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Comment by peey | Hacker News Reader

AOSP is an open source project, which is impractical for any business to run because of apps' reliance on proprietary google play services.

Chromium is an open source project, but proprietary chrome has the largest browser market share and they like to abuse their position to not play well with standards bodies.

Google can develop Fuchsia. It'll even be cool piece of tech, but I do not for a second believe that contributing to the project would benefit anyone but Google.

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Chromium, as built in many open-source distributions, uses a per-distribution Google API key for service access. [1] [2] [3]

If built without API keys, Chromium warns 'Google API keys are missing. Some functionality of Google Chrome will be disabled.' [4] [5]

The APIs used include [6]:

* Calendar API

* Contacts API

* Drive API (Optional)

* Chrome Remote Desktop API

* Chrome Spelling API

* Chrome Suggest API

* Chrome Sync API

* Chrome Translate Element

* Chrome Web Store API

* Chrome OS Hardware ID API (Optional, Chrome OS)

* Device Registration API (Optional, Chrome OS)

* Google Cloud DNS API

* Google Cloud Storage

* Google Cloud Storage JSON API

* Google Maps Geolocation API (Optional)

* Google Maps Time Zone API

* Google Now For Chrome API (Optional)

* Nearby Messages API

* Safe Browsing API

* Speech API

[1] https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/community/chromium/A...

[2] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...

[3] https://git.launchpad.net/~chromium-team/chromium-browser/+g...

[4] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/9a11dadde80...

[5] https://sources.debian.org/patches/chromium/83.0.4103.116-1~...

[6] https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys

To elaborate, the following distributions of Chromium are violating the Google API terms of service [1] [2] by publishing the API secret key publicly in the build source code responsible for building Chromium:

* Alpine Linux (community port) - https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/community/chromium/A...

* Arch Linux (svntogit, AUR) - https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/1e8f3fe7... - https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=chrom...

* Fedora Linux - https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/chromium/blob/e78656ce58d...

* Gentoo - https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/9acf51b665b6f4b5b97edb...

* OpenSuSE - https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/openSUSE:Factor...

* Slackware - http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/chromium/build/c...

* Ubuntu, Linux Mint (Canonincal Chromium Snap) - https://git.launchpad.net/~chromium-team/chromium-browser/+g...

[1] https://developers.google.com/terms (specifically: "You will only access (or attempt to access) an API by the means described in the documentation of that API. If Google assigns you developer credentials (e.g. client IDs), you must use them with the applicable APIs. You will not misrepresent or mask either your identity or your API Client's identity when using the APIs or developer accounts." and "Developer credentials (such as passwords, keys, and client IDs) are intended to be used by you and identify your API Client. You will keep your credentials confidential and make reasonable efforts to prevent and discourage other API Clients from using your credentials. Developer credentials may not be embedded in open source projects.")

[2] https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys (specifically: "Note that the keys you have now acquired are not for distribution purposes and must not be shared with other users.")

The Arch Linux one sort of doesn't count. The AUR is a user-created package repository. Anyone can make a build and add it to the AUR.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "doesn't count"?

It's not an official package. The Arch Linux project cannot be held responsible for what non-official packages do.

I agree with you. I don't think any Chromium distributions are at risk of their keys being revoked - I don't believe Google will take any action here.

But, I also don't see anyone ever talk about this, and I think it's worth people being aware.

Some of them could have agreements with Google that let them do that.

Let's say this is true.

If I fork one of the aforementioned Chromium packages, is my fork covered under that agreement? Is my right to build and produce my own binaries from the original unmodified source still intact?

Presumably not.

Hopefully Google is broken up before they decide to discontinue Android and replace it with Fuchsia 10 years from now.

Agreed, but commenting to say that they'll probably try to push Fuchsia much sooner than 10 years.

Hopefully not. They are not a monopoly and doing so would be a severe overreach.

Edit: Looks like many don't understand that you have alternatives to Google and you can use them.

There's a fuzziness to the concept of monopoly. It doesn't have to mean the absolute version where no alternatives exist at all. It can (and legally does) mean that a business is so dominant that it can effectively dictate the terms of the market.

Google has a search monopoly effective enough that they can solely make or break anyone who relies on search. They have enough dominance in the market that if they were to choose to delete something from search results, it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market who cannot at all get by on the tiny fraction of traffic they get from other sources.

This is not the case for all areas of search, but it's the case for enough of them that the concerns about Google's monopoly are valid.

As a simple example of this, let us imagine for a minute that Amazon and Google go to war. Google drops all search results that point to Amazon products or products in the Amazon marketplace and direct those searches to competitors and competing marketplaces. Google also changes Chrome so that entries into the url bar that are not explicitly for amazon domains do not match or return any amazon domain or product.

Since "Google is not a monopoly" I am sure no one would have a problem with this behavior... :)

That's not a simple example, that's an exceptional poor example. That's like talking about a world with a railroad monopoly and a steel monopoly and discussing what happens if they have a war at their intersection. That's not the point at all.

Google does NOT have a monopoly on searching for the sorts of products you buy on Amazon. In that particular exceptional case, a lot of people do go straight to Amazon for the search.

Google's monopoly is on other sorts of searching.

Google would lose a lot of customers if they did that. If that's ok with them, it's their business to drive into the ground.

I switched to Bing for search, it's great.

> it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market

That's the risk you take if you bank your entire business off of your search rank on Google. You should diversify accordingly.

This fuzziness you speak of has lead to massive overreach in the past, and it needs to stop.

I use DuckDuckGo myself. The issue isn't that no alternatives exist (if that were the case, it would be much clearer that Google had a plain and simple monopoly). The issue is that Google can unilaterally kill or make other businesses through their search. For example, they can use their search dominance to push everyone into Chrome in order to kill Firefox (even as they pay Mozilla and Apple to keep Google as default search).

Google's search dominance is under threat from competition, but they do enough anti-competitive stuff to keep their dominance that it's an issue.

Maybe a big step would be just to block Google from paying Apple and others to make Google the default. I don't know. Probably the more impactful would be to separate the Google search business from the Android stuff. The benefit Google has from tying those two together makes it really so much harder for competition to gain ground.

If you want a pretty neutral balanced view of the issues of anti-trust, Planet Money did a good little series on how overreach in the past led to excessive caution and underreaction now.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...

> The issue is that Google can unilaterally kill or make other businesses through their search.

I don't see how this answers my statement. Of course they can, it's their platform. I'm sure MS pushes their new browser on bing. There's another thread open today where people have listed a ton of alternates so one can de-google. I did it 2 years ago, it's been fine. Apple Maps is much better than it used to be, bing is better than it used to be. Lots of email options.

I'm not saying it's a clear conclusion that Google has a monopoly that must be regulated/broken-up. I'm saying that it's not conclusive. The case is strong enough to seriously consider and to evaluate. I think the duopoly of iOS/Android is probably the most serious issue, even more than search. But none of this is simple cut-and-dry.

So for search they are not a monopoly, not even close.

For iOS/Android, I'm not seeing a problem just because they are popular. Is there some specific legislation you would like passed which would interfere and most likely overreach into their companies?

Like you said, it's not cut and dry because there isn't a monopoly. If an upstart company came along and wanted to make a new mobileOS, I wish them well. If Google or Apple did something wrong to interfere with their success, bring a suit at that time with specific claims.

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