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Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

alexdanco.com

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Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#121

Post by mattigames »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #47

The main problem I have with the predominant discussions around antitrust in contemporary internet software is that they largely ignore one quality that truly makes something a monopoply. 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. Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discus…

Interesting how you left out the biggest issue at hand and didn't mention it once: Android

> Without Google Services and the Google Play Store, it’s a brick. They’ve mastered separation of the strategic openness of Android with the accompanying strategic closed-ness of everything that runs on it and makes it actually worth something.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

_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…

"Google is not a for-profit company, but some sort of philanthropic association [providing] good technology" is an image Google created for itself and pushed hard. The good ol' "don't do evil" was part of it.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#123

Post by ionised »

vkou wrote: post #70
DubiousPusher wrote: post #47

The main problem I have with the predominant discussions around antitrust in contemporary internet software is that they largely ignore one quality that truly makes something a monopoply. 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. Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discus…

> Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives. What is a quality alternative to Facebook? Diaspora was DOA, Mastodon is a cesspit, Twitter is nothing like Facebook, and G+ is long-dead.

It sounds like you just want Facebook.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#124

Post by ionised »

_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…

I've never once gotten the impression that people think Google should behave like a non-profit.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#125

Post by ionised »

skybrian wrote: post #17

It would be weird for a mustache-twirling villain to give most of their source code to their competitors, hence allowing them to start out compatible with nearly every website on the Internet. (With a bit of DRM needed for video, so those competitors can't be pure open source. But still, it's not going to stop Microsoft.) The article admits to this, then kind of ignores it.

Villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well-camouflaged.

-- Jean-Luc Picard, Captain, USS Enterprise

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#126

Post by bryanrasmussen »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #47

The main problem I have with the predominant discussions around antitrust in contemporary internet software is that they largely ignore one quality that truly makes something a monopoply. 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. Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discus…

one of the markers of monopoly is that you can use your dominance in one industry to move into other industries and achieve dominance there. Sound like anyone you know?

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#127

Post by leadingthenet »

ajross wrote: post #88
lifthrasiir wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We watch Microsoft choke Netscape to death in the 90's, and at the end of the day nothing happened. Well, yeah, nothing happened as the IE development was grounded to a halt.

The MS settlement with the DoJ was reached in 2001, about three months after the release of IE6. If anything I think history shows the opposite occurred. Internet Explorer continued rapidly evolving during the antitrust case and its development "grounded to a halt" after the government let Microsoft off the hook. Which makes enough sense. MS always viewed the web as an enemy and wanted people on windows apps as their…

Apple unfortunately did not succeed at that vision, and all the damn Electron apps running on my Mac are proof of that.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#128

Post by Mindwipe »

euyyn wrote: post #74
joshAg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfair barrier to entry is that in order to compete at making a browser the competitor has to build much, much more than just a browser. The fact that it was apple that was successful in building an also-ran competitor isn't helpful for google, because Apple's size allows other companies to argue that unless they are as large as google or apple, they cannot compete at all, which means new or smaller players can't…

Can people use or license Apple's version of DRM instead?

> Can people use or license Apple's version of DRM instead?

There's no public mechanism for doing so. If Apple would do so to people it liked is not known.

You could license PlayReady from Microsoft though, and lots of people do for various implementations. There are also a few other companies that do similar modules, mostly aimed at the global pay TV market.

The terms would be fairly painful for a free browser vendor I expect, but "I priced my product at a level where I can't afford to buy in the things my users want from any of the independent vendors" isn't really an anti-trust concern.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#129

Post by Mindwipe »

joshAg wrote: post #100
robocat wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it not that HBO pressured Google into using DRM, and that HBO are the evil guys here?

Because Google isn't beholden to HBO. Secondly, the issue isn't that google added DRM to chrome, it's that the DRM was pushed into an ostensibly open standard, but the implementation of that open standard is locked behind a licensing agreement with Google because it's illegal to make a compatible client under the DMCA, since that would be considered copyright circumvention. If instead google and HBO had made a specia…

> Secondly, the issue isn't that google added DRM to chrome, it's that the DRM was pushed into an ostensibly open standard, but the implementation of that open standard is locked behind a licensing agreement with Google because it's illegal to make a compatible client under the DMCA, since that would be considered copyright circumvention.

It's not locked behind a licensing agreement with Google. It just unambiguously isn't. Google's own implementation is, but they aren't even the majority provider of EME CDM modules in the market, and there are several competitors, as well as an entirely free specification for one.

The problem for these smaller browser vendors isn't building their own EME modules, it's convincing major content streaming websites to trust their modules, which they don't. And that really isn't any different to the fact that if they were to start running their own certificate signing authority there's no reason why lots of sites would start trusting them either.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#130

Post by Mindwipe »

onli wrote: post #112
comex wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> But why should Google have the power to control who can build browsers that support streaming sites?

They don't.

You can build one tomorrow. I can go and get the clearkey spec and make one right now, very quickly.

But if you do why do streaming sites trust you? And that really isn't anything to do with Google.

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