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Comment by tupputuppu | Hacker News Reader

This isn't the highly visible anticompetitive behavior which might cause a backlash. Regular people, or even journalists or judges won't even understand what cookie clearing on exit means.

If there's antitrust sentiments towards Google, it needs to come from some where else.

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On the other hand, a corporation cannot be allowed to continue its anti-competitive practice just because the subject is too complex for an average person to comprehend.

Techology isn't going away and is becoming ever more important. It seems obvious to me that we will need cross-domain specialists to handle cases such as this in the future -- someone with both a legal and computer science background.

From https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/learn/ma/ & https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/learn/ma/jdma-program/

> Many of the most important challenges confronting the legal profession lie at the intersection of science, technology, law, and policy. Emerging science and technologies, such as AI, big data, social media, genomics, and neuroscience, demand an interdisciplinary approach and visionary leadership. Students in the JD/MA in Bioethics and Science Policy program spend their three years at Duke focusing on these intersectional problems and preparing themselves for a seat at the table in these discussions for decades to come and earn an additional degree while doing so.

This is something I've often called a retreat into complexity. Classic example: food corpo gets flak for putting something nasty into their products. They then switch to using an alternative that's just as harmful, just with harder to spot effects.

> This is something I've often called a retreat into complexity.

Thanks, I'm using this from now on.

I disagree. This sort of double standard is a very clear-cut and easy to understand case of abusing a dominant market position.

I wager that Google will be very quick to declare this a bug and fix it ASAP.

Yep, though specifically because it’s harming Google’s competition rather than users.

Here's what Google said when this same "Clear all Cookies except Google Cookies" issue happened back in 2018:

https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...

This 2018 CNET article has more details:

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-promises-chrome-changes-aft...

People understand perfectly well when you abstract it by one level: Google's web browser ignore's some of the user's privacy settings on sites Google owns.

> Regular people, or even journalists or judges won't even understand what cookie clearing on exit means.

It's been almost 30 years since the Cypherpunks. When billions of dollars or existential business threats are at stake, regular people are motivated to find a technically-knowledgeable peer for advice. There have now been several generations of financially successful tech entrepreneurs, some of whom move in non-tech circles.

Chrome is one thing the DOJ is using to push its case against Google.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/10/feds-may-target-goo...

Although politicians and the court does not understand the cookie, That doesn't mean we won't have a backlash. It just doesn't guarantee the backlash is technologically sound. EU's cookie law, for example, is just stupid from the pure technical standpoint.

It's your computer that store a cookie to local storage. It's your computer that decide to send back previously stored cookie. And they're crying like they don't have a consent.

> It's your computer that store a cookie to local storage. It's your computer that decide to send back previously stored cookie. And they're crying like they don't have a consent.

Fortunately, EU regulators understand that non-technical users exist and need protection from abuse.

Except your computer doesn’t know what the purpose of a cookie is, in order to decide what to do with any particular cookie.

Neither does the user, not by themselves anyway. Only the website knows really.

Antitrust action against Google is much more likely to come from the EU than from the US.

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