I think the monopoly is pretty obvious at this point. No company should have this many strings to pull to maintain market share.
There’s no way this is fair competition.
TLDR:
When reCAPTCHA flags what it considers suspicious activity, it abandons the old image puzzles and demands you scan a QR code. That scan requires Play Services running in the background, communicating with Google’s servers. If you’re using GrapheneOS or any other custom ROM that strips out Google’s software, the verification fails.
Nice open source OS you got there, Google
I swear they’ve been at it for years now. I’ve had it happen on an old android tablet that I rebuilt because Samsung abandoned that model after a year. Tried to log into Discord and I would always get a minimum of 10 captchas, sometimes as many as 20.
I’m almost always browsing from a VPN on my phone, at least, and I get endless CAPTCHAs as a result. I’ve been soft locked out of my Microsoft (Hotmail) account that I’ve used since the late 90s. I can’t log in on any device that hasn’t previously logged in.
(I haven’t contacted support about that, yet, FWIW. I’ll be asking for a full refund for all my Windows Store purchases if they don’t fix it.)
Lots of sites just straight fail to connect, too, due to “abuse from my IP address”—some websites post an error to that effect, at least; others don’t even load at all.
And I don’t even blame website hosts, either, since not running some sort of bot-prevention layer opens up all sorts of other potential problems for them.
The open web is slowly dying.
