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

91–100 of 153 posts

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#91

Post by ajxs »

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.

My personal opinion is that there isn't a quality alternative. I don't think that these platforms are the least bit beneficial to the well-being of their users. It's a very unfortunate fact that I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon, the idea of online 'social networks' is firmly entrenched in modern culture and has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. I think that antitrust should be just the beginning, I feel that more needs to be done at a legislative level to set reasonable limitations on the invasiveness of the companies behind such networks. Part of this would be closing the legislative gaps that make regulations difficult to enforce against such companies.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#92

Post by JoshMnem »

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.

> What is a quality alternative to Facebook?

Independent forums and self-hosted blogging. They are about content and real connections with like-minded people. Instead of mindlessly posting little updates throughout the day just for the sake of posting updates, people should save it for when they actually have something to say.

In general: read books not timelines.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#93

Post by ajxs »

antisthenes wrote: post #50
CharlesColeman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Independence comes in degrees, and I'm not convinced a "truly independent" browser would by truly better for consumers. It'd need a revenue model, and its not clear to me what that would be besides bundling with a paid product or displaying banner and text ads. Essentially Mozilla is selling ads, but only to one advertiser (Google) which is easy to disable.

Wait, hold on. Why does a browser need a revenue model? Why can't a browser just be a piece of software that's "finished", with the occasional security patch? Chrome is incredibly overcomplex because it attempts to be more than just a browser, and it is part of Google's strategy. A regular browser doesn't have to be an OS in itself.

Unfortunately keeping modern software secure is a full-time job. Internet browsers are just one giant attack surface. This is especially complicated by the speed at which the implementation of new features is required to keep a general audience interested. Unfortunately, a user like my mother wouldn't care how ideologically well-meaning a browser was if she couldn't use it for watching online media. I recently went looking for a lightweight browser for an older linux box, and it was hard to find anything that didn't either bundle Chromium or just forego having Javascript at all. Keeping up with modern web standards is pretty much an impossible job for a team of hobby developers on the basis of features alone ( WebGL, WebAssembly, DRM etc ), let alone security.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#94

Post by damnyou »

ajross wrote: post #80
dralley wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absurd. Apple is the #2 biggest company in the world, the fact that they are build their own parallel system is in no way proof that it isn't an unfair barrier to entry to "new and smaller players".

You're hanging that "absurd" entirely on my use of the word "smaller" and ignoring the first clause of that sentence. The simple truth is that an antitrust case needs to show some kind of harm to consumers , not to browser vendors. Again, I cite the fact that MS straight up murdered Netscape and got away with it (though it was scary for them for a bit).

Thankfully the misguided consumer welfare model of antitrust has slowly been changing with Lina Khan's work.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#95

Post by robocat »

joshAg wrote: post #66
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…

Come on, HBO is literally listed on widevine.com as a user of the product (this asset is like halfway down widevine.com: https://www.widevine.com/assets/img/logo-hbo.png ), and there's an iOS sdk for widevine as well, so iOS apps are using widevine too, so no, neither is streaming a ton without it, unless you mean how Apple themselves went and made an entire competing ecosystem that depends not just on a competing DR…

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

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#96

Post by judge2020 »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #83
dralley wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

And one that the GOP will actually care about. Truth be told the GOP doesn't care about the average American locked into 1/2 ISPs available to them, but when businesses are the ones being price gouged you can bet the GOP will be the one to save the day by regulating big tech.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#97

Post by Dylan16807 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #79
snek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make a browser and show any content encrypted with Widevine (which is the majority of DRM content), you need a Widevine license, and they straight up refuse to issue those. How are you supposed to compete with Chrome when Google prevents you from playing Netflix and Spotify?

Spotify has native apps on all platforms (even Linux). Netflix works on Firefox (even on Linux). Not sure how Google is preventing anything...

Isn't Netflix stuck at 480p without properly working widevine?

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#98

Post by cwyers »

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…

I tried switching to Edge because it has better touchscreen support, better battery life and some other niceties. But the number of websites that only test in Chrome is... not small.

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#99

Post by ModernMech »

whatshisface wrote: post #26
CharlesColeman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By doing like firefox, making money out of making google the default search engine. Which means their unique source of revenue (and client) would be google. Full circle... However, a Chrome-with-Google-revenue would be far more independent of Google than Chrome-the-Google-Subsidiary. Mozilla/Firefox has shown that it's still possible to advance privacy even within such an arrangement. Also, its far from clear who w…

It only seems like Mozilla is independent because they are the most independent - a truly independent browser would probably do something shocking, like bundling adblock.

> a truly independent browser would probably do something shocking, like bundling adblock.

Opera does this: https://www.opera.com/computer/features/ad-blocker

Re: Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?

#100

Post by joshAg »

robocat wrote: post #95
joshAg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, HBO is literally listed on widevine.com as a user of the product (this asset is like halfway down widevine.com: https://www.widevine.com/assets/img/logo-hbo.png ), and there's an iOS sdk for widevine as well, so iOS apps are using widevine too, so no, neither is streaming a ton without it, unless you mean how Apple themselves went and made an entire competing ecosystem that depends not just on a competing DR…

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 specialized browser app to handle the DRM or even just a browser extension that enabled the browser to understand a nonstandard html tag, then the argument that Google is using Chrome's footprint to to modify open standards to make it harder for people to compete with them starts to fall flat on its face (cw. no one is complaining that an HBO app for android and iOS is a monopoly that needs to be broken up). But doing it that way makes it much harder for HBO to acquire customers, because it requires customers to install a new app on their PC or an extension in their browser.

Post reply on HN