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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

It adds to a number of other great reasons to break up Google and some other big tech companies. The fact that Google is so dominant (controlling both the discovery, browser and casual video content aspects) that they can unilaterally decide on fundamental internetworking protocols is obviviously a very important issue.

"U.S. House's antitrust report hints at break-up of big tech firms: lawmaker (reuters.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697860

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This argument is false. Google contributed the protocol to IETF. Where the competitors introduced a lot of incompatible changes, which Google then implemented. The blog post is literally Google's announcement that they are moving to that public standard.

What other company could have done this? Was the fact that Google controls so much of the entire usage chain (chrome, google.com, youtube.com) irrelevant?

Back in the 90s Microsoft had been rumored to be developing their own proprietary TCP replacement -- back when IIS was the king of the world.

They could have shut off a large portion of IIS traffic to those that weren't running Internet Explorer.

Makes sense.

I guess they failed because they were too late to the web - Netscape ate their breakfast.

Have anything to read on this?

Apparently, was more than just a rumor.

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2002-June/00...

https://wiki.c2.com/?MicrosoftPalladium

It might have worked if the majority of web servers had been Microsoft’s, but my recollection is they never got close to having the majority of the web server market.

The crown went from NCSA to Apache and then only recently to Nginx.

They had the majority of the corporate market at the time.

In this specific case only three other companies make web browsers with significant market share (Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft), so I guess you could argue only those three companies could have done this particular thing and you're correct that only Google owns Youtube.

But more generally companies have written up IETF paperwork for other protocols. Lots of Microsoft protocols have RFCs for example. But one thing that's less common is actually engaging with full-blown IETF working group standards development like Google did here, as opposed to just saying "Look here's the protocol we built, you can use that, or not". The IETF is totally happy to accept what I guess you could call a "donation" of that sort, and it's much less effort. Maybe you take some internal documents, you reassemble them into the rough shape of an RFC, you publish that draft, you get a bunch of feedback about that document, focused on clarifying the explanation, making sure you cover everything required, and so on rather than altering the protocol (which you've maybe already actually shipped in a product) and after maybe 6-12 months you've got a polished RFC ready to publish.

If you use a work VPN for example, or a corporate WiFi network that's not just a few home WiFi routers with a more professional SSID and password, you probably end up using protocols Microsoft "donated" in this way, like PEAPv0/EAP-MSCHAPv2 - these protocols are awful but there was no multi-step process where other vendors improve on it and then they eventually reach consensus and publish. Microsoft shipped products that do MSCHAPv1, then wrote it up so that other products could interoperate with Windows, and when they made MSCHAPv2 they followed the same path.

Nonwithstanding your argument, their size also makes them suspect by default. They would be able to push control much farther if it had separated interests.

Look at LetsEncrypt: A Google initiative. Yet 25% of the world’s websites use it.

How exactly do you figure Let's Encrypt is a Google initiative?

> Look at LetsEncrypt: A Google initiative. Yet 25% of the world’s websites use it.

No. Let's Encrypt is a service of the Internet Security Research Group, a California Public Benefit Corporation, it isn't an "initiative" of Google except in the same sense that the Red Cross is an initiative of Google, or Sweden is a US state, to make it seem "true" you need to squint so hard you can't see anything properly at all.

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