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Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

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Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#41

Post by hutzlibu »

Animats wrote: post #17

It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-los…

"Chrome - browsers"

And the money is coming from where? Chrome exists mostly, so the ad buisness gets more data and they can influence the direction of the web.

Seperate that and there will be no more chrome as there is no other source of income. (Except maybe a little bit from ChromeOS).

Otherwise I get it, it is mostly politics to threaten google to reach this.:

"It's quite likely to make Google dump this proposal, on the advice of their antitrust lawyers."

But a breakup of google(alphabet) is something very unrealistic and actually not something I want to see, unless we also break up Microsoft at the same time. Otherwise we end up with Microsoft dominating the web again. No thank you, I still remember those times.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#42

Post by rvnx »

dotancohen wrote: post #6

The article applies this terrific Doctrow quote about Secure Computing to WEI: > Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth, even when you would prefer that it lie on your behalf? Should there be a facility in your computer that you can’t control that other people can remotely trigger? It is an apt application of the quote, and a fundamental question that is likely based on culture and each person…

A bit similar dilemma with self-driving cars that they don't necessarily serve their owners but rather "what is right" (aka the truth); in case of unavoidable collision, should they save the interests of the current owners, or the interests of the manufacturer, or the interests of everybody on average, etc.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#43

Post by caesil »

DeathArrow wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #17

It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-los…

That's wishful thinking. Politicians will never break up Google since they benefit from it.

Fundamentally, Big Tech is an outsized part of what sets America's economy apart. Breaking up any of them would potentially be a footgun.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#44

Post by BiteCode_dev »

Animats wrote: post #17

It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-los…

Sure, but then you have to militate also for half of the fortune 500, most of them having bigger impacts.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#45

Post by rvnx »

robertlagrant wrote: post #29
c0l0 wrote: post #15

In 2012, I interviewed at Google Ireland for an SRE position. I ended up not taking the job due to family issues, but I somewhat regretted having missed the opportunity to tackle Google-sized problems and make FAANG-sized money for a few years after. This feeling has ceased entirely in the meantime, due to what Google has become, and how its understanding of its role in the world seems to have shifted. Or maybe its t…

It's also been a massive boost to FOSS as well. I don't think Google is a single entity with a true nature. It's just people deciding things. Sometimes we get VP8 open sourced, a world-level value adding move. Sometimes we get them running an experiment whose intentions should've been better articulated.

Some gifts along the way like AMP aka "Better internet"

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#46

Post by bushbaba »

Animats wrote: post #17

It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-los…

Cloud would be a huge profit maker as YouTube, search, ads would all then pay cloud for hosting. And they’d have no where else to go.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#47

Post by worrycue »

rplnt wrote: post #25

Google might have pretended to stood for something, but they have been an evil corporation since they have been a corporation. That's what corporations do by design. One relevant example is that they've been doing the "only for ie5+" with their services for 10+ years now. They killed most of their browser competition not by having a good product, but by having or buying up good services that they used to force chrome…

That’s not how I remembered it. Chrome really was a good browser and I would argue is still a good browser (for now).

IE got displaced by Firefox’s predecessors because MS got caught napping - they disbanded the IE team thinking they have won. Firefox simply got outcompeted by Chrome as Google went crazy making it faster and faster. Firefox fell behind often enough that Chrome managed to take almost all of its market share.

I’m not happily with Chrome’s dominance, and Google’s abuse of its market position, but it was a good product for most of its life span.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#48

Post by devsda »

skybrian wrote: post #22

This is attributing intentions to Google when it's unclear what they're going to do. Probably even unclear to them. Not all anti-fraud measures are DRM. If "holdout sets" get implemented then it can't be used as DRM, because it will randomly fail. What we know now is that they wanted to run an experiment to gather some data. Since it's in Chromium, they needed to explain it, and they explained it poorly.

Holdout sounds like it is explicitly added to ward off any criticisms insinuating DRM.

If a server is not denying access for clients with no valid attestation then what exactly are the servers gaining from implementing WEI?

CAPTCHAs also reasonably prove that the user is a human and legitimate but not all captcha challenges are solveable by humans in one go.

Businesses have denied access for those failures and they just repeat the challenge until the captcha is solved successfully. If the failures are less per client they can easily be treated as tradeoff against security.

What's stopping websites from doing the same with WEI? They can always deny access and repeatedly request attestation until a positive reply comes.

This is acceptable for those "attested" clients where the failures are random and within an upper bound. But a client without attestation can always be denied or they can be shown different limited content altogether.

In both the cases the unapproved clients are at a disadvantage.

Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

#49

Post by samwillis »

Animats wrote: post #17

It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup. It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition. - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more. - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites. - Analytics - services to web sites. - Cloud - the money-los…

This may seem like a good idea but so much of Google's power comes from the Search + Search Ads monopoly. That is where they are anticompetitive to the max, that is where a change needs to happen. Splitting everything else off doesn't solve the core problem.

Within Search + Search Ads you have a platform where Google are/have:

- the sole vendor of a digital asset - ads

- the sole marketplace for that asset

- a closed algorithmic trading system with no public auditing

- no public ledger or auditing showing who bid what

- currently one of the main customers for those ads (advertising their own products)

Along with that you as an advertiser have to install tracking on your site allowing Google to see every transaction, all revenue, every customer, of your business. The level of spying on the advertisers is insane, when seen in combination with the closed source algorithm and market for the ads the potential for manipulation is enormous.

The whole ads platform is built for extracting every last cent of margin from advertisers businesses. It's anticompetitive, monopolistic, and to some extent even a protection racket.

The most important "breakup" needs to be the ads business from everything else, including search. That's going to hurt, and I don't have the answers to how to make it work, but changes are needed.

I suspect a "breakup" isn't on the cards, maybe some strong regulation of online ad marketplaces, ring fencing them from the rest of the business and auditing of the platform?

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