Feds may target Google's Chrome browser for breakup
politico.com
politico.com
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.
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.
Some ad tech companies already do this. They exchange and aggregate user tracking data with content websites on the backend.
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.
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.
Do you have sources on that?
I mean, technologically, it's feasible, but I have never heard of CDN providers actually doing it.
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.
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 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...
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.
That said I usually browse youtube with minimal setup
* * * block
* * frame block
* 1st-party css allow
* 1st-party frame allow
* 1st-party image allow
youtube.com 1st-party script allow
youtube.com 1st-party xhr allow
youtube.com googlevideo.com xhr allow
youtube.com ytimg.com image allowThe cost to programmers of interacting with people who aren't also programmers is apparently very high.
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.
Congress wants more ads...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's an interesting point. To me it has merit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.”
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.
Google is quite fortunate that Apple doesn't block web ads or intercept web payments and charge a platform fee for that.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Chicken? Egg?
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!
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
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.
*as a firefox user. I imagine if i used something really obscure it would happen more often.
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.
EDIT: see comment below about QUIC. tl;dr my info was out if date
An argument could be made for QUIC, though.
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2015/01/ipv6-security-m...
Note at the top of Brave's "QUIC in the wild" post[1] in 2017:
"Update: This post has been edited to correct errors of fact about developer tools and APIs with respect to QUIC. Also, the original post implied that Google might be using QUIC in an anti-competitive manner. We regret the errors, and we apologize for the implication."
Do you have a link to a more recent post from Brave about this?
But this really doesn't matter all that much to Google since regardless of how your browser session resumes you're probably still logged and/or are loaded with tracking cookies.
And IPv6 is... well IPv6. Nothing is really stopping you from NATing at your firewall if you want -- in fact, I highly recommend it for your private networks so you can use your ISP public-allocation as a pool of public addresses while having the whole IPv6 private address space to yourself.
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.
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.]
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think both shareholders and the economy would benefit in the end; these breakups would make explicit the implicit relationship between these multibillion dollar business functions and, in the process, incite a profit motive that would invite competition to make the ecosystem healthier.
For example:
Google could be split roughly into ads, search, browser, youtube, mobile, and nest/devices. When the relationship of each of these divisions is made external (ads pay search, search pays browser to be the default, browser pays mobile to be the default, etc) then we we can now have healthy competition, like bing bidding to become chrome's default search or facebook ads bidding to serve google search ads.
I haven't thought it out as much but I'm certain society could benefit from breaking out a few major business functions of amazon, of apple, of microsoft, of facebook, and so on.
In fact, if we were a really forward thinking society we could write a law rather than rely on antitrust action to restrict tech companies operating in the US from combining too many business functions - did it ever make sense to allow content discovery platforms to also be ad distribution platforms? Perhaps we should categorically disallow that.
Of course, I'm sure the free market minded of you will immediately point out - why do we want government dictating what private companies can and can't do? I sympathize with this sentiment, but ultimately the point of democracy is that the democratically elected government can make fair rules with the goal of promoting a better society.
If we can make a better society by separating content distribution from content monetization, I don't see why we shouldn't. If we can make a better society by separating marketplaces from their participants (e.g. amazon & AmazonBasics) then I don't see why we shouldn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, for one, would welcome forced spin-out of chrome/edge/safari.
Come to think of it, a break-up would probably just result in Microsoft "owning" Chrome, since they, through Edge, would quickly become the primary contributor to the project in the absence of available funds to keep the Chrome core team running at its current capacity.
Regarding Mozilla’s diversification — I am not sure, so far default search payments are the only actual significant revenue source. A lot of expansion they are trying to do is just empire building.
Also, if every browser is independent then default search payment becomes more viable since you can no longer guarantee to be default on “your own” platform.
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.
Even if they all merged into 1 again in the near future I'd still count that breakup as having massive long lasting impact.
To be one option among others.
Ideally open sources as well : ) : )
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.
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?
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.