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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

When the final version is implemented in a couple of years you will no longer see any URL, that way it won't be as evident that most sites on the web will be loaded from Google.

Google is also attacking this issue from a different perspective with Signed Exchanges [1][2], to fake the URL and ensure their success in becoming the gatekeepers of the internet.

If you refuse to become a content provider for Google's vision of the web, then they currently won't feature you at the top of search results in the Top Stories carousel, and perhaps demote you entirely from the first page in the future, depending on how their hijacking strategy works out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678693

[2] https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2019/06/mozilla.p...

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Yeah the endgame would involve a play-store like 30% cut of any revenue, subscription, ads, anything. 30% cut from non-Google ad network revenue as well. At that point publishers won't have a choice any more because of the Chrome and Google search monopolies.

By that time it will be warranted to limit user freedom on the web to make security and privacy accessible for everyone, just like Apple does today on their devices. The scary open web and the meaning of a general purpose computing device will be easily forgotten.

Off-topic hysterics

I think the easier version of that is AMP gets favored and AMP only serves Google ads. I never really thought of that being the endgame, but it makes a lot of sense now that you say it.

I wonder how bookmarking and auto-complete work with signed exchanges. I don't think they could ever remove the URL completely because it conflicts with their extortion scheme for AdWords where they'll sell your trademarked words to the highest bidder.

What happens if Chrome shows no URL and Google sells the AdWord for your bank's name to a malicious actor? That's a huge liability can of worms IMO.

I'm not sure the signed exchanges are all bad either. I'd rather have visitors seeing example.com than example.google.com/amp/ or google.com/amp/example.com. Isn't it better for your brand to be in the URL and bookmarks / auto-complete to go to your domain (assuming it works like that)?

I'm not convinced the whole web identity push is 100% bad. I don't trust Google, but as a general concept I think there's some technical merit in the idea.

> to fake the URL and ensure their success in becoming the gatekeepers of the internet.

They should just buy Cloudflare

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