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…
Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
221–230 of 427 posts
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
At that point nothing would stop AdCorp from cutting a deal with the new ChromeCorp that says "you get incentive payments for each page load that presents a remote attestation that no ad blockers are present". It wouldn't be seen as anti-competitive then because there are multiple ad serving companies and multiple browser companies, and anyway, legislators would expect and find it reasonable that browsers only get pa…
> At that point nothing would stop AdCorp from cutting a deal with the new ChromeCorp that says... I suspect judges that just ordered an antitrust would not be kind to people to people who essentially ignore the order by recreating an informal structure.
It's important to keep things mentally separate here. There is nothing anti-competitive about remote attestation, no more than there is about TLS. It's just far too general a tool for that. Even much more restricted versions as used by the smartphones, games consoles, Windows managed network security etc have never been claimed to be anti-competitive. That would be a very novel legal theory that's unlikely to work on its own (you can use the tech in ways that are anti-competitive, but it needs someone to actually do so).
So if Google were to be broken up, it'd have to be for wider competition and market health concerns, it wouldn't be to do with any specific API getting added to Chrome. And then if they were split up, they'd need to formalize arrangements in contracts that are today informal, like how Chrome is funded exactly. At that point, do you think the newly born AdCorp will just accept paying lots of money for ad impressions to Chrome when the users aren't going to see them? Google tolerates it today for a mixture of reasons e.g. a lot of their own staff use ad blockers, they want to be able to recruit very widely for many different projects, etc. A company specialized only in advertising would have fewer such concerns and could easily demand more aggressive measures, indeed, their new shareholders might insist upon it. Whereas today Google isn't really susceptible to stockholder pressure and is willing to let a lot slide.
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#223Google can achieve horizontal integration since they own youtube, search and lead the Chromium project. They are "the web" and make money with ads so they are going to force you to watch these ads, nothing more.
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#224It seems Everyone is taking for granted the claim that this is about DRM. The claim is that websites (not Google) will use this signal to allow or deny access but this is already possible with various means. Google or any other Browser vendor do not have a say on how websites use or misuse features. > There is a tension between utility for anti-fraud use cases requiring deterministic verdicts and high coverage, and t…
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is also how I remember it. "getfirefox.com" is burned into memory from ages ago, the first real competitor to IE. Everyone wanted to switch to it. Then chrome came along and people reluctantly switched at first, then enthusiastically. Firefox had the reputation of eating RAM like candy.
It wasn't unwarranted. They were dealing with a great deal of memory leak issues in the early Chrome vs FF era. The most important thing is that even when Chrome ended up taking more ram than FF for an equal amount of tab and equal websites loaded, closing tabs on Chrome was far more likely to let you free ram usage than on Firefox, and nobody likes to have to close the entire browser session to reclaim ram.
In the XUL days, Firefox was quite janky. XUL enabled powerful addons that made it a great power user browser, and people still occasionally can be seen missing it on places like HN, but it was also a curse upon the browser and they took too long to decide to get rid of it and rearchitect their browser into something more modern.
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know this is about DRM because that is explicitly the stated goal of this move. Apologies for just repeating a previous post I made about this but: The first goal of the proposal is to > Allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device. That is, to give web servers the ability to Digitally restrict (or Manage) a user's Rig…
DRM is not about access or not (that can and is being done with simple authenticated content). DRM is about what you can do with SPECIFIC contents. The MANAGE part in DRM. Netflix requiring you to login to view a movie is not DRM. Netflix offering a way to content owners to specify for example this movie can be seen but not download or this movie can be seen only once or this movie can not be fastforwarded, that is D…
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#227It'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…
Although the Chrome team would prefer not to block ads, I'm pretty sure there's some pressure on them to reduce the number of users using ad blockers.
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not forget maps, where they arbitrarily decide to show you a shop/hotel/restaurant 5km away when there is one 200m away.
I am kind of surprised none of the navigation apps divert your course slightly to pass in front of a large store or something yet. It could even announce the place. "On your right is such and such store where using the code Maps will give you a 10 percent discount."
Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#229Re: Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
#230It'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…
> YouTube - streaming content. Probably gets sold to Netflix or AT&T or Comcast.
Make Netflix more powerful? In what world is that good for competition