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

Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

alexdanco.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 153 posts

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#111

Post by _fh5n »

This whole antitrust debate around Google feels weird to me. People act like Google is not a for-profit company, but some sort of philanthropic association that is law-bound to provide good technology to the people.

Google has only one goal, which is selling advertisements. To do so, it provides, FOR FREE, the best technology services of the planet, including what is basically the entrance door to the internet and a piece of software to make the experience of browsing pleasant. Nobody forces Google to do so. They could easily make people pay for the services, and nobody could say a thing. And yet they give this all for free, even allowing you to block the only stream of revenue that they get from you (ads).

The antitrust controversy around Google is just a major case of wanting to have the cake and eating it too. It's like we've had somebody giving us free food for decades, and now we're suropriesd that the terms of a deal that is extremely advantageous for us are changing. We've become accustomed to the idea of fre Google, and we've forgot that Google could make us pay a fee for their services, and we would all shut up and pay.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#112

Post by onli »

comex wrote: post #90
joshAg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, truly onerous monopolies don't just own a vast majority of some market share. They hamper the ability to switch to another product. The article explains how Google through Chrome's dominance is doing and did exactly this via webstandards for DRM despite most of chrome being completely open-source via chromium. Because Chrome has such a large footprint, it become much easier for google to make a non-standar…

Browsers with Widevine support, according to [1] and [2]: - Chrome - Firefox - Brave (Chromium fork, built in ad blocking) - Opera (Chromium fork) - Roku - Samsung Tizen smart TVs Browsers which support a similar selection of streaming providers through different DRM solutions: - Edge (Chromium fork) - Safari Just because you can't get a license for "my personal open source browser" doesn't mean there's a barrier to…

> Just because you can't get a license for "my personal open source browser" doesn't mean there's a barrier to serious competitors here. (At least, not at present.)

There is no way to know if not one of those "personal open source browsers" they blocked would have become the new chrome. The shared video playback experience of the one they sabotaged sounded neat.

It's not about adblocking, the article gets that wrong. If Chrome limits adblocking there are a bunch of alternatives that allow it. But the DRM control position they lobbied themselves into is in my eyes a barrier of entry to a relevant part of technological projects and something an antitrust case could address.

Yes, there are a few other browsers that can do the same, play DRMed videos. That makes the case harder. But why should Google have the power to control who can build browsers that support streaming sites? All while having economic interests to limit the competition? I think that's still a trust issue.

But I'm absolutely biased. I hated the DRM decision and would love it if it has dire consequences.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#113

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

bduerst wrote: post #87
dnissley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an amp page (although it will redirect to regular reddit if you're not on a mobile device): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimf... Basically it's a way for google to promote web pages that are better formatted for mobile devices that use a limited subset of html and restrict use of javascript. The pages are hosted on google.com as additional assurance that they will load quickly. I do…

AMP is like the bogeyman here on HN, when it is really just another web framework. >The pages are hosted on google.com Anyone can roll their own AMP pages and host it on their domains. For example: https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6yj6iw/what_did_... This includes getting your own amp lightning icon in search results when you host with certified CDNs.

AMP's HTML validator has a hard dependency on cdn.ampproject.org [0]. So the hosting requirements aren't fully isolated, and entirely under your control.

Also, I could not find a list of certified CDNs.

[0]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/validator/...

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#114

Post by marcus_holmes »

eitland wrote: post #16
writepub wrote: post #7

I don't faintly see the logic in this! The proof is in the pudding on Chrome's tangible open source impact: 1. V8 is used in a multitude of projects, node being the most impact-ful. And node has changed desktop (with electron and CLI apps), server and developer workflow 2. Brave, Edge, Opera are just some of the WideVine licensed Chromium based browsers On the contrary, iOS has banned almost every tenet of common sen…

> How one rationalizes Chrome to be more "anti-trust-y" is contrary to logic. IMO it was not Chrome that was the problem as much as: ... the way Google has rammed it down the troat of the Internet ... the way Google keep sabotaging other browsers from the server side (yep, ask the Edge team about YouTube or Firefox users about GSuite) ... the way a number of developers has picked up these bad habits and forget (or "f…

I remember when Chrome launched. And the cheers that followed. Finally, someone was doing something about the complete mess that browsers were in.

So "ramming it down the throat of the internet"... not so much. It was eagerly adopted by everyone because the only alternatives at the time were IE (with it's curious off-standard interpretation of... well...everything) and Firefox (which at the time was unusably slow and difficult).

It's a huge shame that we've got to this point with it, because it has been the driving force behind the massive improvement in browsers over the last dozen years. It's like watching an old friend being forced to humiliate themselves to keep a job :(

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#115

Post by millstone »

_fh5n wrote: post #111

This whole antitrust debate around Google feels weird to me. People act like Google is not a for-profit company, but some sort of philanthropic association that is law-bound to provide good technology to the people. Google has only one goal, which is selling advertisements. To do so, it provides, FOR FREE, the best technology services of the planet, including what is basically the entrance door to the internet and a…

Wikipedia provides information FOR FREE yet isn't the subject of an antitrust probe.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#116

Post by feanaro »

_fh5n wrote: post #111

This whole antitrust debate around Google feels weird to me. People act like Google is not a for-profit company, but some sort of philanthropic association that is law-bound to provide good technology to the people. Google has only one goal, which is selling advertisements. To do so, it provides, FOR FREE, the best technology services of the planet, including what is basically the entrance door to the internet and a…

> They could easily make people pay for the services, and nobody could say a thing.

I don't think people would pay for much of Google's products. Google is candy served so that the target is complacent while it is being invisibly surveiled.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#117

Post by taneq »

joshuamorton wrote: post #59
taneq wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine we're 20 years into the future and Ford has just successfully managed to lobby (with quite some industry support, mind you) for mandatory Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure comms, where every car has to be able to talk to every set of traffic lights, speed sign, and other vehicle. Now imagine that the V2X standard which just got enshrined in law states that every vehicle has to be compatible with every other v…

> Imagine we're 20 years into the future and Ford has just successfully managed to lobby (with quite some industry support, mind you) for mandatory Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure comms, where every car has to be able to talk to every set of traffic lights, speed sign, and other vehicle. Right, but this is where the analogy breaks down. Its more like "some municipalities decided that cars on their streets had to be…

OK, then how about instead of it being a national legal requirement, 90% of roads were privately owned toll roads and Ford convinced a consortium of toll road owners to standardize on their V2X component. So you can build a car without it but that car can't drive to anywhere you want to go.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#118

Post by akarki15 »

People here seem to assume all monopolies are illegal. THAT'S NOT TRUE!

Source: https://www.classlawgroup.com/antitrust/unlawful-practices/m...

A monopoly is when a company has exclusive control over a good or service in a particular market. Not all monopolies are illegal. For example, businesses might legally corner their market if they produce a superior product or are well managed. Antitrust law doesn’t penalize successful companies just for being successful. Competitors may be at a legitimate disadvantage if their product or service is inferior to the monopolist’s.

But monopolies are illegal if they are established or maintained through improper conduct, such as exclusionary or predatory acts. This is known as anticompetitive monopolization

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#119

Post by joshuamorton »

taneq wrote: post #117
joshuamorton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine we're 20 years into the future and Ford has just successfully managed to lobby (with quite some industry support, mind you) for mandatory Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure comms, where every car has to be able to talk to every set of traffic lights, speed sign, and other vehicle. Right, but this is where the analogy breaks down. Its more like "some municipalities decided that cars on their streets had to be…

OK, then how about instead of it being a national legal requirement, 90% of roads were privately owned toll roads and Ford convinced a consortium of toll road owners to standardize on their V2X component. So you can build a car without it but that car can't drive to anywhere you want to go.

But again, that still doesn't work, because it's not 90% of toll roads. Like, keep in mind, in this analogy, Ford owns a bunch of roads, and they're all free to travel on. And of course there's also Honda (Microsoft: PlayRead) and BMW (Apple: FairPlay) with their own exclusive components that serve the same purpose, and some municipalities choose to use those instead, or to allow vehicles that use any. Or, most of the municipalities (in concrete terms, the vast majority), don't pass any laws at all.

For your analogy to make sense, the following would need to be true:

1. Apple and Microsoft didn't have competing (and fairly widely used) alternate DRM solutions

2. The average website required DRM to access it.

Without those, this is nothing more than dystopian fanfiction.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#120

Post by anoncake »

skybrian wrote: post #43
pcwalton wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why shouldn't Microsoft do something similar when they have different goals? They explicitly said they wouldn't fork Chromium.

Sure, for now, and maybe for years. Chrome upstreamed patches to WebKit for a while. But the point is, they can fork, so that means Chrome doesn't have full control.

Microsoft couldn't maintain a Trident-based browser compatible with the Google-controlled web. They won't be able to maintain one based on Blink either.
Post reply on HN