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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> "once Google has control of the web, they can turn off huge parts of it for whatever reason..."

What does "turn off" even mean? Following the links, it looks like the author is opposed specifically to Chrome pushing sites to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, mainly because he claims "the web is a social agreement not to break things" and "we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed."

This is hard for me to get on board with. Standards evolve and improve because major players push them. We don't use floppy disks anymore either. HTTPS provides desperately needed privacy and integrity guarantees. And archive.org continues to make historical sites available -- over HTTPS even if the original wasn't.

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> What does "turn off" even mean

Google is dominant in search engine (Google Search), advertising (via profiling and Doubleclick etc), e-mail (Gmail), mobile (Android), and in browser (Chrome).

There are alternatives, but they are dominant. Though perhaps Android is the worst example due to iOS there's basically two choices you got: apple juice or robot oil.

The fear is that Google -consciously or not- abuses its position to leverage another, under the guise of "doing good". They did embrace & extend with Google Reader (which is, by its very definition, proprietary software). They may do something similar with e.g. AMP or HTTP(s). If it isn't already happening. Heck, Android is more and more restrictive with each release.

Well, for one example, Google basically shut off audio for the entire web a while back and panicked and reverted it once people angrily pointed out they had messed up. Given their willingness to destroy swathes of old content (just like killing - for good reason, at least - all existing Flash and Unity content permanently) it's not hard to imagine them disabling HTTP permanently in Chrome, with exceptions for enterprise LTS builds if you have group policies.

Typically Google justifies these decisions to kill portions of the web with "security" and/or "user experience", and it's easy to use both of those reasons to justify disabling HTTP forever. You can remove the 'secure' indicator!

Google could decide that it doesn't want to be associated with guns in any way and not allow advertising for any type of gun related content and purge all gun content on any of its platforms.

Replace guns with ________ and repeat.

But 1) pretty much all advertising platforms reject certain categories of ads, and 2) if Google stops returning search results for certain categories of content and people feel this is wrong, they'll immediately start jumping to Bing or DuckDuckGo etc.

Yes, Google could do all sorts of stupid things. But if they do, wouldn't that be the fastest way for their dominance to erode? The fact that they're a profit-driven corporation, combined with the fact that censorship tends to piss off and drive away customers, doesn't really let me imagine any realistic scenario here.

well, there's two ways to solve that. Regulate or invest in the competition .. or create competition.

Which one would you like?

ISTM the best way to "create competition" would be to start using competing services... which is what DW and others are suggesting in this very thread.

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