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Comment by tropo | Hacker News Reader

Every browser has to act together, or the ones that don't will win due to better compatibility.

The obvious way to make that happen is a law. Just prohibit the user agent string from being sent, starting with browsers that are distributed after a certain date.

Perhaps a bit of voluntary cooperation is possible. It worked for webassembly.

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That's insane to propose the government should regulate http headers. What happened to freedom of speech?

>What happened to freedom of speech?

Deceptive speech is regularly curtailed by the government (eg. fraud, deceptive advertising)

>> What happened to freedom of speech?

> Deceptive speech is regularly curtailed by the government (eg. fraud, deceptive advertising)

Is spoofing a User-Agent string really deceptive speech? It's just asking a server to return a web-page in the same format as a specific browser... somewhat like asking a salesperson to give you the same price they give everyone else.

Only a small subset of deceptive speech; it’s perfectly legal to lie about who you voted for, or that you like someone’s haircut. Plausible deniability (my browser is Chrome, I swear) is potentially a means for individual autonomy and counteracting the misuse of power.

While I agree with your first sentence, freedom of speech doesn't have anything to do with HTTP headers.

Say for instance, all clients claimed to be Chrome. This would skew analytics towards Chrome, and would clearly benefit Google. If this activity did not benefit Google, Google would fight this activity, presumably on the grounds that other companies are producing a product that claims to be their product when it is not. Since it benefits Google, Google is not compelled to fight this misrepresentation. I argue that Google is evil for allowing this to happen, and that the US government (FTC) should intervene in this area where possible, on anti-trust grounds.

If there's nothing to analyze, analytics would lose meaning (it's already a cargo cult though).

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