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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Anti-trust action can't come fast enough.

Once upon a time Google would've been applauded for forcing people to improve their security. Like when they made https a ranking factor for sites and overnight forced all the laggards to move off http.

Now, people just scream "monopoly" at everything google does, good or bad and boy is it getting tedious.

Once upon a time Google had "don't be evil" in their corporate mission and people trusted them to act in good faith. Good old times.

They still do

>And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

>Last updated September 25, 2020

src: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Before, it stated that the company must not be evil. Now, it is for the employees not to be evil somewhere in the end. In the meantime, if you are high up the management ladder, you can fuck the subordinates and get away with millions.

Now it's "Do the right thing (for corporate)"™.

How times have changed.

Leveraging their dominance in one market to limit competition in the browser market is something the millennium-era DOJ went after Microsoft for.

Of course, if you just hand-wave away such criticism as being "tedious", I don't expect you to care, but other people do.

Explain to me how being forced to turn on Javascript or not use a text-based browser results in me having "improved security."

The reason Google is requiring you to have JavaScript enabled, potentially opening you up to running malicious code, is because they want to use feature detection to prevent people from using competitors' Google-unapproved browsers.

They are not improving security, just making it more difficult to scrape google, who ironically is 100% based around scraping and living off other peoples content and creations in general.

Most of these controls are a blessing. They are blocking gross incompetence from front-end developers who don't know ow to do their jobs. I say this as a front-end developer.

They just got some friends elected. Wouldn't count too much on the DOJ being impolite with big tech the next 4 years.

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