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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

#311

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

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.

In the past, such forced breakups included restrictions on how the new entities could do for a period of time. As an example, AT&T was not allowed to use any of the Bell trademarks despite still owning them. In theory, the government could bar them from any contact whatsoever once the breakup is complete.

That said, AT&T/Bell was broken up in 1984. The "Baby Bells" had all merged back together into 3 different companies (AT&T, Verizon, Lumen) by 2000. So there would need to be better protections in any potential breakup of Google or any other company today

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

#312

Post by swores »

i_am_jl wrote: post #297
swores wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Despite not being privy to the details, I am familiar enough with this sort of marketing to be extremely confident that Google and McDonalds (and other big brands) did indeed negotiate specific terms including promotion of McDonalds locations beyond what is available to typical Google customers, rather than a McDonalds marketing manager just logging in and setting up some local campaigns.

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

#313

Post by meragrin_ »

helen___keller wrote: post #280
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…

> it's clear that they are being careful and are upfront about the some potential misuses and the proposed handing of them. On the contrary, my main issue is that they identify one of the primary issues and fail to address it. The biggest issue is that web designers will design around WEI such that the web is unusable without it. For example, while the current use case might be “captcha without WEI, no captcha with W…

> The biggest issue is that web designers will design around WEI such that the web is unusable without it. For example, while the current use case might be “captcha without WEI, no captcha with WEI”, a future use case might be “captcha with WEI, 401 without WEI”

You know they can do that right now, right? They aren't doing it. Will more do it because it is simpler now? Sure. Will it put "an end to the open web"? Nope. If they wanted to end it, they could have already achieved that. WEI is just simply another better option for the websites which sorely need it. Sure, some other sites will abuse it, but I think you already avoid them since you still think the "open web" is still a thing.

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

#314

Post by meragrin_ »

moneycantbuy wrote: post #70

one “side effect” of this would be enabling Google to effectively block ad-blocking. And, of course, plenty of people will insist that that’s not a side-effect, that’s the end goal.

How would this block ad-blocking?

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

#315

Post by local_issues »

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…

Google and it's employees are, combined, one of the largest DNC donors. This will never, ever happen.

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

#316

Post by JohnFen »

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.

I'm grateful they started doing this sort of thing. It was what got me to finally stop using Google Maps.

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

#317

Post by metalcrow »

wzdd wrote: post #160
cowl wrote: post #92

It 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…

The difference is that currently you can lie. You can identify the fingerprinting techniques being used, and work around them. yt-dlp already does something like this, for example. In Android, there was a lot of support for making your rooted / custom ROM system look like stock Android so you could still do banking. Now, depending on the level of Safetynet the app is using, you literally can't. I'm not arguing in fav…

I mean, you can still lie, it's just made more difficult. Unless i'm missing something, running your OS under a hypervisor with a virtual TPM (or a forked browser with TPM access stubs and custom kernel drivers) still allows you to do whatever you want. It's certainly more difficult, and unreasonably so, but it's still quite possible. While i'm not familiar with Safteynet, i'm sure it's also possible to bypass it that way.

The issue with this seems to be a sort of a restricting freedom for the greater good idea. If you restrict the ability of web developers to check security values and stuff, then they can't do some good things like improve security, but they also can't do any really bad things like block ad-blockers. But if you allow this access then you get the opposite.

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

#318

Post by charcircuit »

account42 wrote: post #262
charcircuit wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's not in Chrome's interest to prevent blocking ads from DoubleClick or Google But it would still be in their interest in preventing ad fraud on the web.

Why? Users don't care about ad fraud and neither should the user agent.

Because sites, advertising networks, and advertisers do care about it and they are part of the web too.

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

#319

Post by vel0city »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #303
flagrant_taco wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

ChromeOS bundles its own browser and goes even further in preventing people from installing their own than Windows. Imagine if on the first boot of ChromeOS it asks if you want to use Chrome, Edge, Safari, or Firefox.

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

#320

Post by acdha »

worrycue wrote: post #134
tgv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was clear when they started with Google docs that they were using their browser to get market domination. They offered a free product that people liked, but almost forced them to switch to Chrome. They got entire nations to switch their education tooling to chrome and google docs. Now they keep adding features that enable bad developers to create websites that don't work properly in Firefox and Safari. The…

Google’s web products have always worked with Firefox to my knowledge. Maybe they run a bit faster on Chrome but I don’t recall them ever being broken on Firefox. Perhaps I’m wrong. Can you cite incidents of Google’s stuff not working right on Firefox (or Safari even). Also which features enable developers to create sites that don’t work in Firefox and Safari? (I really don’t know. I’m not a web developer.)

Google Meet reported errors for Firefox users which no other service had problems with.

Google Cloud’s login page frequently broke for Firefox users.

YouTube was famously slower for a long period of time where they used a proprietary API which only Chrome supported instead of the standard API which Firefox and Safari implemented.

I suspect that all of those weren’t malice as much as neglect but for such a large company it’s definitely not a lack of resources if they choose not to test on browsers they don’t make.

The real damage, however, was not things actually breaking but the constant push to use Chrome. If you used Firefox you would be prompted to do that frequently visiting Google search, mail, YouTube, etc. with various allegations of better performance which didn’t hold up in testing.

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