It’s not clear if chrome is really the heart of Google’s monopoly power, if it is a monopoly. It seems to me like the combination of being the ad network and the (non ad) content distribution & discovery network is the real issue. If I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome.
> I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome.
Most people don't realize WHY google started to build their own web browser in the first place. It was actually because of google docs. Google wanted to dominate the office software sector, and Microsoft didn't let them on Windows. Therefore Google had to change the platform - to the web.
Regarding ad networks: google analytics is used among around 84.1% of websites. If that is not a monopoly, then I don't know what is. The rest is like a couple of pedestrians on the street that don't have a car already.
I mean, you cannot justify that this should be allowed. Not a single country on the planet should have access to THAT much data, and much less a single company without any moral obligations because they don't even pay taxes in the countries they are operating in.
They could have contributed to Firefox... more than just monetarily, I mean. They used their dominant position in search etc to push Chrome out to the masses... They had, in fact, previously pushed Firefox. I remember cheering at this point: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mozilla-firefox-on-googl...
Firefox's architecture at the time was years behind WebKit. People forget how much faster and better Chrome was when it launched in 2008.
Google was able to build Chrome in-house faster and at lower cost than it would have been to rewrite Firefox from scratch under Mozilla governance. They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks. However, it was more responsive thanks to smart UX design and implementation.
The real advantage of WebKit (or KHTML) was that it was way, way, way easier to embed than Gecko. That made experimenting much easier.
People tend to forget that the Chrome team was initially a Firefox team paid by Google to work on "the chrome" (which has always been the name of the back-end of Firefox).
Legend has that Google decided to roll out their own browser when they realized that they could not arbitrarily land any feature in Firefox without a review from someone out of Google. More specifically, legend has it that Google prepared a large refactor of Firefox called "Places", reviewed it internally, then attempted to land this as a single patch to Firefox, without any public review. It is my understanding that this is how Google open-source typically works (big code drops), but definitely not how true open-source works (incremental changes). This was blocked by Mozilla until it could be split into smaller changes that could be reviewed and discussed individually. Places eventually landed (and new versions of Places are still part of Firefox to this day) but, says the legend, Google was pissed off and decided that they would be better off with their own, in-house, browser.
>No, Chrome was not faster at the time. It was slower on all speed benchmarks.
Chrome when released on September 2008 had the faster Javascript v8 engine. (Built by Lars Bak team in Denmark.) The improved performance was very noticeable on js heavy websites like Google Maps when scrolling the map and zooming in and out.
A paper[1] showing Chrome winning on various performance benchmarks matches my recollection of performance differences.
Also, Chrome's per-process isolation for each tab also made it more stable when dealing with buggy websites (bad javascript code leaking memory). Firefox would crash more often. The tradeoff was that Chrome used a lot more RAM than Firefox.
This story doesn't make any sense, because landing changes to WebKit is just as hard if not harder due to Apple's culture. Going from Gecko to WebKit would not have made it easier for Google to do code drops upstream. In fact, the slower pace of upstreaming into WebKit is one of the reasons why Blink was forked off (years later)
I remember the launch of Chrome. It wasn't that better. The process isolation was nice (especially for flash) but not earth shattering. Their marketing was good however (see the linked comics).
The V8 javascript engine was the real deal however. It forced Mozilla to significantly invest in its own javascript engine.
> The V8 javascript engine was the real deal however. It forced Mozilla to significantly invest in its own javascript engine.
That's not entirely true. If memory serves me correctly, at the time V8 came out, Mozilla already had the TraceMonkey JIT implemented in Spidermonkey. However, the first version of Google Chrome (with V8) was released before the first version of Firefox with the new JIT.
I fail to understand why people call Firefox as broken. I exclusively use Firefox (with all the ad-blockers) and almost never have any issue in rendering a webpage or a need to switch to another browser.
It is not broken in that way and I'm actually annoyed at myself for writing that :-/
If Firefox was broken broken all other browsers would be beyond broken IMO as none of the mainstream browsers really hold a candle to it for my workflows even today.
But compared to itself a few years ago the advantage over other browsers has diminished in every aspect I care about except maybe security.
Actually I suspect that one of the major motivations was that to have a seat at the table of bodies like the W3C and CA/Browser Forum you had to be the party responsible for a browser. Merely having some of your employees contribute to Mozilla's browser wouldn't be enough.
It also meant that Google could try out new experimental technologies in their own browser which Mozilla might have different opinions on:
Since Google's delivery platform has been the web for over a decade, it was paramount to protect their revenue.
Consider if the world moved to first party apps (ie, news app, ebay app, amazon app) for _everything_, Google would lose their stranglehold. It's in Google's best interest to make the web be as rich and engaging as mobile apps. Google Chrome increased the expected performance of browsers substantially after it was released.
Their ad delivery network utterly eclipses all other revenue last time I checked.
Imagine that the laws have been written with an extremely narrow 'Switzerland' clause. This law says if something is taken down right away, with zero proof of ownership or collateral, when a specific type of legal request is made then the service provider has immunity to copyright lawsuits.
Due to the lack of burden of proof or stakes, this makes automating such legal requests a weaponization of the legal system. An inordinate quantity of resources are also spent to proactively, based on a provided library of possible infringement fingerprints, automatically mark anything as something to block. For many things the automation actually works out, however any time there is Fair Use (which is viewed as a legal defence) or Authorized Use (except problems of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing) it really doesn't.
Combine this with a system where there's also no government provided system of authenticating an individual as someone, and tying them to specific legally owned works or authorization to act by such owners and it should be obvious where the problems and solutions exist.
Without a megacorp's army of lawyers, my opinion is, it seems very likely youtube and any other similar entities would either be sued or legislated out of existence.
Breaking out Youtube doesn't fix what gives them their disproportionate power. Youtube is a low profit pretty basic video site by and large that works because of the adsense monopolization.
And that largely come down to the answer to the question: if you make a website, how can people find it? Whether its you advertising to them or them searching into you its all Google. And that's the problem because Google does exploit this discover ability monopoly hugely.
> If I had to pick a thing to make Google give up, it would probably be YouTube and not Chrome.
You don't have to pick a thing though. For some reason the article title highlights Chrome, but the article makes clear that they're considering many options, only one of which is Chrome.
To me it's interesting that Google has the #1 or #2 market share in so many different areas: search, advertising, web browsers, mobile OS, app stores, email, maps. There are so many, I'm surely forgetting some. DNS? Office suites? In almost any area that Google wants to enter, they automatically become one of the biggest players. The only thing they couldn't do was make a social network...
EDIT: I forgot online video, duh!
Maybe we need a bunch of Baby Googles, like the Baby Bells after the breakup of Ma Bell.
I dunno if this is exactly the point, (not prevent them from profiting on whatever sub businesses get created), but with Standard Oil you could say that splitting it up didn’t do much in the long term. See: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...
I'm not sure I can come to the same conclusion from that page. 100 years later 4 major branches are still competing with the largest of those being <50% the value of the group as a whole seems like an ENORMOUS difference in competition compared to 100 more years of a Standard Oil monopoly. That's not even counting the dozens of minor company spin offs.
Even if they all merged into 1 again in the near future I'd still count that breakup as having massive long lasting impact.
How would an argument against Chrome this even hold up? Google has decoupled the technology from the distribution. The chromium browser is open source, any body can build on it and many companies have. The platform where chrome is pre-installed doesn't prevent the use of other browsers and underlying technologies unlike Apple. How does consumer preference make one a monopoly when moving away from chrome is not difficult at all as you have no lock-ins
Have you ever used another browser and seen a "This site works better in Chrome, download now" on a Google property?
They do it even to other Chromium based browsers. They degrade the experience on Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge, persistently nagging people to switch browsers.
That persistent nagging has an impact, especially for non-technical users who might only understand that Google, YouTube, Google Maps, or another Google property they trust is telling them that Chrome is better. Well, if Google is saying it, it must be true, right?
And that's not even mentioning the ways in which Google has degraded the experience in more tangible ways by turning off features for mobile browsers, fighting app compatibility on Windows Phone to the point of breaking Google Maps - literally just serving an inferior experience and using user agent detection to impair Windows Phone - or blocking the YouTube API on the device.
I just opened up google.com on Edge and this popped up in the top right corner:
"Switch to Chrome for Windows
Built for Windows. Hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web."
I then went to maps.google.com:
"Google recommends using Chrome
Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in"
I then went to news.google.com:
"Google recommends using Chrome
Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in"
That was just a fresh first sign in experience, and as I understand it, these prompts recur - I still see them occasionally on my primary browser, Firefox!
Why do you find it hard to blame Google (the business behind Chrome) for making a business decision of pushing for Chrome installation? This is a straightforward relationship.
[1] As it happens Google advertising Chrome on Google websites seems fairly reasonable to me, but anyway.
This is the very definition of monopoly abuse: Using your monopoly in one market (search) to push into another market (browsers). Exactly what got Microsoft in trouble in the 90s... and looking at firefox marketshare, it's having exactly the same results.
As a Firefox user, I regularly see sites that ask me to switch over to Chrome. Even some very mainstream open-source projects only support Chrome properly.
On Chrome, no captchas. On other browsers, I've literally gone through 5 minutes of fire hydrant selection with no end in sight. Sometimes it'll simply reject it and tell me to start again a dozen times, and other times it's just infinitely adding more.
I really want there to be a third party captcha system that isn't just a covert push into Google's filthy, corrupt, incompetent ecosystem.
CloudFlare's switch to bCaptcha or whatever it's called has made that experience much more pleasant when using non-Chrome browsers, because you can install the Privacy Pass addon and see them much less frequently
Even the freaking Gmail app for iOS has a convenient "bug" where it keeps forgetting your browser selection and suggesting you download Chrome and use that instead of Safari.
Browser selection in the iOS Gmail app has been broken forever. If you select "Chrome" it opens links in iOS Chrome. If you select "Safari" it opens links in an in-app webview which doesn't share cookies with actual Safari.
This webview behavior seems to be common across a lot of apps. I habitually tap the Safari icon on the bottom right of the webview to get into the Safari app. I had the impression that iOS must require this, perhaps to prevent an app from being able to effectively pollute the user’s global cookies, or to prevent broken UX when the user has some existing global cookie that changes website behavior in a way the developer doesn’t expect. It’s annoying to have to tap out of the webview to avoid repeated logins, but I could imagine it being the least-bad solution to a more complicated problem. Maybe a less confusing way to present it would be for the webview to open in a private tab?
I'm skeptical that Apple is imposing this on them. Many apps (Reeder, Reddit, Discord, Toot!) have an option to toggle between opening links in an in-app webview or Safari.
Reeder's options are "In-app browser," "Safari," and "Firefox" on my device.
On my Gmail app it opens a Safari webview every time. I see in the Gmail “Default apps” settings there’s a “Ask me which app to use every time” slider. Maybe you have that turned on?
> A major antitrust report that the House Judiciary Committee released this week found that Chrome’s market share allows Google to “effectively set standards for the industry,” an issue of particular relevance as Chrome phases out cookies.
HN is full of creative thinkers. Someone should figure a way to get gorhill before the committee so he can explain what ublock origin does and how Google has been trying to destroy it in the name of "efficiency."
I'm not sure exactly how to frame blocking all the goddamned ads in a conversation about Google monopolizing all the goddamned ads. But senators and their staffers should know about blockers and be using one on all their machines.
Interesting they want to phase out cookies given how hostile they are to people that browse without them.
If you go to youtube without cookies, your video starts playing. Then it stops and you get a popup asking if you want to sign in. You click no, then it rewinds your video.. then you have to click play and re-watch the part you already watched.
Every video.
Even google as a search engine becomes a less attractive option when you have to agree to their 50 page long privacy policy every time you search for something.
That's what's doing it: you'll effectively get to Youtube without a cookie and be harassed.
It's a strange thing. It's so annoying that I've essentially given up Youtube. I don't care enough about the videos that I want to Login and whitelist (and have a profile recorded) the site, and this makes the experience bad. Ergo YT is fading from my life. Can't say that I miss it all that much after a few days, it has been a habit more so than something I actively enjoy.
Okay, I thought "without cookies" was referring to having cookies disabled.
I use Cookie AutoDelete and YouTube doesn't give me any problems for discarding its cookies. But maybe one of the uBlock Origin annoyance filter lists I use is taking care of the nag screen.
I’m making a dedicated Google account/browser profile for YT this week as I prepare to delete my main, ten+ year old Google account. It’s the last/only thing I actually need Google cookies for (outside of work/gsuite which is a different machine entirely).
I use Cookie AutoDelete (I use only Firefox, but that is irrelevant in this context.) Deleting all cookies (one could also use white^Hallow lists) works 98% fine. The problem is local storage. Pages can store the same (and more) information as in cookies in local storage. There is no add-on API to manipulate local storage. At the moment only an estimated 2% of all web sites use local storage to store tracking information. But if cookies get widely ignored/deleted, I am sure that will change.
I share your concern, but CAD has claimed to be able to wipe localStorage, IndexedDB and Service Workers for some time (a few months?). Check the settings screen of CAD and see for yourself.
I use firefox with cookies being cleared on every session and I get exactly the same behaviour described by the parent post. You may want to check whether your cookies are actually cleared.
Weird. I use it in Safari in private mode and have never experienced these issues. Looking at my cookies, I have no google or YouTube cookies on my machine.
Considering the main economic interests against Google here are ad companies or companies that also source revenue from online ads, that's not gonna fly. This is just a game between economic rivals, no one cares about consumers' privacy or not seeing obnoxious ads.
We do however care when the competition is not fair - as is the case when the indisputably dominating browser it shipped by the indisputably dominating ad company. The browser monopoly is used to benefit their ad monopoly, while also adding features design to cripple the tracking by other ad companies.
That’s the exact type of behaviour that antitrust laws are intended to stop.
Seriously the only reason there is any non-google decisions about web apis is mobile safari.
Google has enough might to fix this and nobody could compete.
All google needs is to have sites talk via a backend connection to google - no adblocker could fix that - and it could train AI backend supercookies based on your behavior. You could be indentified at key points and it could pick you vs your spouse or kids all on the same ip address all contacting multiple sites and know it is you.
Current CDNs already do some of this backend tracking. People think that CDNs are about caching content for faster load times.
What is actually happening is that they are individually identifying people in an unblockable unstoppable way across multiple sites and compiling data on the backend.
Seriously, look at any cdn request. Maybe stack overflow maybe steam. anything with edgecast or akamai* (especially akamaihd) or fastly or more. you are being identified and tracked. google could take this all the way where others couldn't.
Agreed on the fact that Google could definitely do that. I'd be surprised if they didn't have at least one person working on such a solution as a backup plan.
> Seriously, look at any cdn request. Maybe stack overflow maybe steam. anything with edgecast or akamai* (especially akamaihd) or fastly or more. you are being identified and tracked.
Do you have sources on that?
I mean, technologically, it's feasible, but I have never heard of CDN providers actually doing it.
> CDN providers profit either from direct fees paid by content providers using their network, or profit from the user analytics and tracking data collected as their scripts are being loaded onto customer's websites inside their browser origin. As such these services are being pointed out as potential privacy intrusion for the purpose of behavioral targeting and solutions are being created to restore single-origin serving and caching of resources.
Collecting, storing, selling, or otherwise using any digital data in any way traceable to a person, entity including device or location, or other single identifying point of information should require informed consent and contract with minimum dollar value set by law to like $10. Add a bypass where entities do not have to sign to this contract to use the app or site, opting out of all tracking and data collection beyond those specified in ToS for subscribers or registered users of the service.
Now every service in the US that can identify any individual entity must agree to a contract with minimum monetary value for every entity or stop collecting data that has any use beyond generic trends, much like Google trends itself. Maybe eliminate third parties without their own user consent and contract so if I consent to the site having my data (for $10) then any deal with third parties must reflect a smaller amount (say $2) per third party data pull. Fold that cost into the cost of selling user data.
Add exceptions for good faith research, education, healthcare, and similar groups (not all nonprofits but select types or areas of work) so they do not have a minimum dollar amount but maintain a contract with informed consent by both parties. Force opt out by default behavior by making auto-check options to subscribe, agree to terms, etc all unchecked with disclaimer about what you are signing up for by checking including email volume or third parties. Add language for a simple overview of any contracts or ToS acknowledging the law and entity rights including ability to use the service without data collection.
Basically, F u Pay me but for digital data with further third party deals returning on the investment that is your site vising, sales, etc habits. Make it so companies either have to fork over real money (not pennies on their revenue) or stop collecting data.
> Seriously, look at any cdn request. Maybe stack overflow maybe steam. anything with edgecast or akamai* (especially akamaihd) or fastly or more. you are being identified and tracked.
Do you have sources on that?
I mean, technologically, it's feasible, but I have never heard of CDN providers actually doing it.
Google's new cross platform development framework flutter has a mode on the web called "canvaskit", where the page is rendered as a giant canvas that you get to interact with. This makes all forms of extensions practically useless.
also notable, with firefox to longer allowing anything but a handful of carefully approved extensions on mobile, mobile users haven't much of a chance at all to navigate the web in their preferred fashion. this attack on mobile users, this non-user-agent-ified browser, makes me very sad.
Trading within what context? If between corporate entities, I think that would give Google and other large companies a larger advantage because sharing within the company is allowed.
There are, indeed, very few of them. They just happen to be your employer (Background and credit checks), your landlord (Background and credit checks), and your bank (Credit checks).
I'm not sure Facebook, Google, etc, are quite as capable, or as motivated as any one of those three, when it comes to making your life very uncomfortable.
> That criticism escalated in January, when Google said it would phase out the use of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser within two years to enhance consumer privacy. But cookies — small files a browser uses to track visits to websites — are also a key tool for publishers to demonstrate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns to ad buyers.
Their staffers will respond with a nice form letter, but if you identify yourself as a constituent with specific professional knowledge and a suggestion like this about current hearings, stuff can happen.
Because at that point the fake conspiracy would be uncovered entirely. First, Google devs made it clear their API changes intention isn't removing ad blocking. UBlock Origin still works fine on Chrome and Chromium. Safari has in fact done more to limit ad blocking than the supposed attempt by Google, which hasn't even happened because it is fake news.
It's a logical place to start given the X-Client-Data backdoor to DoubleClick and Google properties, which is fundamentally anti-competitive in the ad space by giving DoubleClick access to data that other ad networks are unable to obtain and making it literally impossible for Chrome users to opt out of (and not disclosing the DoubleClick relationship).
Then there's the constant stream of new web APIs which are used almost exclusively for tracking purposes by ad networks including Google properties. For an example of that, look at the AudioContext APIs which leak audio latency information (regularly used to fingerprint users) and are available to websites with no opt-in, no notice and are accessible even if you never use audio on the page. Practically all of the modern web APIs spearheaded by Chrome offer yet another tracking data-point that is abused primarily by ad networks including their own.
So now you want Google to rescue Mozilla, when Servo was nothing but a toy that never reached fruition because it is in fact inferior to Chromium? Why not just ask Google to save half the projects out there because they are inferior solutions that people aren't using?
> This would be wildly beneficial to the consumer.
You'll need some hard proof about that statement, how about you start with a clear metric for "beneficial to consumer". As much as I hate to say this, I really don't want to go back to the pre-GAFA Web, it really badly sucked.
Google has systematically leveraged its monopolies in search, online video, online email, its very high market presence in online documents to promote chrome to all users of all other browsers.
It has if the myriad popovers, interstitial, etc didn’t already harm the user experience of those browsers it has long been suggested (though I don’t know about proven) that their changes deliberately harm other browsers.
Then you have their unending attempts to add privacy invasive web features that aid their ad businesses (hey, one monopoly helping another, what fun!), and have minimal real value.
OK, but who would buy it? Does Chrome make money directly? It does indirectly for Google probably, but what would do anybody else?
It could be good, if the buyer started charging for it. Very few people would use it and it would give a chance to Chromium-based browsers... or Firefox, or maybe not.
Google can still pay for being the preferred search provider. Just without influence on the rest of the project / automatic login to Google services / telemetry reporting.
Chrome as a separate entity would have a very interesting relationship with google. On one hand, Google would be willing to pay a large amount to Chrome to be the default search engine provider, much more than it currently spends on running the Chrome org. Especially since other search providers like Bing would be bidding for the same spot.
On the other hand, Chrome is nothing without promotion on google properties and being installed by default on Android. Chrome would need to pay Google an extraordinary amount to continue to be the default browser on Android. Maybe even the same amount as what Google would pay Chrome to be the default search engine provider.
Any agreement between Google and Chrome needs to account for both transactions - default search engine and default on Android.
The alternative is that regulators force Chrome to become a separate entity and also force Google to keep Chrome as the default for some period of years, although I don’t know if it’s possible for them to compel such an arrangement. If it isn’t, Google could simply release a new browser based on Chromium, just like Microsoft did and make that the new default on Android.
Even if regulators force Android to become separate from Google in addition to Chrome, it still doesn’t work. Now Android has all the negotiating power. It can create its own browser based on Chromium and charge Google an exorbitant fee for being the default search engine.
It’s frustrating when you hear people selling “just break them up” as a panacea without taking into account what would happen afterwards.
The only benefit to chrome running on Android is that Google paying them to use Google and maybe provide tracking. So it doesn't make sense to give back the same amount as other than Google's(or some other company's) money, chrome wouldn't want to be in Android in first place.
> If it isn’t, Google could simply release a new browser based on Chromium
Wouldn't any legal separation of Google and Chrome require that they split of all required resources as well? I would hope that there are fines for trying to just move the Chrome trademark to an empty shell company and call it a day. Also without Chrome there is no chromium, the only relevant distinction between those two is the trademark.
Not to mention Widevine, which every new browser or Chromium fork effectively needs to license from Google. If the regulators forget about that one that would be a big omission.
I don’t see the problem? The point in breaking up Chrome and Google is that there isn’t one default browser owned by Google. Whatever breaks up Chrome and Google will prevent Google from making any browser.
Chrome is only valuable because it is intertwined with Google properties. Outside of Google, with proprietary code removed, it is nothing more than a skinned Chromium and we have plenty of those already.
Sorry, I have a Samsung phone but I must have changed the browser without remembering it. This just reinforces my point that the phone vendors are in control, not Google.
this is brilliant -> On the other hand, Chrome is nothing without promotion on google properties and being installed by default on Android. Chrome would need to pay Google an extraordinary amount to continue to be the default browser on Android. Maybe even the same amount as what Google would pay Chrome to be the default search engine provider.
> Now Android has all the negotiating power. It can create its own browser based on Chromium and charge Google an exorbitant fee for being the default search engine.
Android is code, which anybody can use for free. Making it into a separate entity would cause it to instantly go bankrupt because nobody would have any reason to pay them for anything. Even if they changed the license, everybody would just use the free version from last week and Android Corporation would have no money with which to make improvements, so there would be no improvements for them to charge anything for. Anybody who wanted to try to do this could already fork Android and do it right now; notice the lack of takers.
The reason Samsung et al don't charge Google to be the default browser on their phones already is Google Play Services. So what they really need to separate from the search engine company isn't Android, it's Google Play. Though, of course, if they did that, the search engine company might lose interest in funding Android development.
Actually, the situation is exactly the same for Chrome/Chromium:
Chrome is code, which anybody can use for free. Making it into a separate entity would cause it to instantly go bankrupt because nobody would have any reason to pay them for anything. Even if they changed the license, everybody would just use the free version from last week and Chrome Corporation would have no money with which to make improvements, so there would be no improvements for them to charge anything for. Anybody who wanted to try to do this could already fork Chrome and do it right now; notice the (non-)lack of takers.
Maybe. Though I suspect one of the big reasons that nobody tries too hard to eat Google Play's lunch is that they're backstopped by Google's resources, so if you actually started to succeed, Google would just pour money into crushing you until you were suitably crushed.
If they were separated from unlimited resources, it would no longer be a Sisyphean task to reimplement everything they do, and then others may sense weakness and make the attempt.
Though really that could be the best thing to happen. Let Android Corporation fail, we don't need it anyway, meanwhile everybody else reimplements Google Play Services as part of the open source project, and then Google Play evaporates and there are multiple competing stores from Samsung and Valve and Amazon and Debian that anybody can use on any Android device. And Android gets developed in the same way as the Linux kernel.
Google is hindering innovation around Chromium by refusing to merge upstream patches that may threaten their business interests, such as support for browser extensions on Android [1].
The same way no single megacorp can shape the Linux kernel according to their business interests, and to the detriment of competitors, it would be important to free the open source Chromium browser from Google's exclusive grip.
Apple doesn't even support other browsers in iOS. All 3rd party browsers are a skin on Safari. Is that for battery life too or actually an abuse of market position?
I feel like it might be too late to untangle the mess the web has become without strong market regulation. With Google pushing for QUIC, DoH, ever-increasing scope of browsers and JavaScript, CSS insanity, etc. The time where US antitrust instruments could've been effective might have passed over ten years ago when Google bought DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook bought WhatsApp, etc. Today, it seems only a regulated market covering hosting, DNS, mail based on standardized services, without "free" vertical add-ons (privacy-invasion-as-business-model) with mandatory transferability to another provider in a DNS-like model could work. And it would help if gov, for once, fund web standards rather than relying on private parties with W3C-like funding models since, clearly, the domain of creating standards for browsers has been taken over by Google as well in the absence of any other funding. If then, over a period of several years, we could rollback most of the abominations on the web since 2010, and force a choice of browsers on desktop and mobile, and a number of telcos competing for web and mail spaces, plus ad providers, we might be going somewhere. Ain't going to happen, though.
Would love to hear an explanation from a downvoter so a discussion could be had.
Just saying “no I don’t like that” (Ie a commentless downvote, assuming the comment isn’t inappropriate), is, IMHO, kind of like trying to win a debate by going “booo! I don’t like that.”
Not very hackery. More like just being a plain old hack.
In this case, down-voting without commenting is ok - your comment didn't contain any rationale so no rationale is required to dismiss it - consider e.g. if you had said "I like Firefox better than Chrome" instead of that you liked government funded enterprises better than privately funded enterprises. Without an explanation why, it's basically just noise.
We also live in a society where private relationships (both personal and business) are the default. When arguing for something other than the default, your burden to provide a rationale is greater. So the omission is especially glaring.
> private relationships (both personal and business) are the default.
What on earth is a "private personal relationship" as opposed to a "public personal relationship"?
If you meant the whole tired "less government in our lives" thing, well, where do you think the internet came from? What do you think poll numbers show about public support for Medicare?
It would have to be open sourced first and foremost. Second, there is nothing stopping government funded development efforts towards web technologies. Finally, there would need to be some incentive to developers. If developers can already contribute to an open source browser of their choice with companies that align with their political vision, why should they contribute to a publicly funded browser that will likely have its own political motivations geared towards whatever administration is in power?
You have to realize that there are politicians that would remove funding if something doesn't benefit them. Most politicians aren't going to want to fund open source efforts when it benefits them more to support companies opposed to those efforts.
You're right that PBS is dependent on government funding, as would a publicly-funded browser. But look at the title of the article you yourself shared:
"PBS STATEMENT: Trump Administration Proposes Elimination of Federal Funding for 'Most Trusted' Institution"
I may have misinterpreted but I felt your previous post was making it sound like developers, and perhaps the public at large, would not trust a publicly funded browser. Again, my apologies if I misread it.
Facts - actual data, not supposition - shows otherwise. PBS is a highly-trusted institution.
It's given us Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers.
If someone thinks those things haven't been a good thing, well, then we're going to have to agree to disagree.
I think a Publicly Funded Browser on the model of PBS, also open-sourced, would be more successful than Firefox, and just as beloved as PBS.
Lastly, consider that PBS has continued to struggle on for some time now despite being dependent on funding from self-interested politicians.
Antitrust oversight of Google, similiar to what was done to Microsoft in the 2000s, will do more than spinning off any properties from Google.
Google is able to invest in and made Chrome popular using cash from their advertising business, and Chrome's popularity allows Google to shape the web environment for their advertising business. If Google were to lose Google Chrome, there is nothing that would prevent them from directly or indirectly evolving Chromium. If Google is prevented from making a browser, then they could even move the focus of computing away from the web browser with power from their search business.
Therefore, antitrust oversight is required to curb the types of behavior that lead to the antitrust situation in the first place.
Why not split search and AdWords while they’re at it? There are too many perverse incentives created by the combination of Google’s ad monopoly with their search monopoly.
If Ex-Google Ads has the best ad marketplace and can use the space most efficiently, they will bid the most and buy most of the space. So we will still have Ex-Google Ads on Google searches, but they will be owned separately. What difference will it make?
They would be owned, operated, and governed separately, and Search could have the different ad providers compete amongst each other to provide the best rates. Add it all up together and it'd be a huge difference. Each of the two separate companies would have separate management and a fiduciary duty to maximize their own profit independently, even at the expense of the other.
Consider that Verizon and AT&T, the two largest mobile phone providers in the US, are both Baby Bells resulting from the break-up of Bell Telephone Company in an anti-trust action. They compete strongly against each other, in a way that would absolutely not be true if they were still the same company.
Agreed that breaking up a company horizontally into two competing companies creates competition between the two companies. Here we’re talking about breaking up Google vertically into two companies with a supplier-client relationship. The supplier and the client aren’t going to be competing with each other because they are in two different businesses.
It frees up the supplier and client to compete against each other by patronizing other suppliers/clients in the industry. Right now no one else can sell ads on Google Search; after a break up, other competitors would now be able to.
If I had to guess the outcome, we’d probably see Google Search keep its present market share (splitting Search and ads wouldn’t help Bing Search beat Google Search). Google Ads and Bing Ads would both bid for space on Google and Bing, in addition to other players. Disrupters might be able to take some market share here by having a cheaper cost structure, or Google might dominate because they have the best tech.
The Baby Bell breakup was 36 years ago, resulting from antitrust action brought 46 years ago. Moreover, AT&T and Verizon have consolidated six of the seven Baby Bells into the 2 companies.
2 is still more than 1, and there was a lot more competition in the intervening decades when there were more than 2. So it sounds like it worked for the most part? Certainly more so than doing nothing.
The issue is that the baby Bells were allowed to reconsolidate at all, or allowed to avoid competing in other provider's coverage areas. I agree some good came of the breakup, but the hands off position taken by subsequent administrations has allowed most of the Good to get undone.
But it left the local monopoly in palace instead of mandating Local Loop Unbundling which is why the US and Canada has such poor competition for highspeed internet.
Countless shareholder lawsuits say otherwise though. So it may not be their fiduciary duty, but if there's a good chance they get sued if they don't maximize profits, they will anyway.
> Countless shareholder lawsuits say otherwise though. So it may not be their fiduciary duty, but if there's a good chance they get sued if they don't maximize profits, they will anyway.
No, they don't. In fact, I can't find any that involve maximizing anything.
Also, filing a lawsuit is trivial. Succeeding is a whole other kettle of fish.
Courts will generally not second-guess the judgement of management, but they are obliged to act in the interest of their shareholders, primarily, because shareholders have the ability to fire the board of directors.
If someone who owned a share of Search Google managed to get a controlling interest in Ad Google and was operating it to benefit Search Google to the detriment of Ad Google's minority shareholders, that would be one of the rare cases where a court would intervene.
I'm more referring to what the shareholders will do if the company is clearly not acting in the interests of actually making them money, but rather, cozying up to an now-unrelated company in a way that leaves lots of potential money on the table for no reason.
> I'm more referring to what the shareholders will do if the company is clearly not acting in the interests of actually making them money
That's fine, but "fiduciary duty" is a specific legal concept and you are misusing it. Making shareholders angry enough to vote you off the board is not the same thing.
Also, it's worth noting that institutional investors often rubber-stamp the board's recommendations in shareholder votes. One side effect of the rise of passive funds is that there is less shareholder opposition to board moves nowadays.
Why not offer two Googles, one for people who don't mind sifting through three pages of SEO results when they search for actual information, and another subscription that cuts out ads for those willing to shell the cash?
For example. If you’re looking to refinance a home loan; you’re easily worth $100-$300 of revenue to Google; with a decent number of searches and clicks (eg “refinance”, “mortgage interest calculators”, etc)
> Now that Chrome is the leading browser they are turning off targeting for everyone else, so that only Google has access to target users
What - in detail - does this mean?
Because it doesn't appear true in anyway I can see. I can still buy ads exactly the same way targeting the same characteristics I've always been able to.
"If Google is prevented from making a browser, then they could even move the focus of computing away from the web browser..."
If that ever happened, I think that would be a vast improvement. There is much more to the internet than just the web and a handful of ports used by browsers.
Internet advertising mainly lives on the web; it's maninly delivered through those ports opened for the web/apps.
You reminded me how impressive it is, in a way, that Google made the Chrome play knowing it would take years and years to bear any fruit. I’d be interested to learn internally how that got incentivized and managed.
Google makes the browser because they are profoundly vulnerable otherwise to platform owners demanding payment for access to their platforms. Android exists because Google wanted protection against a Microsoft mobile monopoly that seemed inevitable (of course it turned out to be the Apple mobile monopoly that was the real threat; notice that Google has to pay Apple billions annually for access to their platforms). Internet explorer was a similar threat. Chrome was the response to that threat.
If Google can't influence this, then there will be other platform owners who will the ones with all the margins. A world where Microsoft and Apple just squeeze all the profit out of the internet is not obviously (at least to me) better than one where they can't.
I agree, but feel like this is only a problem because antitrust rulings are blue-moon events. In a healthy system I would expect Google to be restricted from dominating the browser landscape, and in turn Apple from restricting access to their platform.
Market power is a difficult thing to wrangle. There isn't going to be any policy which can't eventually be worked around by some party. The policy has to evolve with the landscape.
That's the thing that makes me uneasy about this. I'm ok with some regulation of Google and perhaps even some kind of breakup. What I don't want to see is regulators picking winners and losers. I'm concerned about Google's control over the web but at least their interested are aligned with the survival of the web and not completely locked down & proprietary platforms like iOS.
Worse, the corporations have to meddle with their own regulation because they know other corporations will. My understanding is AT&T basically wrote its own consent decree.
Who in their right mind decided that the solution to a national monopoly is a handful of regional monopolies...
> In the early 1970s, American antitrust regulators became suspicious that Bell was abusing its monopoly power, and in 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. In 1982, feeling that it could not win, Bell agreed to a Justice Department-mandated consent decree that settled the lawsuit and ordered it to break itself up into seven "Regional Bell Operating Companies" (known as "The Baby Bells"), which it did in 1984, ending the original company's existence. These "Baby Bells" are now independent companies, and several of them are very large corporations in their own right, such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, and CenturyLink.
> What I don't want to see is regulators picking winners and losers
I'm not thrilled by the idea either, but I'd prefer it to another round of IE6. When it comes to dealing with monopolies I think you're solidly in the realm of looking for the least bad choice.
I don't think IE6 really compares to Chrome. IE6 froze the web in time and made impossible for standards to evolve. Chrome may be in danger of becoming synonymous with the web but it's hardly standing still. In fact the most common complaint is that it's adding features too quickly and trying to do too much.
IE6 was the most innovative browser of all until it won the race. I don't think we're at the stage yet where we can say if Chrome can be compared or not.
The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web, prevent ad blocking, etc.
I’m surprised no ones even noticed that Portals are basically AMP Supercharged to where you’d never leave Google. Truly dystopian future they’re trying to slowly cement.
> The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web
Reminds me of the Browser Wars of yesteryear, when Microsoft and Netscape invented their own unnecessary, easily abused, proprietary HTML tags, such as blink and marquee.
It's easy to look backwards, with the benefit of more robust and fast (relatively!) standards bodies, and shake a finger.
But my memory at the time is that there were essentially no effective, consensus-based evolutions of web standards, because everything was so new.
Even the idea of running executable code in a browser at all was "That's weird. Is this a thing we want to do?" and resulted in 10+ variations (of which javascript ultimately triumphed).
It was certainly a worse time for the consumer, and web developer, as essentially everything was broken on every platform but your target w/ your target plugin installs.
Google AMP is bad. Google Pagespeed Insights is bad and misleading. Google has its own agenda for the web, and it doesn't really align with anything but the survival of Google.
I think that goes too far. Google does have an agenda for the web but at least it includes the web. Apple would like nothing better for the entire internet to be locked down and controlled inside its app store. We're better off with Android and Chrome than we would be without them.
That's the wrong analogy. Regulators aren't random spectators sitting in the stands, they are the referees. The better analogy would be if you were assigned to monitor the race for violations, and you discovered the winning horse had broken a rule. As the referee, your decision whether or not to enforce the rules has a direct impact on the results. Just so, if regulators choose not to act, they are picking the incumbents as the winners, whether or not that is ideal, best, legal or good.
In this race every horse is breaking every rule they can get away with and exploiting every advantage. If you suddenly want to jump in and start enforcing rules, which I think probably should happen, you need to be very careful that you don't wind up making things worse by legitimizing the abuses of only one horse. If you can't do that then you're better off just letting them fight it out.
We've already arrived at that station. The rules are already enforced such as to legitimize the abuses of a small number of horses in each vertical. If we let them fight it out, they will only further entrench and consolidate, which is the worst thing that can happen. We don't need to act like battered housewives afraid that it could always get worse - the laws are already on the books to fix the issue, we just need to insist on their vigorous enforcement.
But anti-trust law is vague, and violations are often in the eye of the beholder. A sports game is also the wrong analogy because sports games have very clearly defined rules, specifically to avoid referees picking winners.
Governments are nowhere near that level of rigour or coherency, especially if you look at EU anti-trust. The USA at least requires the government to demonstrate some actual harm to consumers in court. EU anti-trust requires a single bureaucrat to decide that competitors were harmed, and they can then levy any fine they like which goes straight into the EU Commission's coffers. It can only be appealed in some sort of court after the fine is paid, and the court is packed with judges who want to see the EU expand (via spending), so that's cold comfort.
That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
Many arguments about anti-trust do implicitly assume the US model, which at least has some tenuous connection to harm to the general public. That isn't really true internationally, yet ramped up anti-trust in the USA would absolutely be taken as a green light by other parts of the world to whack US firms with enormous fines for conduct that isn't actually bad in any way.
> But anti-trust law is vague, and violations are often in the eye of the beholder. A sports game is also the wrong analogy because sports games have very clearly defined rules, specifically to avoid referees picking winners.
Have you ever watched sports? The referee always has an impact whether they blow the whistle or not. Every rule requires some level of interpretation or fitting to a given situation. Some sports (mainly soccer) don't have rules, they explicitly have "laws of the game" because it's understood that they are to be interpreted.
> That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
...you know regulators don't get to keep any money right? Their job is to set market rules, enforce them, and break up any competitor who gains too much market power. Where exactly is the conflict of interest? Historically, most shareholders wind up making more money off the future value of the broken-up interests than they did with the original conglomerate.
It seems like you are arguing from an EU standpoint, and I don't know anything about their antitrust history, so I'm not going to try and defend or interpret what Europe does.
Bureaucrats have their own set of incentives. They can increase their position within the bureaucracy, and increase the bureaucracy’s influence.
One of the reasons Americans are so “anti-bureaucracy” is because of precious bureaucratic oversteps.
It’s pretty well established the EUs administrators strongly value the influence I’d their own agencies (with some exceptions).
A good US example is the military. Army, Navy, Marines, etc. are in constant competition. Do any of the generals or admirals get to take home their funding?
you know regulators don't get to keep any money right?
This is exactly my point. They don't ... in America. In the EU anti-trust fines are both created by and collected by the Commission, specifically, a high ranking Commissioner. Those people are selected not for any particular expertise in their subject area but rather nominated by countries and selected for political reasons. The money goes straight into the general budget of the Commissioner's employer, and then handed out in "solidarity" payments, subsidies, bureaucrat salaries and other priorities of the Commission.
The market Google and Friends are in is not a horse race.
It's more like you know that someone is manipulating the bets on the horse race, possibly even forcing results by paying off the competitors. If you do nothing, you are picking winners (the betting house) and loosers (the betters), if you do something you reverse that.
In my above example, by doing nothing you pick winners.
Not in all situations, doing nothing is doing nothing. Take the famous trolley problem. By doing nothing you pick 5 people to die, if you do something you pick 1 person to die. One of those will come true, either inaction or action will determine which. But that also means your inaction is an action of yours to force an outcome. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the outcome you want or the outcome that is preferred. Inaction can be the worst type of action to take in some scenarios, but it is the action of non-intervention that creates an outcome regardless. Inaction doesn't mean you consent to the outcome either.
Sometimes, doing nothing is even illegal, eg not helping someone who is in danger when one can do so at no risk, or sometimes, not reporting an ongoing crime (I think they can be illegal, here where I am)
Both forms of “Silence is (not) consent” are true, they just refer to different things.
If you are in a position of authority, silence is effectively consenting to the status quo remaining unaltered.
If you are not in a position of authority, whoever is in that position can’t take your silence as consent of their choices.
I hope some pseudo open source components come under non profit with reduced Google control. So other big player have bigger say in stuff Chromium and Android.
If Google, Apple, and MS were prevented from developing web browsers, who would? The mass public wouldn't bother buying a copy of Netscape.
We'd likely have skipped over the web entirely and gone right to native app stores for everything, like the bad old days on cell phones.
Most of their revenue comes from Google. In this hypothetical example where the largest tech companies are no longer involved in Web browsers, where would Mozilla's funding come from?
Funding would still come from Google to buy there way into the default search engines list. Just because Google loses Chrome in this hypothetical doesn't mean they don't care about search and ads anymore.
Google pays Apple to advertise their Search Engine in Safari. Google, like every website, gets access to Apple platforms for free via Safari, with no obligation to pay 30% up front nor 30% of any other revenues, be they direct purchases or indirect via ads.
Google is quite fortunate that Apple doesn't block web ads or intercept web payments and charge a platform fee for that.
what really need to happen with ani-trust is to alter the system politically, monetarily and militarily to prevent oligopoly. oligopoly is pretty much monopoly with theatre piece.
> notice that Google has to pay Apple billions annually for access to their platforms)
uhhhh, doesn't Google pay Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS? That's not "forced to pay for access", but "choses to make a business deal that costs them billions to make them billions more"
I get that iOS is closed down, but I'm a bit confused how being "open" would resolve the fact that a default search engine for Safari is set? You can still change your search engine on iOS (to one of few the browser ships with, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duck Duck Go in UK)
Firefox is completely open/open source (isnt it?), yet Google pays Firefox for being the default search engine.
Open vs Closed has nothing to do with this. Google wants to be the default in browsers, and it choses to pay for the luxury.
I mean open in a more general sense, not of its source code.
If the platform invited the user to set a default, or was "biased towards their user's preferences", as most would select google, google would be the "natural default".
There is a sort of mild rent-seeking / racketeering in asking google to pay to configure a service Apple provides, to a default Apple's users would chose for themselves.
See my comment below. I meant a more general sense of open, maybe "unbiased" or "biased towards their users preferences". ie., where any decision about the platform (including defaults) is left to the users, or defaulted to their clear general preference.
The "issue" is that they are charging for something the users would set themselves, and otherwise, already want.
Google is being "forced" into paying for this only because apple is willing to act against its users preferences, and eg., set a Bing default.
> Well, consider that if Apple were an open platform, this default would be set by most "for free".
> If the platform invited the user to set a default, or was "biased towards their user's preferences", as most would select google, google would be the "natural default".
You almost make it sound like defaulting to Google without making people aware of the alternatives is “open” and unbiased.”
> similar to what was done to Microsoft in the 2000s
Meaning there will be a ton of news about their case but the whole thing will disappear in a puff of settlement-smoke ten months after an incoming president takes office?
As someone who managed to be a class member to multiple state-level anti-trust actions against Microsoft, I'm still disgusted how one of the class representatives sold us out.
I remember trying to figure out how to intervene as a non-lawyer and eventually giving up without filing anything. After giving a pitiful offer of a few dollars per class member, they had it such that the rest would be donated to the schools (Apple's last stronghold at the time) and could only be used for new, whole computers, not peripherals or other stuff. This was such a bogus restriction to put on the money that it made my jaw drop. But not being a lawyer, all I knew was that a pro se filing was likely to be ignored.
If I had to do it over again, I would love to have argued about how the settlement was calculated to create a new anti-trust injury and would have requested relief by having a guardian ad litem for the class, after rejecting the current offer. Still not sure it would've gone anywhere, but maybe it would've at least pushed back at the nonsense.
Yeah, but then there's no one left in the class, essentially. What am I going to do in court as someone with a single copy of Windows 95 and Windows 98?
Here's the thing... anti-trust breakups are a hack to work around one core problem - taxation.
The reason corporations like FANG metastasize and become uncontrollable is that they have unfair competitive advantages that can be neutralized by proper taxation.
For example, why can Amazon ask cities to slash their taxes if they move their HQs there?
What are they going to do otherwise? Not have office?
Why doesn't my small ISV get the same tax advantages?
Corporations like Amazon effectively don't pay taxes and YOU'RE subsidizing them. We should be outraged.
Instead. Just change the law. Make it retroactive (ex post factor legislation only applies to criminal law) and demand that these companies immediately bring in their money into the US and pay taxes.
Ex post facto legislation is extremely risky as a chilling effect: If the government can retroactively take away your earnings at any time, why bother developing businesses.
I have my doubts the courts would side with you either.
We need to tax trillionaire corporations much more aggressively, but retroactive action probably isn't a good way to do it.
2) it is a mistake to think about tax break as lost revenue. You can tax 100% everything, then wonder why the "official" economy has halted and whine about "lost revenue" of the black market. The problem is not the black market, it's the 100% taxation.
This government obsession with Google reeks of partisanship. Perhaps because in one of those leaked internal meetings Sergey Brin said he was offended by Trump's victory.
I don't mind progressive regulations to increase competition but is the government also putting the same effort in investigating other tech., media, telecom, energy companies ?
Yeah, this has been incredibly amusing to witness.
It seems odd to single it out when you have far more anticompetitive practices on web browsers itself. You can't have other web browser engines on iOS. Shells to the same engine don't really count.
Chrome changed the cross platform browser landscape for the better with a more stable, performant and responsive browser. Only few companies like Google had the incentive to do this.
Isn't there also a big conflict of interest between Google "the search engine of the world and indexer of all information" and Google "seller of ads"?
When I search for something, some stuff comes in front of other stuff, and sometimes that stuff isn't the best result because of a monetary incentive. If you criticize that, you're given myriad reasons why. All I know is, it's easier to find information on Reddit sometimes than Google, to the point where I add "reddit" to the search keywords, even though I barely use Reddit as a commenter or follower of subs.
And everyone hates the SEO junk that now dominates the first few pages. It's an ugly thing and not in the service of people.
Here's an idea. Separate Google seller of ads and room in the search results, from Google the "Wikipedia-like" provider of information for humanity.
> Separate Google seller of ads and room in the search results, from Google the "Wikiepdia-like" provider of information for humanity
How is the latter supposed to make money? Why not just separate Google the company selling ads on Google properties from Google the ad exchange for half the Internet.
> separate Google the company selling ads on Google properties from Google the ad exchange for half the Internet
This is where I think the Justice Department and state Attorneys General can win. I don't know why the Justice Department is rushing a case on search dominance, and it definitely doesn't make sense to target Chrome.
> I don't know why the Justice Department is rushing a case on search dominance, and it definitely doesn't make sense to target Chrome.
Because Google has an abusive search monopoly that harms consumers by providing a shitty experience and there are very few alternatives. First they built their monopoly, through a combination of producing an exceptional product and then gradually building moats around it; then once it was entrenched they started squeezing out competitors in their results (eating the ecosystem) and providing an ever worsening service as they focused on maximizing revenue extraction at the cost of service quality.
Google is providing a mediocre service by their own early (and correct) definition. They're aggressively violating numerous things they spelled out as hallmarks of bad search engines in the beginning of the company. Their product sucks by their own words.
Google has a browser monopoly and it has been integral to providing a moat for their search monopoly (which is one of the reasons they did it; as with Android). It absolutely makes sense to target that gigantic moat protecting their search monopoly. The search monopoly requires the moats to survive long-term at this point, since their search service is getting worse by the year. Peel off the moats shielding it from competition and the search engine either has to improve considerably, or competition will start eating its market share.
IE, Edge, Firefox and Opera are all de facto dead. The only browsers remaining that have a user base of significant size are Chrome and Safari mobile. It's not enough competition to only have two companies (both trillion dollar companies at that) providing the browsers for nearly all Internet users globally.
> harms consumers by providing a shitty experience
But where are the search engines providing a better experience? I've tried Bing. I've tried Duck Duck Go (although DDG is mostly Bing). I've found Google to be better which is why I still use it. Microsoft even tried paying me to use Bing!
Moreover, I am no expert on antitrust law but I can't see how it helps the Justice Department's case to rush to file before the election.
Because Google has an abusive search monopoly that harms consumers by providing a shitty experience and there are very few alternatives.
There are a number of alternative search engines (Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc). These tend to have the same crap (to me) approach. But they're drive by the same exigencies - to help deliver advertising, to foil the most garbagy SEO and monetize the rest, to provide "answers" rather than just key-word search (IE, dumb things down for the masses).
Google has a browser monopoly and it has been integral to providing a moat for their search monopoly
I'm writing on Firefox, I love firefox and I've heard good things about Edge. Of course, Firefox is supported by Google and uses Google by default but I spent a year on Duck Duck Go and unlike Firefox, it really does suck. To expand, it's suckiness isn't lack of money but because it's clearly trying to do everything, all the bad things interface-wise, that Google does ("answers", weight-to-new-and-recent result, etc) but worse.
Edit: It's really terrible that all interfaces have become interfaces for morons, that the paradigm for any company is "we give you few choices and use sophisticated AI to give you the choice we think you'd want 'cause giving you choices and tools means you might not decide what we want you to decide". But this paradigm doesn't actually relate to companies being monopolies. It really is what some portion of people want/need and it serves any company that doesn't have organized nerds as their customer base. I'd love to get past this but "break up Google" doesn't address this.
> Isn't there also a big conflict of interest between Google "the search engine of the world and indexer of all information" and Google "seller of ads"?
The biggest conflict, nobody seems interested in fixing: That Google has a strong disinterest in getting you to click on search results, when they could get you to click on ads.
It's why since Google's inception, ads have become less and less distinguishable from search results, to the point that ordinary users aren't able to tell the difference anymore.
I get multiple reports per week of malware and scams that can be traced directly back to "I hit search instead of typing the URL, and clicked the first link".
Google should be forbidden from inlining advertisements with search results, and required to make them vastly more distinct.
Ironically, two academics very concerned about this conflict of interest when they wrote a study about search engines were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazing what billions of dollars will do to your ethical standards.
Users often don't understand what's happening. For instance, many times the ad that pretends to be the top result, is one the brand had to pay for to avoid squatting.
People who get scammed or get malware from Google Ads don't realize a Google Ad was involved. They think they got "hacked" or did something wrong.
Sure, there are those of us who know better, but they aren't the oblivious majority that is where Google's income comes from.
Indeed. I think, increasingly, Google does not want people going straight to results.
I can't find the quote but I thought their original intent was to get people off the search results page (and to their "real" destination), but I think that's a position they've largely retreated from. That and "we label it clearly".
> Isn't there also a big conflict of interest between Google "the search engine of the world and indexer of all information" and Google "seller of ads"?
The basic concept of a search engine supported by advertisements within its results existed before Google and has been applied by essentially all of Google's relevant competitors, including the preferred "ethical" platform DuckDuckGo. If this is to be banned in Google's case it should fairly extend to all sites operating on that model, which would essentially demolish the entire search engine infrastructure as it has been understood to exist since the days of AltaVista.
Targeting Chrome by contrast seems a lot more reasonable. It also enjoys a clear precedent viz. IE.
Your argument gives a good reason that targeting search engines makes no sense. But Chrome being a loss leader and Firefox and Safari being reasonable competitors give a reason targeting the browser make no sense. IE, anti-trust action against Google makes no sense, it's pure political grandstanding. "The world sucks so we should attack X powerful cog in the system" says Y powerful cogs in the system (politicians, other corporations, mass media like the NYTimes, etc).
Last I recall, Google was one of the main contributors to wikipedia, wikipedia allows Google to do things Google can't.
But if the US state, foundations or provide donations could create a "non-partisan" search engine, they don't need to seize the Google search to do that. They could just launch it.
I would note that a lot of Google's activities involves foiling SEO. Sure, they allow it too but if Google's search criteria was a fixed target, 100% of the results would be garbage spam. A lot of what Google does now is bad but the company is still a wall against a vast sea of worse. Most criticisms of "big tech" doesn't take into account that the troll/spam/SEO complex exists independently from these companies - sure, this complex is a product of how these companies operate but it's also a product of how things have to work in the Internet and frightfully enough, the cost of doing involves the cost of beating this complex back (establishing boundaries, some of which are nasty compromises) no matter who's in running the connections. And where does this money come from?
I'd say the relationship between Wikipedia and Google is symbiotic, at least for now. They collaborated on merging the Wikidata dataset and Google's Knowledge Graph, so now the entities can be connected.
Google gets the benefit of their dataset for their knowledge boxes. You can see the difference in the source code of searches looking at the entity ids, /g/ is Google's own data and /w/ is wikidata sourced.
I see the relationship Google has with Wikipedia similar to the one it had with DMOZ. I imagine at some point in the future that Google will see them as surplus to requirements, though not quite sure how they replace 5 million volunteer editors economically.
By having rules that ensure websites are perfectly accessable and use https and perfectly structured HTML has lead to a corporate takeover of the first page.
The average programmer doesn't have time to learn the rules, but they surely understand how to program better than interns writing tutorials or the average medium article.
Btw I'll be adding 700 words to every recipe on my website.
She makes delicious Cake and has a secret you won't find because it uses http that their grandson set up 5 years ago.
Or how about the single mom of 5 trying to sell dresses, guess we should put an expensive big corporation on the front page instead of the local seamstress.
This might be one of the easier tech breakups. Chromium is already open-source and buildable without Google infra, so doing the same for the close source code should be a lot easier than migrating a service outside of Google infra. Firefox has shown there's a viable business model. The relationship with Android and Chromebook would be weird, but it might just look like a licensing deal. There's also precedent in antitrust history. The main thing I'd look at in Chrome is how much Google's used it to give itself an unfair advantage. I'd say "some;" the aggressive sign-in, default search provider, oversized influence in the development if HTTP, CSS, and JS. I'd put the synergies somewhere between Amazon/Whole Foods and Google/Doubleclick.
About the "precedent" point: I wonder if the MS antitrust case slowed down the development of the web. The dot com crash and people still being on dialup didn't help, but the web wasn't really a usable platform until 2004, and even then, it became a lot less interesting when smartphones took over.
If you read some of the old HN threads when that happened, there were a few takes on Mozilla. One is that they lost the browser war, so they should cut their losses (like with Thunderbird) and move on. The other was that they underinvested in what their supporters care about (the browser) and were distracted by things like Pocket. Mozilla is also in a different situation than a spun-off Chrome; Chrome would be a market leader with licensing deals.
On the other hand, because Chromium is already open-source is there any need to split Chrome from Google? There are already a bunch of other browsers piggybacking on Chromium.
The article is a little vague on the antitrust reasoning behind splitting off Chrome. It bases the argument on how getting rid of third-party cookies could be bad for publishers, but at the same time mentions that Chrome's competitors have already done away with them. From an antitrust perspective I think it makes sense to go after the ad tech stack, but this article feels like it is trying to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
How do you breakup a private company developing an OSS software? The best I can think of is break up the trademark such as Chrome or Chromebook and some few proprietary parts of Chrome. Chromium, the OSS part of the browser is available as OSS and Google can start developing even after the breakup. Or US government force private company to not to develop a certain software like a web browser?
At worst, Google relocates the dev team outside of US jurisdiction, in an entity itself owned by another independent foreign entity owned by Google, but funded exclusively in non-USD currencies, preventing any retaliatory actions from the US government.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadMost people don't realize WHY google started to build their own web browser in the first place. It was actually because of google docs. Google wanted to dominate the office software sector, and Microsoft didn't let them on Windows. Therefore Google had to change the platform - to the web.
Regarding ad networks: google analytics is used among around 84.1% of websites. If that is not a monopoly, then I don't know what is. The rest is like a couple of pedestrians on the street that don't have a car already.
I mean, you cannot justify that this should be allowed. Not a single country on the planet should have access to THAT much data, and much less a single company without any moral obligations because they don't even pay taxes in the countries they are operating in.
Google was able to build Chrome in-house faster and at lower cost than it would have been to rewrite Firefox from scratch under Mozilla governance. They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
The real advantage of WebKit (or KHTML) was that it was way, way, way easier to embed than Gecko. That made experimenting much easier.
> They would have had to convince Mozilla to do all of this stuff. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
People tend to forget that the Chrome team was initially a Firefox team paid by Google to work on "the chrome" (which has always been the name of the back-end of Firefox).
Legend has that Google decided to roll out their own browser when they realized that they could not arbitrarily land any feature in Firefox without a review from someone out of Google. More specifically, legend has it that Google prepared a large refactor of Firefox called "Places", reviewed it internally, then attempted to land this as a single patch to Firefox, without any public review. It is my understanding that this is how Google open-source typically works (big code drops), but definitely not how true open-source works (incremental changes). This was blocked by Mozilla until it could be split into smaller changes that could be reviewed and discussed individually. Places eventually landed (and new versions of Places are still part of Firefox to this day) but, says the legend, Google was pissed off and decided that they would be better off with their own, in-house, browser.
Chrome when released on September 2008 had the faster Javascript v8 engine. (Built by Lars Bak team in Denmark.) The improved performance was very noticeable on js heavy websites like Google Maps when scrolling the map and zooming in and out.
A paper[1] showing Chrome winning on various performance benchmarks matches my recollection of performance differences.
Also, Chrome's per-process isolation for each tab also made it more stable when dealing with buggy websites (bad javascript code leaking memory). Firefox would crash more often. The tradeoff was that Chrome used a lot more RAM than Firefox.
[I didn't downvote your comment.]
[1] https://peerj.com/articles/cs-28.pdf
The V8 javascript engine was the real deal however. It forced Mozilla to significantly invest in its own javascript engine.
That's not entirely true. If memory serves me correctly, at the time V8 came out, Mozilla already had the TraceMonkey JIT implemented in Spidermonkey. However, the first version of Google Chrome (with V8) was released before the first version of Firefox with the new JIT.
IE shipped activex and jscript (MS scripting host) exploits first, too. Which made the whole tab isolation stuff useless.
Unfortunately for them I not at a single point has the difference been big enough to justify leaving Firefox behind.
Even today as broken as Firefox is compared to what it used to be it still outshines Chrome for my workloads it seemsm
If Firefox was broken broken all other browsers would be beyond broken IMO as none of the mainstream browsers really hold a candle to it for my workflows even today.
But compared to itself a few years ago the advantage over other browsers has diminished in every aspect I care about except maybe security.
Actually I suspect that one of the major motivations was that to have a seat at the table of bodies like the W3C and CA/Browser Forum you had to be the party responsible for a browser. Merely having some of your employees contribute to Mozilla's browser wouldn't be enough.
It also meant that Google could try out new experimental technologies in their own browser which Mozilla might have different opinions on:
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
Consider if the world moved to first party apps (ie, news app, ebay app, amazon app) for _everything_, Google would lose their stranglehold. It's in Google's best interest to make the web be as rich and engaging as mobile apps. Google Chrome increased the expected performance of browsers substantially after it was released.
Their ad delivery network utterly eclipses all other revenue last time I checked.
Due to the lack of burden of proof or stakes, this makes automating such legal requests a weaponization of the legal system. An inordinate quantity of resources are also spent to proactively, based on a provided library of possible infringement fingerprints, automatically mark anything as something to block. For many things the automation actually works out, however any time there is Fair Use (which is viewed as a legal defence) or Authorized Use (except problems of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing) it really doesn't.
Combine this with a system where there's also no government provided system of authenticating an individual as someone, and tying them to specific legally owned works or authorization to act by such owners and it should be obvious where the problems and solutions exist.
Without a megacorp's army of lawyers, my opinion is, it seems very likely youtube and any other similar entities would either be sued or legislated out of existence.
And that largely come down to the answer to the question: if you make a website, how can people find it? Whether its you advertising to them or them searching into you its all Google. And that's the problem because Google does exploit this discover ability monopoly hugely.
You don't have to pick a thing though. For some reason the article title highlights Chrome, but the article makes clear that they're considering many options, only one of which is Chrome.
To me it's interesting that Google has the #1 or #2 market share in so many different areas: search, advertising, web browsers, mobile OS, app stores, email, maps. There are so many, I'm surely forgetting some. DNS? Office suites? In almost any area that Google wants to enter, they automatically become one of the biggest players. The only thing they couldn't do was make a social network...
EDIT: I forgot online video, duh!
Maybe we need a bunch of Baby Googles, like the Baby Bells after the breakup of Ma Bell.
Even if they all merged into 1 again in the near future I'd still count that breakup as having massive long lasting impact.
They do it even to other Chromium based browsers. They degrade the experience on Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge, persistently nagging people to switch browsers.
That persistent nagging has an impact, especially for non-technical users who might only understand that Google, YouTube, Google Maps, or another Google property they trust is telling them that Chrome is better. Well, if Google is saying it, it must be true, right?
And that's not even mentioning the ways in which Google has degraded the experience in more tangible ways by turning off features for mobile browsers, fighting app compatibility on Windows Phone to the point of breaking Google Maps - literally just serving an inferior experience and using user agent detection to impair Windows Phone - or blocking the YouTube API on the device.
I just opened up google.com on Edge and this popped up in the top right corner:
"Switch to Chrome for Windows
Built for Windows. Hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web."
I then went to maps.google.com:
"Google recommends using Chrome Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in"
I then went to news.google.com:
"Google recommends using Chrome Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in"
That was just a fresh first sign in experience, and as I understand it, these prompts recur - I still see them occasionally on my primary browser, Firefox!
I find it hard to blame Google or Chrome for that. It's a developer (or business) choice.
[1] As it happens Google advertising Chrome on Google websites seems fairly reasonable to me, but anyway.
This is the very definition of monopoly abuse: Using your monopoly in one market (search) to push into another market (browsers). Exactly what got Microsoft in trouble in the 90s... and looking at firefox marketshare, it's having exactly the same results.
*as a firefox user. I imagine if i used something really obscure it would happen more often.
On Chrome, no captchas. On other browsers, I've literally gone through 5 minutes of fire hydrant selection with no end in sight. Sometimes it'll simply reject it and tell me to start again a dozen times, and other times it's just infinitely adding more.
I really want there to be a third party captcha system that isn't just a covert push into Google's filthy, corrupt, incompetent ecosystem.
Reeder's options are "In-app browser," "Safari," and "Firefox" on my device.
Use Chrome -> everything works perfectly Use Safari -> enjoy your deliberately degraded experience
HN is full of creative thinkers. Someone should figure a way to get gorhill before the committee so he can explain what ublock origin does and how Google has been trying to destroy it in the name of "efficiency."
I'm not sure exactly how to frame blocking all the goddamned ads in a conversation about Google monopolizing all the goddamned ads. But senators and their staffers should know about blockers and be using one on all their machines.
If you go to youtube without cookies, your video starts playing. Then it stops and you get a popup asking if you want to sign in. You click no, then it rewinds your video.. then you have to click play and re-watch the part you already watched.
Every video.
Even google as a search engine becomes a less attractive option when you have to agree to their 50 page long privacy policy every time you search for something.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...
It's a strange thing. It's so annoying that I've essentially given up Youtube. I don't care enough about the videos that I want to Login and whitelist (and have a profile recorded) the site, and this makes the experience bad. Ergo YT is fading from my life. Can't say that I miss it all that much after a few days, it has been a habit more so than something I actively enjoy.
I use Cookie AutoDelete and YouTube doesn't give me any problems for discarding its cookies. But maybe one of the uBlock Origin annoyance filter lists I use is taking care of the nag screen.
https://imgur.com/cPDJW3v.png
It is not container-aware and no allow lists are possible. Everything gets deleted. Probably because of these limitations it's off by default.
I seemed to have remembered some older arguments in this discussion:
https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issue...
https://imgur.com/vmnozjV.png
That said I usually browse youtube with minimal setup
That’s the exact type of behaviour that antitrust laws are intended to stop.
Seriously the only reason there is any non-google decisions about web apis is mobile safari.
The cost to programmers of interacting with people who aren't also programmers is apparently very high.
Google has enough might to fix this and nobody could compete.
All google needs is to have sites talk via a backend connection to google - no adblocker could fix that - and it could train AI backend supercookies based on your behavior. You could be indentified at key points and it could pick you vs your spouse or kids all on the same ip address all contacting multiple sites and know it is you.
Current CDNs already do some of this backend tracking. People think that CDNs are about caching content for faster load times.
What is actually happening is that they are individually identifying people in an unblockable unstoppable way across multiple sites and compiling data on the backend.
Seriously, look at any cdn request. Maybe stack overflow maybe steam. anything with edgecast or akamai* (especially akamaihd) or fastly or more. you are being identified and tracked. google could take this all the way where others couldn't.
> Seriously, look at any cdn request. Maybe stack overflow maybe steam. anything with edgecast or akamai* (especially akamaihd) or fastly or more. you are being identified and tracked.
Do you have sources on that?
I mean, technologically, it's feasible, but I have never heard of CDN providers actually doing it.
but just look at wikipedia:
> CDN providers profit either from direct fees paid by content providers using their network, or profit from the user analytics and tracking data collected as their scripts are being loaded onto customer's websites inside their browser origin. As such these services are being pointed out as potential privacy intrusion for the purpose of behavioral targeting and solutions are being created to restore single-origin serving and caching of resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network#Secur...
Now every service in the US that can identify any individual entity must agree to a contract with minimum monetary value for every entity or stop collecting data that has any use beyond generic trends, much like Google trends itself. Maybe eliminate third parties without their own user consent and contract so if I consent to the site having my data (for $10) then any deal with third parties must reflect a smaller amount (say $2) per third party data pull. Fold that cost into the cost of selling user data.
Add exceptions for good faith research, education, healthcare, and similar groups (not all nonprofits but select types or areas of work) so they do not have a minimum dollar amount but maintain a contract with informed consent by both parties. Force opt out by default behavior by making auto-check options to subscribe, agree to terms, etc all unchecked with disclaimer about what you are signing up for by checking including email volume or third parties. Add language for a simple overview of any contracts or ToS acknowledging the law and entity rights including ability to use the service without data collection.
Basically, F u Pay me but for digital data with further third party deals returning on the investment that is your site vising, sales, etc habits. Make it so companies either have to fork over real money (not pennies on their revenue) or stop collecting data.
Do you have sources on that?
I mean, technologically, it's feasible, but I have never heard of CDN providers actually doing it.
also notable, with firefox to longer allowing anything but a handful of carefully approved extensions on mobile, mobile users haven't much of a chance at all to navigate the web in their preferred fashion. this attack on mobile users, this non-user-agent-ified browser, makes me very sad.
Trading of user information should be outlawed.
And collection of user information.
This will be slightly tricky because of real businesses that need to know certain things about you, but those are very few.
I'm not sure Facebook, Google, etc, are quite as capable, or as motivated as any one of those three, when it comes to making your life very uncomfortable.
Some ad tech companies already do this. They exchange and aggregate user tracking data with content websites on the backend.
Congress wants more ads...
Write an email to your reps. All of them are listed here:
https://judiciary.house.gov/about/members.htm
Their staffers will respond with a nice form letter, but if you identify yourself as a constituent with specific professional knowledge and a suggestion like this about current hearings, stuff can happen.
I 100% could be wrong, but I image that bigger battle would be getting gorhill to agree to go before the committee in the first place....
Normally Private people have no desire to subject themselves to publicity of a Congressional hearing.
Some people would find it an "honor" but many people (including myself) would not, and would have no desire to go in front of congress for any reason
Then there's the constant stream of new web APIs which are used almost exclusively for tracking purposes by ad networks including Google properties. For an example of that, look at the AudioContext APIs which leak audio latency information (regularly used to fingerprint users) and are available to websites with no opt-in, no notice and are accessible even if you never use audio on the page. Practically all of the modern web APIs spearheaded by Chrome offer yet another tracking data-point that is abused primarily by ad networks including their own.
https://9to5google.com/2020/02/06/google-chrome-x-client-dat...
Your X-Client-Data ID is not reset when you clear your browsing data. You need to launch Chrome with a special command line parameter to reset it.
You'll need some hard proof about that statement, how about you start with a clear metric for "beneficial to consumer". As much as I hate to say this, I really don't want to go back to the pre-GAFA Web, it really badly sucked.
It has if the myriad popovers, interstitial, etc didn’t already harm the user experience of those browsers it has long been suggested (though I don’t know about proven) that their changes deliberately harm other browsers.
Then you have their unending attempts to add privacy invasive web features that aid their ad businesses (hey, one monopoly helping another, what fun!), and have minimal real value.
It could be good, if the buyer started charging for it. Very few people would use it and it would give a chance to Chromium-based browsers... or Firefox, or maybe not.
On the other hand, Chrome is nothing without promotion on google properties and being installed by default on Android. Chrome would need to pay Google an extraordinary amount to continue to be the default browser on Android. Maybe even the same amount as what Google would pay Chrome to be the default search engine provider.
Any agreement between Google and Chrome needs to account for both transactions - default search engine and default on Android.
The alternative is that regulators force Chrome to become a separate entity and also force Google to keep Chrome as the default for some period of years, although I don’t know if it’s possible for them to compel such an arrangement. If it isn’t, Google could simply release a new browser based on Chromium, just like Microsoft did and make that the new default on Android.
Even if regulators force Android to become separate from Google in addition to Chrome, it still doesn’t work. Now Android has all the negotiating power. It can create its own browser based on Chromium and charge Google an exorbitant fee for being the default search engine.
It’s frustrating when you hear people selling “just break them up” as a panacea without taking into account what would happen afterwards.
Wouldn't any legal separation of Google and Chrome require that they split of all required resources as well? I would hope that there are fines for trying to just move the Chrome trademark to an empty shell company and call it a day. Also without Chrome there is no chromium, the only relevant distinction between those two is the trademark.
Is this a question or statement?
Chrome is only valuable because it is intertwined with Google properties. Outside of Google, with proprietary code removed, it is nothing more than a skinned Chromium and we have plenty of those already.
Would they need to pay Google or would they need to pay Samsung? While we're breaking things up, maybe Android should not mandate any default browser.
So your idea of Android mandating default browser is false. These comments are for some reason full of this misinformation. Why?
Chicken? Egg?
Android is code, which anybody can use for free. Making it into a separate entity would cause it to instantly go bankrupt because nobody would have any reason to pay them for anything. Even if they changed the license, everybody would just use the free version from last week and Android Corporation would have no money with which to make improvements, so there would be no improvements for them to charge anything for. Anybody who wanted to try to do this could already fork Android and do it right now; notice the lack of takers.
The reason Samsung et al don't charge Google to be the default browser on their phones already is Google Play Services. So what they really need to separate from the search engine company isn't Android, it's Google Play. Though, of course, if they did that, the search engine company might lose interest in funding Android development.
Actually, the situation is exactly the same for Chrome/Chromium:
Chrome is code, which anybody can use for free. Making it into a separate entity would cause it to instantly go bankrupt because nobody would have any reason to pay them for anything. Even if they changed the license, everybody would just use the free version from last week and Chrome Corporation would have no money with which to make improvements, so there would be no improvements for them to charge anything for. Anybody who wanted to try to do this could already fork Chrome and do it right now; notice the (non-)lack of takers.
If they were separated from unlimited resources, it would no longer be a Sisyphean task to reimplement everything they do, and then others may sense weakness and make the attempt.
Though really that could be the best thing to happen. Let Android Corporation fail, we don't need it anyway, meanwhile everybody else reimplements Google Play Services as part of the open source project, and then Google Play evaporates and there are multiple competing stores from Samsung and Valve and Amazon and Debian that anybody can use on any Android device. And Android gets developed in the same way as the Linux kernel.
The same way no single megacorp can shape the Linux kernel according to their business interests, and to the detriment of competitors, it would be important to free the open source Chromium browser from Google's exclusive grip.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/4493#issuecomm...
Apple doesn’t support extensions on mobile Safari either, maybe there are good reasons around security and battery life.
Are you really ready to ask senile boomers who barely understand the tech industry to regulate the tech industry ?
It sounds like a recipe for disasters.
To be one option among others.
Ideally open sources as well : ) : )
Just saying “no I don’t like that” (Ie a commentless downvote, assuming the comment isn’t inappropriate), is, IMHO, kind of like trying to win a debate by going “booo! I don’t like that.”
Not very hackery. More like just being a plain old hack.
We also live in a society where private relationships (both personal and business) are the default. When arguing for something other than the default, your burden to provide a rationale is greater. So the omission is especially glaring.
What on earth is a "private personal relationship" as opposed to a "public personal relationship"?
If you meant the whole tired "less government in our lives" thing, well, where do you think the internet came from? What do you think poll numbers show about public support for Medicare?
And what you describe is not how PBS works.
http://about.lunchbox.pbs.org/blogs/news/pbs-statement-trump...
You have to realize that there are politicians that would remove funding if something doesn't benefit them. Most politicians aren't going to want to fund open source efforts when it benefits them more to support companies opposed to those efforts.
"PBS STATEMENT: Trump Administration Proposes Elimination of Federal Funding for 'Most Trusted' Institution"
I may have misinterpreted but I felt your previous post was making it sound like developers, and perhaps the public at large, would not trust a publicly funded browser. Again, my apologies if I misread it.
Facts - actual data, not supposition - shows otherwise. PBS is a highly-trusted institution.
It's given us Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers.
If someone thinks those things haven't been a good thing, well, then we're going to have to agree to disagree.
I think a Publicly Funded Browser on the model of PBS, also open-sourced, would be more successful than Firefox, and just as beloved as PBS.
Lastly, consider that PBS has continued to struggle on for some time now despite being dependent on funding from self-interested politicians.
Chrome is the 100% least important problem.
Since every other browser now is based the same foundation, it is trivial for Google to point out that there are many alternative browsers.
Breaking up search, ads, and other integrated pats of Google should be the highest priority.
Google is able to invest in and made Chrome popular using cash from their advertising business, and Chrome's popularity allows Google to shape the web environment for their advertising business. If Google were to lose Google Chrome, there is nothing that would prevent them from directly or indirectly evolving Chromium. If Google is prevented from making a browser, then they could even move the focus of computing away from the web browser with power from their search business.
Therefore, antitrust oversight is required to curb the types of behavior that lead to the antitrust situation in the first place.
Google pushes Chrome EVERYWHERE
Now that Chrome is the leading browser they are turning off targeting for everyone else, so that only Google has access to target users
The solution is to STOP the monopoly of Search
So that a new thing like Google Chrome can't happen i.e. Search can't be used to take over another space
Consider that Verizon and AT&T, the two largest mobile phone providers in the US, are both Baby Bells resulting from the break-up of Bell Telephone Company in an anti-trust action. They compete strongly against each other, in a way that would absolutely not be true if they were still the same company.
That's exactly the myth the above link is about, btw.
No, they don't. In fact, I can't find any that involve maximizing anything.
Also, filing a lawsuit is trivial. Succeeding is a whole other kettle of fish.
If someone who owned a share of Search Google managed to get a controlling interest in Ad Google and was operating it to benefit Search Google to the detriment of Ad Google's minority shareholders, that would be one of the rare cases where a court would intervene.
That's fine, but "fiduciary duty" is a specific legal concept and you are misusing it. Making shareholders angry enough to vote you off the board is not the same thing.
Also, it's worth noting that institutional investors often rubber-stamp the board's recommendations in shareholder votes. One side effect of the rise of passive funds is that there is less shareholder opposition to board moves nowadays.
What - in detail - does this mean?
Because it doesn't appear true in anyway I can see. I can still buy ads exactly the same way targeting the same characteristics I've always been able to.
If that ever happened, I think that would be a vast improvement. There is much more to the internet than just the web and a handful of ports used by browsers.
Internet advertising mainly lives on the web; it's maninly delivered through those ports opened for the web/apps.
And those are way more annoying, since they're baked into thected by ad blockers...
If Google can't influence this, then there will be other platform owners who will the ones with all the margins. A world where Microsoft and Apple just squeeze all the profit out of the internet is not obviously (at least to me) better than one where they can't.
Market power is a difficult thing to wrangle. There isn't going to be any policy which can't eventually be worked around by some party. The policy has to evolve with the landscape.
If you look at the breakup of Ma Bell, I think you’ll doubt the government’s ability to break up a company properly.
Did busting kingpins solve the drug problem?
Who in their right mind decided that the solution to a national monopoly is a handful of regional monopolies...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
> In the early 1970s, American antitrust regulators became suspicious that Bell was abusing its monopoly power, and in 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. In 1982, feeling that it could not win, Bell agreed to a Justice Department-mandated consent decree that settled the lawsuit and ordered it to break itself up into seven "Regional Bell Operating Companies" (known as "The Baby Bells"), which it did in 1984, ending the original company's existence. These "Baby Bells" are now independent companies, and several of them are very large corporations in their own right, such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, and CenturyLink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
I'm not thrilled by the idea either, but I'd prefer it to another round of IE6. When it comes to dealing with monopolies I think you're solidly in the realm of looking for the least bad choice.
I’m surprised no ones even noticed that Portals are basically AMP Supercharged to where you’d never leave Google. Truly dystopian future they’re trying to slowly cement.
Reminds me of the Browser Wars of yesteryear, when Microsoft and Netscape invented their own unnecessary, easily abused, proprietary HTML tags, such as blink and marquee.
[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/blink-marquis-tag/
But my memory at the time is that there were essentially no effective, consensus-based evolutions of web standards, because everything was so new.
Even the idea of running executable code in a browser at all was "That's weird. Is this a thing we want to do?" and resulted in 10+ variations (of which javascript ultimately triumphed).
It was certainly a worse time for the consumer, and web developer, as essentially everything was broken on every platform but your target w/ your target plugin installs.
Governments are nowhere near that level of rigour or coherency, especially if you look at EU anti-trust. The USA at least requires the government to demonstrate some actual harm to consumers in court. EU anti-trust requires a single bureaucrat to decide that competitors were harmed, and they can then levy any fine they like which goes straight into the EU Commission's coffers. It can only be appealed in some sort of court after the fine is paid, and the court is packed with judges who want to see the EU expand (via spending), so that's cold comfort.
That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
Many arguments about anti-trust do implicitly assume the US model, which at least has some tenuous connection to harm to the general public. That isn't really true internationally, yet ramped up anti-trust in the USA would absolutely be taken as a green light by other parts of the world to whack US firms with enormous fines for conduct that isn't actually bad in any way.
Have you ever watched sports? The referee always has an impact whether they blow the whistle or not. Every rule requires some level of interpretation or fitting to a given situation. Some sports (mainly soccer) don't have rules, they explicitly have "laws of the game" because it's understood that they are to be interpreted.
> That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
...you know regulators don't get to keep any money right? Their job is to set market rules, enforce them, and break up any competitor who gains too much market power. Where exactly is the conflict of interest? Historically, most shareholders wind up making more money off the future value of the broken-up interests than they did with the original conglomerate.
It seems like you are arguing from an EU standpoint, and I don't know anything about their antitrust history, so I'm not going to try and defend or interpret what Europe does.
One of the reasons Americans are so “anti-bureaucracy” is because of precious bureaucratic oversteps.
It’s pretty well established the EUs administrators strongly value the influence I’d their own agencies (with some exceptions).
A good US example is the military. Army, Navy, Marines, etc. are in constant competition. Do any of the generals or admirals get to take home their funding?
This is exactly my point. They don't ... in America. In the EU anti-trust fines are both created by and collected by the Commission, specifically, a high ranking Commissioner. Those people are selected not for any particular expertise in their subject area but rather nominated by countries and selected for political reasons. The money goes straight into the general budget of the Commissioner's employer, and then handed out in "solidarity" payments, subsidies, bureaucrat salaries and other priorities of the Commission.
It's more like you know that someone is manipulating the bets on the horse race, possibly even forcing results by paying off the competitors. If you do nothing, you are picking winners (the betting house) and loosers (the betters), if you do something you reverse that.
So which is it? Can you help me out here?
As for myself, I'm certain that silence is not consent. It's a freely-made choice not to take part in something.
Thus, doing nothing is not equivalent to picking winners. Picking winners is when you ... wait for it ... pick winners.
Not in all situations, doing nothing is doing nothing. Take the famous trolley problem. By doing nothing you pick 5 people to die, if you do something you pick 1 person to die. One of those will come true, either inaction or action will determine which. But that also means your inaction is an action of yours to force an outcome. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the outcome you want or the outcome that is preferred. Inaction can be the worst type of action to take in some scenarios, but it is the action of non-intervention that creates an outcome regardless. Inaction doesn't mean you consent to the outcome either.
If you are not in a position of authority, whoever is in that position can’t take your silence as consent of their choices.
For the former, the idea (I think) is that if you don't consent to something, speak up to make a difference.
In the latter, it's more that one should not assume consent on the part of another, presumably in the context of a sexual partner.
It's an interesting point. To me it has merit.
Google is quite fortunate that Apple doesn't block web ads or intercept web payments and charge a platform fee for that.
uhhhh, doesn't Google pay Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS? That's not "forced to pay for access", but "choses to make a business deal that costs them billions to make them billions more"
"Forced" here doesn't mean coerced, more in the sense of "forced error"; ie., as a move within a game than an opponent forces you to make.
I get that iOS is closed down, but I'm a bit confused how being "open" would resolve the fact that a default search engine for Safari is set? You can still change your search engine on iOS (to one of few the browser ships with, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duck Duck Go in UK)
Firefox is completely open/open source (isnt it?), yet Google pays Firefox for being the default search engine.
Open vs Closed has nothing to do with this. Google wants to be the default in browsers, and it choses to pay for the luxury.
If the platform invited the user to set a default, or was "biased towards their user's preferences", as most would select google, google would be the "natural default".
There is a sort of mild rent-seeking / racketeering in asking google to pay to configure a service Apple provides, to a default Apple's users would chose for themselves.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f...
The "issue" is that they are charging for something the users would set themselves, and otherwise, already want.
Google is being "forced" into paying for this only because apple is willing to act against its users preferences, and eg., set a Bing default.
> If the platform invited the user to set a default, or was "biased towards their user's preferences", as most would select google, google would be the "natural default".
You almost make it sound like defaulting to Google without making people aware of the alternatives is “open” and unbiased.”
Meaning there will be a ton of news about their case but the whole thing will disappear in a puff of settlement-smoke ten months after an incoming president takes office?
I remember trying to figure out how to intervene as a non-lawyer and eventually giving up without filing anything. After giving a pitiful offer of a few dollars per class member, they had it such that the rest would be donated to the schools (Apple's last stronghold at the time) and could only be used for new, whole computers, not peripherals or other stuff. This was such a bogus restriction to put on the money that it made my jaw drop. But not being a lawyer, all I knew was that a pro se filing was likely to be ignored.
If I had to do it over again, I would love to have argued about how the settlement was calculated to create a new anti-trust injury and would have requested relief by having a guardian ad litem for the class, after rejecting the current offer. Still not sure it would've gone anywhere, but maybe it would've at least pushed back at the nonsense.
Entertain the rest of us, of course!
The reason corporations like FANG metastasize and become uncontrollable is that they have unfair competitive advantages that can be neutralized by proper taxation.
For example, why can Amazon ask cities to slash their taxes if they move their HQs there?
What are they going to do otherwise? Not have office?
Why doesn't my small ISV get the same tax advantages?
Corporations like Amazon effectively don't pay taxes and YOU'RE subsidizing them. We should be outraged.
Instead. Just change the law. Make it retroactive (ex post factor legislation only applies to criminal law) and demand that these companies immediately bring in their money into the US and pay taxes.
Everything else is just a hack.
I have my doubts the courts would side with you either.
We need to tax trillionaire corporations much more aggressively, but retroactive action probably isn't a good way to do it.
2) it is a mistake to think about tax break as lost revenue. You can tax 100% everything, then wonder why the "official" economy has halted and whine about "lost revenue" of the black market. The problem is not the black market, it's the 100% taxation.
2) That doesn't follow. Just because some tax hikes could dissuade businesses from operating and depress revenue doesn't mean they all do.
I don't mind progressive regulations to increase competition but is the government also putting the same effort in investigating other tech., media, telecom, energy companies ?
It seems odd to single it out when you have far more anticompetitive practices on web browsers itself. You can't have other web browser engines on iOS. Shells to the same engine don't really count.
Chrome changed the cross platform browser landscape for the better with a more stable, performant and responsive browser. Only few companies like Google had the incentive to do this.
When I search for something, some stuff comes in front of other stuff, and sometimes that stuff isn't the best result because of a monetary incentive. If you criticize that, you're given myriad reasons why. All I know is, it's easier to find information on Reddit sometimes than Google, to the point where I add "reddit" to the search keywords, even though I barely use Reddit as a commenter or follower of subs.
And everyone hates the SEO junk that now dominates the first few pages. It's an ugly thing and not in the service of people.
Here's an idea. Separate Google seller of ads and room in the search results, from Google the "Wikipedia-like" provider of information for humanity.
How is the latter supposed to make money? Why not just separate Google the company selling ads on Google properties from Google the ad exchange for half the Internet.
This is where I think the Justice Department and state Attorneys General can win. I don't know why the Justice Department is rushing a case on search dominance, and it definitely doesn't make sense to target Chrome.
Go after the ad tech stack.
Because Google has an abusive search monopoly that harms consumers by providing a shitty experience and there are very few alternatives. First they built their monopoly, through a combination of producing an exceptional product and then gradually building moats around it; then once it was entrenched they started squeezing out competitors in their results (eating the ecosystem) and providing an ever worsening service as they focused on maximizing revenue extraction at the cost of service quality.
Google is providing a mediocre service by their own early (and correct) definition. They're aggressively violating numerous things they spelled out as hallmarks of bad search engines in the beginning of the company. Their product sucks by their own words.
Google has a browser monopoly and it has been integral to providing a moat for their search monopoly (which is one of the reasons they did it; as with Android). It absolutely makes sense to target that gigantic moat protecting their search monopoly. The search monopoly requires the moats to survive long-term at this point, since their search service is getting worse by the year. Peel off the moats shielding it from competition and the search engine either has to improve considerably, or competition will start eating its market share.
IE, Edge, Firefox and Opera are all de facto dead. The only browsers remaining that have a user base of significant size are Chrome and Safari mobile. It's not enough competition to only have two companies (both trillion dollar companies at that) providing the browsers for nearly all Internet users globally.
But where are the search engines providing a better experience? I've tried Bing. I've tried Duck Duck Go (although DDG is mostly Bing). I've found Google to be better which is why I still use it. Microsoft even tried paying me to use Bing!
Moreover, I am no expert on antitrust law but I can't see how it helps the Justice Department's case to rush to file before the election.
There are a number of alternative search engines (Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc). These tend to have the same crap (to me) approach. But they're drive by the same exigencies - to help deliver advertising, to foil the most garbagy SEO and monetize the rest, to provide "answers" rather than just key-word search (IE, dumb things down for the masses).
Google has a browser monopoly and it has been integral to providing a moat for their search monopoly
I'm writing on Firefox, I love firefox and I've heard good things about Edge. Of course, Firefox is supported by Google and uses Google by default but I spent a year on Duck Duck Go and unlike Firefox, it really does suck. To expand, it's suckiness isn't lack of money but because it's clearly trying to do everything, all the bad things interface-wise, that Google does ("answers", weight-to-new-and-recent result, etc) but worse.
Edit: It's really terrible that all interfaces have become interfaces for morons, that the paradigm for any company is "we give you few choices and use sophisticated AI to give you the choice we think you'd want 'cause giving you choices and tools means you might not decide what we want you to decide". But this paradigm doesn't actually relate to companies being monopolies. It really is what some portion of people want/need and it serves any company that doesn't have organized nerds as their customer base. I'd love to get past this but "break up Google" doesn't address this.
The biggest conflict, nobody seems interested in fixing: That Google has a strong disinterest in getting you to click on search results, when they could get you to click on ads.
It's why since Google's inception, ads have become less and less distinguishable from search results, to the point that ordinary users aren't able to tell the difference anymore.
I get multiple reports per week of malware and scams that can be traced directly back to "I hit search instead of typing the URL, and clicked the first link".
Google should be forbidden from inlining advertisements with search results, and required to make them vastly more distinct.
Ironically, two academics very concerned about this conflict of interest when they wrote a study about search engines were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazing what billions of dollars will do to your ethical standards.
People who get scammed or get malware from Google Ads don't realize a Google Ad was involved. They think they got "hacked" or did something wrong.
Sure, there are those of us who know better, but they aren't the oblivious majority that is where Google's income comes from.
I can't find the quote but I thought their original intent was to get people off the search results page (and to their "real" destination), but I think that's a position they've largely retreated from. That and "we label it clearly".
The basic concept of a search engine supported by advertisements within its results existed before Google and has been applied by essentially all of Google's relevant competitors, including the preferred "ethical" platform DuckDuckGo. If this is to be banned in Google's case it should fairly extend to all sites operating on that model, which would essentially demolish the entire search engine infrastructure as it has been understood to exist since the days of AltaVista.
Targeting Chrome by contrast seems a lot more reasonable. It also enjoys a clear precedent viz. IE.
But if the US state, foundations or provide donations could create a "non-partisan" search engine, they don't need to seize the Google search to do that. They could just launch it.
I would note that a lot of Google's activities involves foiling SEO. Sure, they allow it too but if Google's search criteria was a fixed target, 100% of the results would be garbage spam. A lot of what Google does now is bad but the company is still a wall against a vast sea of worse. Most criticisms of "big tech" doesn't take into account that the troll/spam/SEO complex exists independently from these companies - sure, this complex is a product of how these companies operate but it's also a product of how things have to work in the Internet and frightfully enough, the cost of doing involves the cost of beating this complex back (establishing boundaries, some of which are nasty compromises) no matter who's in running the connections. And where does this money come from?
Google gets the benefit of their dataset for their knowledge boxes. You can see the difference in the source code of searches looking at the entity ids, /g/ is Google's own data and /w/ is wikidata sourced.
I see the relationship Google has with Wikipedia similar to the one it had with DMOZ. I imagine at some point in the future that Google will see them as surplus to requirements, though not quite sure how they replace 5 million volunteer editors economically.
By having rules that ensure websites are perfectly accessable and use https and perfectly structured HTML has lead to a corporate takeover of the first page.
The average programmer doesn't have time to learn the rules, but they surely understand how to program better than interns writing tutorials or the average medium article.
Btw I'll be adding 700 words to every recipe on my website.
She makes delicious Cake and has a secret you won't find because it uses http that their grandson set up 5 years ago.
Or how about the single mom of 5 trying to sell dresses, guess we should put an expensive big corporation on the front page instead of the local seamstress.
About the "precedent" point: I wonder if the MS antitrust case slowed down the development of the web. The dot com crash and people still being on dialup didn't help, but the web wasn't really a usable platform until 2004, and even then, it became a lot less interesting when smartphones took over.
The article is a little vague on the antitrust reasoning behind splitting off Chrome. It bases the argument on how getting rid of third-party cookies could be bad for publishers, but at the same time mentions that Chrome's competitors have already done away with them. From an antitrust perspective I think it makes sense to go after the ad tech stack, but this article feels like it is trying to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
Prohibit large players from offering something that undermines healthy competition.
If they try to fund another under a different name then journalists and whistleblowers will expose them.