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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

#291

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

tiborsaas wrote: post #211
rocho wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you split the search and ads divisions into two companies, what prevents them from entering into a partnership and keep doing whatever they do now?

That's what I fail to understand in these breakup threads. They would be free to business with whoever they want. It feels like if a breakup happens it's mostly paperwork and accounting changes in practice.

No, they would certainly not be free to do business with whomever they want. There's a reason the Baby Bells didn't all just enter into a partnership with each other the day after the breakup... they were not permitted to do so.

If/when business was unavoidable between two offspring companies, at minimum, I would expect them to have to inform the FTC, justify how it was unavoidable, and make the details of the transaction public. If someone complained that it wasn't unavoidable, quite possibly there would be additional penalties leveled on each of the participants.

It's not like some Monty Python character waves a wand and declares "you're not n different companies", only to wander off and never exercise oversight. Mind you, I don't think there's enough political capital in the world to manage to break Google up, but if it did happen then the judgement will have the teeth to make sure they're actually broken.

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

#293

Post by flyinghamster »

skilled wrote: post #98

I find it staggering that so few media outlets have picked this story up. TechCrunch spends 80% of its time farming Elon Musk stories but won't lift a hand to promote a good fight. Are these news companies so entangled in the corporate world they can't risk taking a stand because it risks them losing access to real-time news? I don't really understand it so I am kind of guessing, but it is nonetheless strange.

> I find it staggering that so few media outlets have picked this story up.

The media outlets are pushing for this. Hey, no more adblockers! I'm surprised they aren't running glowing testimonials of the new Google-overlord future.

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

#294

Post by elefanten »

delfinom wrote: post #253
rapnie wrote: post #60

We all let it come this far, because of how we treat the services Google provides: As nice free and helpful tools. Talking about "Chrome this and that" all the time we forget what that really means, namely: Using the strategic tools of the largest Advertising Agency in the world, that allows them to ever grow their dominance. Chrome, GMail and all that jazz all fit into a global-scale ad-tech framework to push shady…

Google is just copying Apple, this is the entire funny part. Apple is over 50% of US market share of phones https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att... You should be more afraid of banks soon requiring Apple devices only

I don’t follow this logic. For one… the other 50% is Google. But Google has equal or better market share of many other key product/service areas… and significantly higher share in the web advertising ecosystem central to the discussion.

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

#295

Post by account42 »

IshKebab wrote: post #35
colordrops wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crazy that they just unashamedly removed it.

I doubt their motivation was "now we want to be evil". Probably more like "evil isn't actually well defined and people keep pointing to this and having dumb arguments about it".

Hint: If there are "dumb discussions" about whether what you are doing is evil, it probably is.

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

#296

Post by civilitty »

idlewords wrote: post #272
civilitty wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Send letters and call your Senators and House representatives. Donate to them the maximum you’re legally allowed to and when you get the staffer call asking for more money, give them an (respectful) earful. All it takes most of the time is a dozen people pushing the issue for a rep to make up their mind on a bill. On contentious issues, a few hundred persistent constituents will convince even Senators in large states…

None of what you suggest has any impact, and your model of how many people it takes to influence a Senator is frankly delusional. A max donation to a campaign will get you a signed thank-you card if you're lucky. Policy on stuff like tech is set by staffers, most of whom work from material helpfully pre-drafted for them by lobbyists. There are some legislators (like Wyden of Oregon) who have very good in-house people…

I never said you could buy a Senator's vote for the max donation, just that you can get their ear. You should try harder if all you get is a thank you card because a decent sized donation is the easiest way to quickly establish a relationship with their office.

YMMV but I've helped several nonprofits in SoCal navigate Congress and I'm constantly surprised by how little coordinated effort it takes to effect legislation, especially the budget (and I have no previous experience in politics, I was just an interested volunteer). We've only just begun collecting sponsors for the first bill drafted by one of the nonprofits so I can't speak to the whole process for a greenfield bill just yet but already we've had help from the Office of the Legislative Counsel to fix up the bill through our House rep so the ball is rolling.

So far we've spent far more on travel expenses than any of the orgs have spent on lobbyists or the members have spent on donations.

> Large donations at best get your calls answered by the junior staffer whose job it is to protect the Senator/Congressman from ever having to talk to people like you directly.

They're there to protect the politician from raving abortion/guns/bullshit-of-the-day lunatics. Offer to send them a short fact sheet in the format that they expect and the doors start to open quickly.

Like I said though, I'm in SoCal and YMMV. I have no idea what it's like with the GOP or in states where both Senators are like Feinstein (her office is a black hole). I do agree with the rest of your point about tech bills, my experience is with environmental and social services nonprofits who don't deal with very controversial issues.

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

#297

Post by i_am_jl »

swores wrote: post #216
Vespasian wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine Margrethe Vestager will start flexing her regulation muscles the minute Google even thinks about it.

Google Maps (and even more so Waze which they own) already had partnerships with various brands - for example, type McDonalds into Google Maps (at least in the UK) and it has the M logo next to "see locations" as soon as you've typed Mc - so it's not such a huge stretch as you think it would be.

This isn't a "partnership", it's an option for anyone who has purchased a Local Campaign product on Google Ads.

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

#298

Post by dragonwriter »

tiborsaas wrote: post #211
rocho wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you split the search and ads divisions into two companies, what prevents them from entering into a partnership and keep doing whatever they do now?

That's what I fail to understand in these breakup threads. They would be free to business with whoever they want. It feels like if a breakup happens it's mostly paperwork and accounting changes in practice.

> They would be free to business with whoever they want.

The separate pieces would not be able to engage in business together that constituted a combination in restraint of trade, because that’s illegal whether or not they are breakuo siblings. Breakups turn what used to be sole company actions into combinations, which, in and of itself, adds legal complications.

(Also, as soon as the ownership diverges at all, which will happen almost immediately, between the siblings, a lot of things that are problematic for market effects would also be breaches of fiduciary duty on one side or the other.)

And all of this leaves out the explicit targeted constraints that would inevitably be part and parcel of any breakup order.

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

#299

Post by recursive4 »

wzdd wrote: post #266
recursive4 wrote: post #247

You should be as comfortable running the (proposed) attestator on your machine as you are running anti-virus software. In thinking about it relative to anti-virus, I came across an insight: The Web Environment Integrity proposal isn't much different than requiring that, in order to receive an email, the sender both secures their machine with anti-virus and provides proof to you, the receiver, that the message in ques…

I don't think this is a good analogy. The WEI proposal is different to anti-virus in many ways. The fundamental ones are: 1) WEI doesn't attest that your device isn't running malware, it attests that your device is running a particular set of software -- it is a positive filter, rather than a negative one. This means that you can't run your own software (if it's part of the WEI trust chain), even if you know it's not…

1. Running a particular set of software _correctly_ i.e. the positive filter is positive insofar as the negative filter is negative. This logic applies to anti-virus if you predicate it's negative filtering on a positive filter that the problem itself hasn't been backdoored (which we arguably do as part of our intuitive trust model).

I disagree with your characterization of metal detectors defining success on approval. Consider the practical difficulty of defining a whitelist of every possible piece of "approved clothing" compared to a blacklist of known knowns (e.g. guns, knives, poison, etc.).

2. I think we're in agreement that who is permitted as a legitimate attestor is a core issue. I wouldn't ultimately conclude that it must be Google, although many web admins would be satisfied with that.

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

#300

Post by pc86 »

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…

I know it's just a hypothetical but YouTube being sold to Netflix or god forbid a century-old telecom company sounds awful to me, unless they let it continue to run as basically a completely separate entity - possible under something like Netflix or another tech-forward streaming company, nigh impossible under something like Comcast.

I would hope YouTube could just operate as its own company. Certainly there's enough traffic, and it makes Google billions so presumably there's enough for it to survive on its own.

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