid you are making a mistake in assuming that Incognito mode == no tracking. The only thing that Incognito mode does is not save any local history or cookies. This is mainly of benefit for people who share a computer and don't want the other users to see their history.
Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.
You can delete your watch history after every session or have something automated do it for you. That will work fine if you only want to watch the content you subscribed to.
If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".
You'd also have to trust that YT doesn't track you in the incognito window, given that it's still pretty easy to identify an user and you're also most likely using Google's own browser to hide.
If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.
Also cute these people think using incognito does anything to stop Google from tying the traffic back to them. They already finger print you off hundreds of parameters. Hell most people are literally using their web browser.
I know this wouldn't be easy but maybe such an arrangement would be possible where there is some shared index and then the partners can each use it, extend it... in their own way.