Hacker News Reader

Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

> But the whole attitude that this is some sort of tyrannical thing is a little over the top.

This is the exact sort of thing anti-monopoly laws are intended to work against: that a major market force in one market uses that power to intrude or support itself in another market. Since Google Chrome undoubtedly has a sufficiently large market share that this may be a concern and the removal of this extension certainly affects the advertisement market, this seems like a very dangerous move for Google.

Yes, it may be considered “self-defense” but is the cost incurred really so large that they want to risk another lawsuit?

View on HN

> This is the exact sort of thing anti-monopoly laws are intended to work against: that a major market force in one market uses that power to intrude or support itself in another market.

That's actually not true. There's some case law about that sort of thing (the Microsoft antitrust case being the most famous), but the basis for anti trust law has always been about price efficiency, not protection of competition for competition's sake (c.f. the Microsoft breakup was overturned), nor consumer benefit.

The case against Standard Oil was pretty explicitly because of anticompetitive behaviour, not price inefficiency.

The anti-competitive behavior was creating price inefficiency. Standard Oil owned almost the entire refinery market, and they were colluding with railroads so they effectively owned distribution. This vertical alignment meant they could effectively set whatever price they wanted because there was no other game in town.

But this isn't a case of two different markets...Google makes no money off of Chrome. They make money off of advertising. The bottom line of Chrome is that it is just there to view advertising. The better they can make it, the more it will be used, and the more advertising will be viewed (hopefully Google's)

Microsoft wasn't making any money off of IE in 2001's US vs. Microsoft.

It was defaulting to Yahoo who was paying them. Also their browser was mandatory, not optional. You don't need to use Chrome.

I switched to FireFox long ago.

Google Assist (enterprise support and management for Chrome) makes a bunch of money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com