Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
The main externality of this open source EEE strategy is developer opportunity cost. When google swept into the chat market, they used their size and first mover advantage to push an open standard, XMPP. So developers who might have worked on other projects/standards naturally gravitated toward XMPP and contributed their time there. If those developers had known the future of XMPP, they likely would not have worked on it. They could have invested time in a competing, more open project instead.
This to me is the real danger. It’s bad enough that google gets to benefit from thousands of free contributors to its “open source” code. It’s even worse that they are taking those developers away from other projects, so that when google moves to the third phase of EEE, there are no viable alternatives.
They are giving away everything they learned with Borg and you somehow take it as a negative? Really?
Do think from a business standpoint not sure why Google would give up the K8s brand but it is good for everyone.
I really worry that Google will stop opens sourcing and more important sharing so much through papers when people b*tch so much.
Starting to be hard to see why they even do it any longer. Who else have a huge competitive advantage with something like Borg and just gives it away to the industry?
But I am someone super curious and just probably spend more time on
https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
Read most of the paper. But then what they presented at NIPS. My favorite paper right now is
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208
Bigger example is how much they give away in terms of AI/ML.
You think they are publishing all these papers and open-sourcing TensorFlow for the good of the community solely?
No... if the entire ML community publishes papers with TensorFlow as code, then now Google can sell that many more TPUs and that much more access to their cloud systems to run the models...
I was shocked they gave away the K8s brand. Now that was ballsy and surprised necessary.
Because with Borg they only had an advantage with their own products' operations. That's nice, in that they are able to maintain a decent amount of technical superiority and have their product reliability be leading or tied for first, but it's not a clear line between this and them generating more revenue. They want their cloud offering to compete with AWS and Azure, which is why they want K8s to gain mindshare. GCE has huge potential for growth and significant switching costs; meaning they need to get new products on it sooner rather than later, and developer mindshare is the way to do that.
They were tired of writing something up as a paper and then someone implemented as OSS and then companies and engineers knew the OSS implementation instead of their own.
So instead do a OSS version and then drive what everyone learns.
I found this a bit funny. One solution would have been to not write the papers. But so glad Google does. Spend a lot of time on their research site.
The original papers on Map/Reduce, Bigtable, Dremel, Dapper, Spanner, directly spawned a bunch of successful open source implementation projects as well as companies.
But with Google-run (or other company-run) open-source projects, it's a completely different story. Want to be a TensorFlow maintainer? Great, sure, you can contribute, but you'll never get to make any decisions about the direction of the project itself unless you're inside Google.
To me it's a disappointing semi-abuse of the term "open source"... it doesn't mean what I think it should...
This isn't unlike any other open source project ran by people who don't want to consider all input from others. Not all suggestions are worth serious consideration, after all. Open source doesn't mean I'm beholden to your every whim just because you've contributed. That's what forks are for.
Don't want to move to California? Can't pass the interview? Salary too low in the offer? There could be lots of reasons.
I agree with your other points, but what I'm saying is not exactly that. What I'm saying is that TensorFlow is not a community-led project in the way that other open-source projects are. It's Google-led, and if you don't like it, you can go away or fork it (...and if you fork it, it's unlikely you'll get many users given the Google marketing machine).
(The same complaints have been and are being regularly made against Red Hat, and also Fedora, given that Fedora is basically "experimental" Red Hat.)
Consider if Tensorflow were half as useful as it is today if it was community-led and it was led by a shitty community.
...you could always find other people who think the same way and create a fork.
The larger and more important a project, the more bureaucratic it will be, and the more people you’ll be competitive with for attention.
Would you have preferred that those developers reverse engineer something closed source Google developed instead? Libpurple has advanced messaging not at all, only been great for interoperability.
Google talk / now hangouts once was an XMPP pusher. XMPP is decentralized. As with mail servers you can advertise your own XMPP servers, see https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/SRV_Records , you can even publish a per-user DNS record with an OTR key.
I shut down my XMPP endpoint a few monthes ago because Google had stopped supporting XMPP bridging to hangouts. Now that everybody uses hangouts (coders) or slack (teams/corporates) or whatsapp/messenger/skype (everyone else) there is no incentive to support it anymore (I speak now only IRC with coders)
They gave their support and a lot of traction to the protocol, and removed it on a second step (once advocates of XMPP, _yes, like me_ said to everyone, "yes you should prefer gmail+talk, they are supporting open standards")
Looks like an approaching-with-good-intentions and then disrupting strategy to me. Even if you disagree on the responsibility of XMPP rise and fall, they are the bull in a china shop : don't drink the kool aid, you'll end up broken.
Further, Google has been taking the Google bits out of Kubernetes. They declined to call their own offering "Google Kubernetes Engine" officially until the playing field was level and they had a certification program. Amazon, Azure, DigitalOcean and others are implementing their own managed Kubernetes solutions.
Google doesn't have to cheat here. Speaking as someone dealing with Google Cloud directly, they are mainly hitting on the point that Google Cloud offers better network and disk performance, in a more flexible manner, for significantly less money. And honest to God they're right. The CPU performance is worse in some cases, but we're saving money on workloads so far.
On the flip side, as long time AWS users, the Kubernetes experience has been pretty good since Kubernetes 1.3. New features typically support AWS pretty early in, with the main exception being Ingress controllers (for good reason: ALBs weren't even released when that became a thing.)
Google is one of those companies big enough to make it easy to feel like they have evil ulterior motives, but I'll be honest: in my dealings with them, I've felt that the opposite is true and generally the intentions are good.
I have more confidence in Amazon and Microsoft.
Google sticks with things that are core. Google reader was obviously not core.
Glasses moved to enterprise and continue to be used in that setting.
I'm not saying it's better than other offerings - It's not all around - but the building blocks are really nice.
There is a lot to be said about choosing the default. I've been a .Net developer for over a decade, but when I started looking into Lambda for instance and saw that it looks like most people were using Node and to a lesser extent Python, I begrudgingly started learning Python. In hindsight, I'm glad I did. I'm actually starting to like Python and I usually hate scripting languages.
Besides, for my own selfish reasons, why would I spend time on the cloud platform that is the least marketable? Companies are asking for AWS and to a lesser extent Azure experience. Very few are asking for GCP experience.
If everyone is going one way, it's not necessarily a bad decision to take a slightly different path. I've been able to build a career and a business on the alternate path.
During those days UNIX based systems were just yet another option, mostly on government and university departments.
I learned UNIX thanks to our OS teacher carrying around a single PC tower (remember those?) with Xenix on it, where we would take 30m turns to try out our C programs, prepared in advance with Turbo C on MS-DOS.
80's and early 90's, before Linux and BSD actually took off as a free way (free beer) to get access to UNIX.
And Google is probably ecstatic. It's disrupting the AWS monopoly that was developing, tons of outside developers are improving GKE for them, and it's running a textbook "commoditize your complements" play.
Compare that with Android, which Google is successfully doing the EEE strategy on. Despite widespread usage, it has few outside contributors, so Google is bearing all of the costs of it being open source without reaping few of the benefits.
But that's Google's fault. It's hard to build and contribute to Android. Development is done privately and thrown over the wall.
OTOH, it's easy to contribute to Kubernetes, and it's done in the open.
So a few years ago I created an open source community in gaming (which coincidentally, the author of this blog post was a part of early on). We had a Github organization, an IRC channel, etc. It was fun.
At some point I grew part of the community into a company, which today is growing and thriving. We're rooted in open source. I'm rooted in open source (Nearly all my work has been public and on Github for the past decade).
Today we still have nearly all our work up and public on Github but get next to zero external contributions. Because contributing as someone external to the company is hard.
Unless your actual goal as the company is to produce free & open source software, it's going to be really, really hard to make it possible for external actors to contribute to the core products as smoothly as for the company's employees. There's loads of things that pile up, like reusing internal CI systems for testing, requiring API keys and passwords for access to resources that are required or highly useful for development (eg. testing a redshift environment), and so on. All those things are fixable, but take a huge amount of time to fix, and why would you fix it if nearly nobody external to the company is contributing anyway? It's not like making the experience easy is a guaranteed win either.
Things like product design, project management, etc... it's not obvious how to make those open processes. It's not like you can do part time project management contributions to any random open source project out there. And when the processes aren't open, the barrier of entry to contribution is that much higher.
And quite frankly, certain people (who will recognize themselves) make it extremely unappealing to spend a lot of efforts on keeping the entire project open. The kind of people who will complain about every little detail of how you're trying to open up the project, until its name is prefixed with GNU/. "All or nothing" is an atrocious approach to open source and actively harms the ecosystem.
Point is, don't blame Google for making Android and Chromium hard to contribute to. It's not like it's on purpose, it just takes a huge investment for it to be possible. I mean fuck, Firefox isn't exactly easy to contribute to, and Mozilla is one of the most open companies out there, and in many ways a role model of how an open source company should be run.
They probably won't.
I have no idea why this didn't happen for Android. Samsung & LG have spent a fortune on Tizen & WebOS, and would have been a lot better off with a truly open Android. Whether that's their fault or Google's is hard to tell, but I suspect that answer is "both".
In open source, there's invariably an "in-track" and an "out-track." The in-track consists of people who will get their concerns pretty quickly addressed and can make their patches known and reviewed fairly quickly. The out-track is those who can't do that.
The strengths and weaknesses of open-source models is in how easy it is to make it into the in-track, and how stark the in/out dichotomy is. My experience with Mozilla is that they do a fairly good job at speeding people from out-track to in-track (although I suppose it depends on what areas you work in--Thunderbird was ridiculously easily, but I can imagine Gecko or SpiderMonkey is going to be much harder), but the in/out dichotomy remains somewhat stark. I've seen other places, like LLVM, where the in-track is much harder to break into, but the in/out dichotomy is not so stark.
It’s a pretty hackable project.
Google backstabbed XMPP, sure, but it's healing pretty well. I don't see how any time spend by developers on XMPP is wasted just because Google backed off. They took their userbase with them, sure, but if you want modern, open, federated IM network, XMPP is a sane choice. The only proper alternative these days is Matrix, but that's more of an IRC replacement.
“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”
“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
“Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”
Writing a secure and up to date HTML rendering engine from ground up is now almost impossible (kudos to Mozilla to actually doing that).
Typically standard bodies avoid this by requiring two independent implementations, but the market situation really means that the standard is what Chrome implements, and nothing else.
Nobody discusses v1 vs v2, x-tags vs webcomponents polyfills even though mozilla had it right (all-in-one js vs typed sub-sections like shadow DOM)
Having worked on both XMPP and CustomElements I couldn't agree more.
Gosh, I've even already written on the quasi-impossibility to use Android as a non-google open-source system, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14516538&p=2#14526788
So kudos to Mozilla once again, they're the one pushing real FOSS
It's great they open source a lot of their stuff, but just because you're big enough as a company to rewrite {component of build chain} for yourselves... doesn't mean you should.
Caveat: I know parts of Google are awesome with contributions and using standards.
edit: GPL -> AGPL
Purchased a Google WiFi for example and the license agreement is pages long of using open source software.
https://support.google.com/wifi/answer/7359345?hl=en
Google uses the Linux kernel for everything. From Google Home to Chromecast to their cloud and Android and ChromeOS.
Only now working on their own kernel, Zircon but suspect just experimentation.
Google tends to use off the shelve if something exist to use. They tend to focus on new things.
Another great example is using Intel processors but did the TPUs as nothing available to meet their needs.
Then we get speech to text using a NN at 16k samples a second at a reasonable cost.
To be honest, that's my usual experience with any open source project, especially with something based on C/C++ (modern languages usually have much better and stable tooling).
I run my own mail server and I have zero problems with reaching Google Mail users. Google – like other big mail providers – just expects you to set up DMARC and DKIM authentication for your server, which is not hard to do. Linode already provides a convenient guide to setting this up for any Ubuntu or Debian installation.
I was also sad when Google Talk was shutdown for Hangouts but to be honest, XMPP was going nowhere. The quality of available clients was very different. You had awful clients like Apple iChat (which is still awful), complete client like Psi which stopped at some point, clients which wanted to be everything like Adium/Pidgin, etc. pp.
Google Reader was indeed sad and really weird, they could have build on top of their social networks they already had but they wanted something new and shiny. I still look for a good replacement.
We all have a soft spot in our hearts for Reader, but the world has largely moved on to algorithmic feeds, because that's what most users want. Most users are intimidated by the fact that you have to find people to follow on Twitter, let alone find RSS feeds.
In some cases, but not in others. MS never joined the Vulkan working group, instead insisting on its DirectX lock-in. MS's Outlook / ActiveSync is still not an open standard which makes it a major pain to use. exFAT isn't an open standard despite MS pushing it on SD cards storage. And so on and so forth.
And XMPP story isn't any better either. Google should be blamed of course for deserting, but so is MS who never joined the effort to begin with.
I just looked at the new YouTube Creator Studio interface, and it's literally the biggest UI and UX abomination I've seen from a major tech company in recent memory. It's worse than the iOS 7 redesign.
They are now a pretty big company with a lot of different teams so not surprising some good and some bad.
It’s great that YouTube for PS4 sorta works now, though.
I do wonder why there’s this crazy variance in quality.
YouTube TV is excellent.
"In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we've used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community — determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community. Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows become the next-generation Internet tool of the future."
It's more complicated than that. US law tries to only target "bad monopolies" that engage in anti-competitive practices or hurt consumers: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopoli...
Second, monopolies in the US are NOT illegal but certain behaviors when you have a monopoly are.
Google's power comes from its (a) technical prowess and (b) popularity of some of its products. Many of their products get a large advantage just from being on their own internal platform.
But I can't think of a product of theirs that doesn't have a strong competitor. Search is the strongest they have, and the underlying problem's getting a bit simpler (I believe it's substantially cheaper now to pay for the infrastructure for a good-enough web crawler than it used to be), and competitors give pretty good results as well. I'm a bit surprised Apple hasn't tried going after this beachhead yet.
Android can be avoided by using an iPhone.
I can get an email account for free nearly anywhere. Every ISP I've had in the last 20 yrs has given me one (that I don't use).
Google's got a lot of influence, and I think AMP is quite the overreach, but they don't fit in the monopoly bucket. If you want, it's pretty easy and reasonable to avoid using them. At least as consumer -- I can't speak as an advertiser. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for advertisers.
Google have monopoly on business email, close 85% if you trust reports from Datanyze [1]. And now they are pushing AMP for email with exactly 0 external input [2][3]
[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting/gmail-fo...
> the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. "his likely motive was to protect his regional monopoly on furs"
That would have to change first. I have my doubts. Repubs do NOT want regulations. Dems and SV are pretty tight.
And plastering ads over everything also is not super hard.
I've got this comment saved on my reddit account because it was so funny:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/53gb56/why_lea...
I can definitely say that is not our default approach to open source; in fact it's a very small minority of projects that actually operate in that fashion. However, I can understand that it could feel that way to some people.
We've long said and continue to believe that there is no one way to do open source. That's true of nearly every aspect of a project including licensing, governance, community management, etc. Project are released for different reasons, with different motivations and goals, and so the way they are managed often differs.
One area I know we could do better is to set better expectations for projects around many of these topics. How is the project managed, how are decisions made, how committed to this are we (ie. are we using it in production), etc? If those aspects of a given project were clearer, would that address some of your concern (with the understanding that some projects may be be held closer to the vest than others) ? Or are you objecting to the tighter control in general?
I posted because I find it alternatingly funny and frustrating that Googlers don't understand (or can't publicly admit) what Google is to the outside. I'm willing to believe that your comment is your own words. The problem is that you might as well have copy/pasted it from a social media playbook.
It's Google's prerogative to run the business however they want. But you pretend not to be a black hole. All companies are black holes, and that's fine. It's the dishonesty in external posturing that gets to me. Sometimes it's acting like a given opensource development process is more externally accessible or transparent than it is. Other times it's pretending like the youtube appeals process isn't a fake website to con the dumb people. Everyone knows the real appeals process is to work your professional contacts until you find someone who can reach out to a real human in google to check if they should over-ride the automated system (and/or the hourly drones that DGAF about doing their jobs well). -- That was weird tangent, but it's the thing least tied to software development process I could think of.
I know you can't admit it outloud on Hacker News, but I hope you would have had a different response if we had this conversation at a bar rather than in front of everyone like this. As long as you can admit that to yourself, privately, you're alright with me.
When a few of us tried to find out what was up with AMP 4 Email, despite Malte Ubl repeating the phrase "well lit" like his life depended on it, we managed to suss out the reality that while AMP 4 Email was a mere "proposal" in the AMP project, that Gmail team was doing it the way they wanted internally with no community feedback whatsoever, and that they were committed to making this proprietary format of email without anyone else's input.
It was suggested that AMP was "open" and "well lit", but it was actually an entirely internal project to an entire different team at Google, and no outside feedback was wanted or accepted. And it took repeatedly asking the question to get a clear answer on it.
Questions like governance (in AMP's case, "benevolent" dictator for life) were hard to get answers to and sometimes came with subtle threats to "enforce the CoC" if they didn't like the topic of conversation, despite it being respectfully inquired.
(Though personally I'm not a fan of the idea itself)
Someone needs to write a client to recognize the gmail, single-URL, bodies and archive the content with the messages.
If you’re thinking about taking on google in a specific product area, now is probably a good time to start.
Google just did it again on the Ads business:
https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/googles-gdpr-cons...
(I use Fastmail, an email service that's much better and standards compliant.)
Note that FastMail is developing JMAP, a replacement standard for IMAP. And even though FastMail itself doesn't support labels, they've made sure their new standard can support Gmail's currently proprietary way of handling mail correctly. Hopefully JMAP will take off and we'll see better email clients in the future.
It would put net neutrality violators like US ISPs out of the mass surveilla- ..eeeh advertising business, so I guess that is a good thing.
My gripe with the broader industry is that Google is finding a lot more of the big vulnerabilities than their competitors.
Should be a lot more balanced. I can not even think of one major one found by Apple. Yet Google has found so many of the really big ones. Today see an article they found additional.
I personally believe MS should have done this years before Google.
1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1
2. WebRTC
3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no technical reason, in favor of an inferior wasm
4. SpyDy inspiring http2
5. V8 js runtime
6. Angular js
7. ProtoBuf and grpc
8. Android
9. Huge contributions to the looking kernel, and many many open source libraries, like boring ssl
10. Brotli compression and other related tech
11. Go language
12. Tensorflow
13. ...
It's a bit sensationalist to label Google an "extinguisher". If anything, they're a huge enabler in software.
Now, all the above doesn't make itself. A company pays competent software engineers to work on this full time. I'm in complete support of Google's attempts to monetise Gmail, one of their largest services. After all someone needs to pay for those engineers, and most of all, Google is a for profit enterprise
You're free to transition to any of the other million standards compliant providers, there's no data lock-in. You can download your email via imap, another standard that was pushed by Google when the competition was only offering web-email
Have you tried to build pure AOSP lately? Hint: you pretty much can't, it's broken. Google plays super dirty with manufacturers that want to use Android.
so fork?
By displaying deceptive ads about competitors in their flagship product?
Get out.
- "Upgrade to Chrome?"
- "Subscribe to YouTube TV?"
No matter how many times you say "No", they'll both come back. And you know that's not bad code, because YouTube literally said it was part of business plan to annoy people until they pay up.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147800/youtube-streamin...
But the craziest one is giving away Borg. Probably the most incredible technology Google has created and just opens sources it.
For me personally the biggest contribution from Google is
https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
Kind of the opposite of what this article suggests.
I get some of the alt right has a problem with Google firing Damore but this article is ridiculous, IMO.
Which are only kind of open sourced.
Google only makes the lower levels available and both are designed in such a way that using Linux as kernel is largely irrelevant for anyone using the OS SDKs.
ChromeOS is mostly a Web browser juggler and as such the only way to develop for it is with the standard Web platform APIs.
Android is all about Google's version of Java, with plain ANSI C, C++ and a couple of native APIs on the NDK, everything else is not white listed as official NDK API and as of Android 7 trying to link to them will cause an application termination.
That's just a distraction from your argument that we shouldn't criticize the actions of Google because they give away some research. Google, and others, have turned open source into a free marketing campaign. Most of it is only open source in the "source available" sense.
You could fork it, but the sheer size and magnitude of insider contributions makes it as useful as packaged software that came with source code.
I have ZERO problem criticizing anyone. But if we look at all the tech companies there has never been any tech company that give away more IP than Google. Nobody even close.
So my post is a lot more about removing the social politics emotions and look at actual data.
It is crazy giving away Borg and the K8S trademark. But Google has open sourced so much stuff. We have five OSs today. iOS, OS X, Windows, Android and ChromeOS.
Two are open source. Yes I realize there was a OSS of Apple OSs but that is NOT what is used today.
But then Chrome and well so many other things. But look at giving away Map/Reduce and GFS and so many other things in papers.
I tire a bit of the bitching on HN and really worry Google will end giving away stuff. It is hard to see why they continue. There is little in it for them.
Google only "gives away" IP that isn't part of their core business - just like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Where is the code for Google crawler and search algorithm? Gmail? Google Play Services? The back end for Google Docs?
I do think they are holding back some stuff and a big one is SDC stuff.
Plus we do not get the info until next release. So we got gen 1 TPUs after Gen 2. We will probably get gen 2 details with gen 3 release.
But Google shares so much more than any other tech company. I think possibly ever?
How is Google's strategy any different from Microsoft's and Netflix's? It would have been unthinkable a few years ago that MS would open source .Net and make it cross platform or gone through the trouble of creating Visual Studio Code that supports almost every popular language.
Besides, Android itself doesn't make Google money - advertising and to a lesser extent Google Play does. Why else would Google pay Apple $2 billion a year to be the preferred search provider on iOS?
In reality, this is nonsense, because both are backend technical tools, NOT core products. Google is not going to open source Google Search any more than Microsoft is going to open source Windows: Google is a closed product company and they're not going to give away what actually makes them money.
Microsoft has actually been topping GitHub's contributions graph for a while. Even Apple's been opening a bunch of stuff up lately. And apart from some licensing squabbles, nearly everyone's been moving their frontend web code to a framework made by Facebook.
Of course, again, none of those companies open source their actual products, just like Google doesn't open source any of theirs. The closest place they come is open sourcing Android, but it's basically useless without the proprietary half of the OS, and Google uses a hilariously draconian contract to control everyone who uses Android, and they actively punish anyone who dares to fork it, because you're not actually supposed to fork Android.
> Two are open source.
Did you just ignore the likes of Linux & BSD? :D
(I mean, there are plenty more OSes of course, saying "we have 5 today" is incredibly far from the truth; but I expected at least these 2 to sound familiar for most HackerNews readers)
So let’s take a look at it.
If I buy an Android device from Google today, can I use it just with the open source version of the OS? No, I can’t. Is there any device I can use just with the open source version? No.
So, what is in the proprietary version that isn’t in the open source version?
The Dialer is proprietary (since somewhere between 4.4 and 5.0), the Calendar is proprietary (since 4.4), the Contacts app is proprietary (since 4.4). The on-device search is proprietary (since 3.0), the homescreen app is proprietary (since 4.4).
The drivers are proprietary, the firmware is proprietary, the libraries to use recent openssl on older versions are proprietary, the only way to do wifi geolocation is proprietary, the only way to run in background is proprietary.
Android is as much open source as macOS is: Darwin is open source, and webkit is open source, but everything inbetween is proprietary.
I suggest you read https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on... to learn about why your statements about Android are deeply misleading
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on...
And thank God for that. That's why their antispam is sooo good.
Being the best available option is good. Using a dominant position to try to ensure nobody is ever allowed to compete with you again in the future is bad, and in theory illegal.
If Google blackholes mail coming from new ("untrusted", therefore "spammy") providers, how does a new provider gain traction in the market?
They already do this with other services. YouTube is probably the single most-DMCA'd site on the internet, for example, but still gets prime search-result real estate. But if you try setting up a competing video site, Google will count how many DMCA notices it gets to take down links to your site, and penalize you in search results for being a no-good horrible copyright-violation-enabler.
Google is very very good at setting up situations where the rule for their property is different from the rule for everyone else, and for some reason it always favors the Google property...
Secondly, do you have any evidence that DMCA claims are a ranking factor? Google search actually goes out of its way to point to sources showing takedowns, implying they do not agree with them.
Thirdly, Youtube has millions of incoming links. It's going to do pretty darn well in ranking no matter what.
Though I'm not sure which service you're referring to specifically. In most cases I would still expect inbound links to be very high, offsetting any mobile penalty.
And yes, Google has admitted that DMCA notices received for results to your site is something they'll factor in to rankings for non-Google properties:
https://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googl...
However, "YouTube gets special promotion in Google SERPs" is still an unfounded claim. There are hundreds of signals. Failing at one does not prove collusion.
This is not some sort of weird way-out-there conspiracy theory. You can test it yourself by going to Google, typing in something likely to have a video result, and observing how Google showcases a YouTube result at the top.
Here's what I see, in a private/incognito tab, searching for the name of a recent popular music song and the artist, for example:
https://i.imgur.com/iBSUBOV.jpg
Literally everything in that box is a link to a Google property, or to further Google searches that will promote Google properties.
Below the fold (it's a large box) is a carousel of news stories about the topic, promoting Google News as a news aggregator.
The actual search results don't start until below that.
It's worth mentioning though that vertical videos will pull from other sources as well. Here is an example of a vertical video result pulling from Vimeo.
https://i.imgur.com/9q7HavK.png
It's not specially hardcoded for Youtube. Youtube is just extremely popular in comparison to other video sites - especially for music queries like yours above.
Re: News, Google News is their index and engine for news results but those are still links to non-Google sites.
But the complaint isn't about how GMail got to a dominant position, it's about what it does with that position.
It's not a great first impression if you are asked to write something up (on a Careers page) and send it to some address and then are 5xx rejected and your email is blackholed and not even delivered to a SPAM folder.
Funny thing is that the 5xx message tells you to contact their gsuite admin to change some settings. :D I guess to get blackholed again.
Having federated e-mail is more important to me than the feature of spam filtering.
Any code that is shared for free under the guise of "open sourcing" is most of the time either a byproduct of their internal research that will not lose any value by sharing it (or will actually make non-employees extend it and work on it for free for Google's benefit), or something so specific to the company that nobody stands to gain anything from adopting it.
Google is first and foremost an advertising and user profiling company, it is useful to think about them from this perspective as it explains most of their actions with perfect clarity.
I'm not sure how a person doing a clone of something owned by a billion dollar corporation (Microsoft)...and then giving up on it...is the same thing. At all.
Hope they keep up the good work.
Mostly slow because they need to display a lot of...Google Ads?
AMP's point is to help standardize the excellence of the few pages that actually are performant. Any rankings boost was a carrot for early adopters. In july, page speed will have greater importantance ranking for pages generally.