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Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

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Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#81

Post by DubiousPusher »

clairity wrote: post #54
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 quality that truly makes something a monopoply... hamper the ability to switch to another product." substitutability isn't often discussed because it's a minor symptom of monopolies and wholly insufficient by itself to prove monopoly power, as every monopolist will have some competition and substitutes. it's unrealistic to expect a monopolist to own 100% of a market (have no competition). it's even more unr…

That's exactly my point though. Marketshare isn't necessarily a good indicator of a problematic monopoly.

Imagine three companies dominate a given market. In most geographies, say 75%, the two larger companies company with each other and a few other stragglers. But in 25% geography a single company dominates. Who is the problem? The larger companies, competing in their broader market or the smaller company?

As an example, Amazon is dominant in the online retail sphere. The have an incredible market share. But I've never once had this create a significant problem as a consumer. Why? Because the cost to me as a consumer to use something else is tremendously low. I can use Walmart.com which has gotten quite good. Or I can go to a physical store.

Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet.

To me monopoly is not dangerous because of marketshare. It's dangerous when the bulk of its customers cannot switch to another service. Particularly so if the market is difficult for new competition to enter.

I get all the open internet gripes about Google and what they've done with Chrome. And that thing could become a monster. But the reality is that you can switch today with minimal impact to an excellent alternative browser.

People buying a drug like HUMIRA are not so lucky.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#82

Post by m463 »

dralley wrote: post #52
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. People need to stop thinking of Google and Facebook as if they offer consumer services. They don't. Their product is their ads, and their consumers are corporate marketing departments, and through this lens they are both thoroughly monopolists. Or at least "duopolists". https://www.e…

Don't think ads, they are identification services.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#83

Post by DubiousPusher »

dralley wrote: post #52
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. People need to stop thinking of Google and Facebook as if they offer consumer services. They don't. Their product is their ads, and their consumers are corporate marketing departments, and through this lens they are both thoroughly monopolists. Or at least "duopolists". https://www.e…

That's a take I hadn't considered. Google's danger as a monopoly comes more from the situation in which you have to pay them to sell anything on the web. That's a much more interesting argument.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#84

Post by cromwellian »

"But what’s completely correct here is that Chrome is, quite explicitly, blocking users’ freedom to use their web browser the way they would expect with a piece of open source software; "

No, what you expect from Open Source software is to be able to fork it, modify it, recompile it, and use the modifications.

Open Source isn't about end-user features, it's about development freedom. A completely open source piece of software could have a set of APIs and UX that keeps you on the rails and doesn't let the end user do what they want. What Open Source shouldn't do, is prevent you from modifying it to edit the app to do what you want after a recompile, and ship and share your modifications with others, that's the freedom open source provides.

Arguably the DRM binary blob angle results in Tivoization, but the idea that this is some elaborate plot for Chrome lock-in by Google is ludicrous. Patent-encumbered compression codecs also created similar headaches and Google went out of their way to try break the MPEG-LA consortium monopoly. The DRM issue is basically forced on the industry by the content publishing industry. If you want to stop this particular issue from making open source browsers hard to develop, you need to talk Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and all of the other players.

Or you just accept that you can't watch most Hollywood produced content in a web browser and leave it up to native apps. Or, we could just mandate everyone have to continue to support Adobe Flash players.

DRM isn't going to magically go away if Chrome were a separate company.

What no one has articulated in any of these conversations is any actual harm that's been done to them. There's a lot of catastrophizing about theoretical harms, but the Web and Mobile industries are far more vibrant than they were in the 90s, and launching some device that includes a browser, mobile OS, or embedded kernel is a fraction of the cost and effort it was in the 90s to do something similar.

Things have gotten easier across the board. Someone launching a new IoT device these days forks chromium, webkit, or android for the UI. This would have cost you huge licensing fees a decade ago and a large engineering team.

How many successful startups are running off node (v8) now? Or Electron (e.g. Discord, Slack, etc)?

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#85

Post by lifthrasiir »

ajross wrote: post #62
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…

> 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. Yes, but it also fails to make much of an antitrust case about this. I mean, is Widevine licensing anticompetitive? Discriminatory? Surely it would be hard to make a competitor for it. But at the same time Apple and HBO seem to be streami…

> 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.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#86

Post by treis »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #81
clairity wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...one quality that truly makes something a monopoply... hamper the ability to switch to another product." substitutability isn't often discussed because it's a minor symptom of monopolies and wholly insufficient by itself to prove monopoly power, as every monopolist will have some competition and substitutes. it's unrealistic to expect a monopolist to own 100% of a market (have no competition). it's even more unr…

That's exactly my point though. Marketshare isn't necessarily a good indicator of a problematic monopoly. Imagine three companies dominate a given market. In most geographies, say 75%, the two larger companies company with each other and a few other stragglers. But in 25% geography a single company dominates. Who is the problem? The larger companies, competing in their broader market or the smaller company? As an exa…

>Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet.

People have Satellite, Cell providers, and usually a DSL option to choose from if they don't like Comcast. Those aren't particularly good options, but realistically neither are the other browsers besides Chrome. Plus, the only other browser that people choose to use is Firefox and that's primarily funded through a deal with Google.

The problem is that Google has laid waste to many potential markets by giving products away for free to protect their ad monopoly. How can you start a competing company in Maps or Browser or mobile OS when your competitor is willing to spend billions to make their product and then give it away for free? The conundrum is is it harmful to consumers? Google gives away a bunch of high quality products for free but ultimately they all serve the Ad master.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#87

Post by bduerst »

dnissley wrote: post #15
pmoriarty wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance, but could you elaborate? What is Amp, and why is it so scary?

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.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#88

Post by ajross »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #85
ajross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, but it also fails to make much of an antitrust case about this. I mean, is Widevine licensing anticompetitive? Discriminatory? Surely it would be hard to make a competitor for it. But at the same time Apple and HBO seem to be streami…

> 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 primary gateways. They needed a browser until they won, then they tried to kill it. Ultimately it was Apple who succeeded at that vision, obviously.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#89

Post by [deleted] »

taneq wrote: post #55
greiskul wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Spotify, or Hulu, or Netflix, or any of the others you mentioned owned by Google? No. So... why would it cause any antitrust violation? Widevine was not the first DRM for videos, it was already common practice for the big paid video websites to require DRM before it was created.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#90

Post by comex »

joshAg wrote: post #58
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…

> 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 serious competitors here. (At least, not at present.)

[1] https://castlabs.com/resources/drm-comparison/

[2] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023851591-How...

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