Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 427 posts

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

#301

Post by throwaway201606 »

zaphar wrote: post #287
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…

It is highly unlikely that Android, Chrome, and Analytics can be viable businesses on their own. I can perhaps see a viable path for analytics if a lot of things go their way but those three are almost entirely successful because they are subsidized by the other businesses. Youtube, and the other ads business can probably survive okay on their own but Chrome and Android I suspect can't.

All can be fully viable, very profitable, very large independent businesses.

Android Based on information obtained by Oracle in a lawsuit, Android had, as of 2010-ish, generated $31bn for google

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-generated-google-31...

Chrome: Browsers make money by

- sharing revenue from ( product and service ) ad searches

- prioritization in search engine results in the browser ( eg being set up as the default search engine)

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...

It is estimated, for instance, that as of 2021, Google was paying Apple $15bn for default browser placement

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/17/google_apple_chrome_i...

Google Analytics:

This is much harder to research - since looking for 'revenue' with 'Google Analytics' simply shows how to use the tool to track revenue for 'your' site if you are a Google Analytics user and my Google-fu fails at a quick remedy for that.

Best quick result would be a proxy i.e. competitor revenue. MixPanel is a standalone Google Analytics competitor and it makes $96MM from that business

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mixpanel

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

#302

Post by lxgr »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #282
lxgr wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming a level of understanding of the market structure and technical details of browsers and web advertising that probably less than 5% of Chrome users possess.

Yeah for sure, but the solution to an uneducated populous isn't large governments and regulation. That's a bandaid at best, but it's never sustainable.

If it was possible for everybody to be educated about everything, we'd indeed probably need neither regulators nor politicians.

As much as I personally like discussing the economic and political impact of various web specifications – there are a lot of things happening in modern society, and everybody only has so much time and mental resources to care about every single one in detail.

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

#303

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #195
omnimus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then lets break up Microsoft too.

There's plenty of questionable business practices that Microsoft could probably be slapped on the wrist for of anyone cares, but I'm not actually sure there's a good antitrust claim that could lead to a breakup there.

There's always bundling a web browser with their OS and giving it an unfair advantage over all other browsers, aka the exact thing they were sued for last time.

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

#304

Post by dragonwriter »

civilitty wrote: post #196
amelius wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So make lots of noise politically about that. How? I've seen similar ideas but the best they do is resonate really nicely in this echo chamber.

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…

> On contentious issues, a few hundred persistent constituents will convince even Senators in large states.

If there aren't already that on each side of an issue, its not actually that contentious. In reality, it takes large numbers of people coordinating action or a small number of people who each are financially involved orders of magnitude beyond the maximum legal direct donation (either as fundraisers marshalling donations for others, or as well-known contributors to party committees and SuperPACs as well as candidate committees, or whatever) to sway most members of either House of Congress from where they would otherwise be. (Being an existing org that is known to either bring a lot of voters or act as a proxy for a lot of big donors, or better both, also helps.)

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

#305

Post by monetus »

TheCleric wrote: post #263

I've been wary of Google for a while now, and this is further proof my wariness is justified. However, one thing I can't seem to kick is using Google search as a fallback. I use DuckDuckGo or Brave search for most of my searches, but half the time I have to add "!g" to the search to switch to Google to get actually useful results. Does anyone have any tips or tricks (or search engines I'm unfamiliar with) so I can br…

Besides DDG, I find myself using phind.com if you haven't seen that yet.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

pc86 wrote: post #300
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…

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by meragrin_ »

trogdolon wrote: post #161
cowl wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about you offer a reasonable opposing viewpoint Read the proposal: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/... >That's settled then. Full filesystem, location, camera, and microphone access should therefore come on by default without a permission dialog. Why not bring back Java and Flash while we're at it! It's not the browser vendor's fault that websites are misusing it. Now who is arguing…

> if you for example would trust let's say Opera as the attester, Opera would need to trust windows or Linux or Android as the OS attester. But it's not the user ("you") deciding which attesters to trust - it's website operators. And they will choose to trust only attesters that meaningfully (cryptographically) verify the user's client environment, including the secure boot chain, OS, and browser. Otherwise the attes…

> But it's not the user ("you") deciding which attesters to trust - it's website operators.

You know what? They are already doing it. This just gives them another option.

> And they will choose to trust only attesters that meaningfully (cryptographically) verify the user's client environment, including the secure boot chain, OS, and browser. Otherwise the attestation can be spoofed, in why case why would they bother using the EnvironmentIntegrity API at all?

You might as well complain that any website requires any sort of authentication or authorization.

How is WEI any different from all the other current methods which have not killed the "open web" in the way the hysteria over WEI is claiming?

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

#309

Post by pydry »

chx wrote: post #256
pydry wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal breakup would be between search engine and index. The index should be treated as a utility like water or electric that search engines purchase access to for a regulated fee. You can then have a thousand competing search engines started in garages with their own ranking algorithms and ads but realistically there are only ever going to be a few indexes. Thats the part that requires enormous data centers and d…

I doubt this is feasible, there's a lot that goes into the index which determines which kinds of queries you can even run.

Why? As a supplier of an API to search engine "customers" their entire job would just be to service that demand and provide new query options.

The intra-engine competition, meanwhile, would drive up results quality. Search engines would rise and fall on their own merits rather than on the basis that theyve got access to the biggest index.

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

#310

Post by florakel »

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…

Government should force google to give competitors access to its search index so that they have a real opportunity to build a competing service on top of it, AI or search. The same way monopoly telcos were forced to open infrastructure to competing service provides.

Google products are getting increasingly crappy. Would be great to see what others could build with their information monopoly.

Post reply on HN