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> I am inclined to predict that the option to use ad blockers may come to an end because browsers and other software financed with online ad-derived revenue have full control over what extensions users are allowed to run. They have full control over that system for extending the functionality of their software.

I have a feeling that if Chrome (for instance) went that route it would quickly become Internet Explorer'd. If you recall, IE was the Chrome of its day for a good while until it slowly eroded away all its goodwill.

But don’t forget Microsoft let IE rot for years and that is what drove the interest - and the protest - for alternatives and helped Flash thrive.

Today Chrome is a fairly good platform, tons of support for all sorts of html extensions, and a very strong commitment to security.

It’s a really nice product, except for the strings attached.

Alphabet should be broken up and Chrome (OS) spun off into its own business; the tracking should be made completely transparent and optional on a subscription base.

Broken up by politicians? Ya, hard no. Just stop using it! Stop forcing your choices on people. No one has to use chrome, google search, gmail, etc. There are alternatives to all your problems, open source ones too.

There's an unstated premise here that the market doesn't force some people's choices on other people. I doubt that that's true - especially when competition is limited. There are limited alternatives currently, and this discussion contains plausible scenarios by which huge companies could use their power to limit even further those alternatives, and the choice available to us.

Can you name a few consumer-level boycotts in, say, the last 50 years, which actually accomplished their goals?

They didn't suggest a boycott. Each individual consumer decision makes a difference in aggregate. Every failed business in history is a result of consumer decisions away from what they have to offer, so I don't particularly understand that rationale.

People are “easy” to manipulate, especially when your control reaches basically every aspect of their life. Hiding/downplaying few articles here, shoving another into my face there with an opaque algorithm will achieve basically anything over a long time.

Also, you underestimate the effect of laziness. A company really has to do some atrocious thing to result in people leaving its services. Like, what would make the average person change from Gmail? He/she may not even know that 1) it is part of google which should be avoided now 2) what are alternative email providers 3) the whole change requires quite the technical know how.

It is simply naive to expect that “the market will solve it” to work in the general case. Competition only works when there are strict rules. Otherwise, the strongest/least fair player wins, and that’s why monopolies have to be broken up.

I'm going to rephrase my original comment, which got flagged: There's inherent hypocrisy in having the biggest monopoly of them all regulate smaller monopolies. Because they're 'monopolies'. Right.

I’m fairly sure I have no say in google’s politics, but I do have a (limited) say in my country’s. Also, the two don’t even play in the same field. The government is more like the referee in a sport.

Oh, but you do have a say: You can work for Google! It's the same as moving to a different country and becoming a citizen to be eligible to vote.

Referees, in comparison to governments, can be fired for doing a poor job.

> You can work for Google

Yeah and I will simultaneously work for google to not fk up the open web, for facebook to not disrupt democracy, and nestle to not goddamn force breastfeeding mothers on their shitty product.

How do you imagine a world without governments? The first thing they will do is put cocaine in their special food so you get addicted, add cheaper and more unhealthy components, even toxic ones, etc. Companies after a quite small size becomes the stereotypical paper clip AI, but instead of paperclips, it optimizes profit over everything else. A well functioning government with separation of power and without much corruption is good - it protects us from the cancerous outgrowth of companies.

As if “hypocricy” was the worst possible offense. If you remove government, who will then stop other monopolies from forming in their place? Government is what all governed people, in aggregate, decide should be common principles. If they are not to your liking, then you can either leave or advocate for (often slow and gradual) change. It is often said that people get the governent they deserve; i.e. the problem (if there is one) is with people, not government. I would argue that you can’t really abolish government, any more that you can have a structureless organization:

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Yes, but I wasn't advocating for the abolishment of anything; I was merely pointing out that there's a double standard. To rephrase your words, don't the people get the 'monopolies they deserve'? After all, neither the CEOs nor the employees of these entities are aliens from space.

You can't just leave a government the same way you can leave a job (and become unemployed) or a product (become a non-customer); you can only switch to another one. Why don't you try parking a vessel in the international waters and see how long it takes before it's sunk.

> Yes, but I wasn't advocating for the abolishment of anything;

You advocated for the government to be broken up like a monopolist would be. I can’t really interpret that any differently.

> I was merely pointing out that there's a double standard.

Yes, it’s a double standard. Now, why do you imply that this is bad? Don’t you have to have special rules for the top level? Like, the root directory is its own parent directory, but nobody complains about “inconsistency” in file systems.

I was merely following kaba0's reasoning. If you're going to advocate for the breaking up of monopolies, why pick only the low-hanging fruit?

Your comparison is not apt. The root directory is merely a container for its subdirectories. In that way it much more resembles geography (a country being subdivided into regions, for example) than a government.

It's bad, because it's a blind spot. Governments, despite being at the top-level, have consistently grown since their inception. I'd expect the top level to be the leanest, not the fattest.

Decentralization and secessionism are highly unpopular ideas that don't look like they'll ever get mainstream acceptance. If anything, it looks like exactly the opposite trend is taking place (take the EU, for example).

Every day you read about new legislation being proposed and introduced. How often do you read about outdated legislation being abolished? Never. It's like writing an app and constantly adding new features but keeping all the existing ones. We all know how well that works out.

Even though HN shouldn't be about politics, when political rhetoric does get posted here (and it's far more common than one would expect), it's extremely one-sided.

It sounds like you would like to advocate for revolution; I can understand that point of view. The problems of government are certainly great, and I would be the first one to agree with you about its many problems, excessive size and growth. But when you seem to advocate for its removal in entirety, that’s when I stop being able to happily cheer you on.

Unfortunately we live in a world were society does need to legislate morality. Slavery or child labour weren't ended by consumers voting with their wallet.

The government is chosen by the people and enforced by their choice to make decisions. A company without control is cancer. Just look at Nestle, Facebook and Google and plenty of others abusing their size and that people are NOT rational entities en masse. A government should (and they are the only thing that can) step up against these abuses.

Products are chosen by 'the people' (consumers) too.

Products are chosen by a weighted sample of the people, according to how much money somebody has access to. "Vote with your wallet" means that different people have different sized votes. "Vote with your wallet" is an inherently anti-democratic phrase.

How much money somebody has access to is directly correlated with how much time (of which everybody gets the same 24 hours a day) they spend on trying to earn money. People who care less about money will earn less and that is their own fault.

The same is true in politics. Those who shout the loudest, win. A big wallet helps too. Ever heard of lobbying?

Wow.. so how many hours Jeff Bezos’s day contains? I’m fairly sure a low level worker at amazon spends much more time on work than any of the billionaires.

A low-level worker made that career choice themselves. They were well aware they wouldn't become rich by working in a warehouse, no matter how many hours they worked. They still have their life in their own hands: They can look for another job.

Jeff Bezos sure worked like crazy to get Amazon to where it is now, so he has every right to take it easy now that he's 'made it'.

Thank you, I prefer not being brainwashed into actually believing that billionaires’ success has anything to do with hard work over plain old dumb luck and not being absolutely trash at what they do (and a “small” few million dollar from daddy here and there).

Factually incorrect. Some people have different hourly incomes, by several orders of magnitude. Some people have passive income, which no longer requires any time input. Some people have inherited wealth, which is entirely uncorrelated with their own efforts.

While I can see some benefits to having a proportional vote that can be allocated to different issues, money isn't such a vote because it isn't equally distributed. Between this and your reply to kaba0, I have a very hard time believing that you are arguing this in good faith.

There's no such thing as passive income; there's only delayed income. You're not getting paid for nothing; you're getting paid for putting in the work ahead of time. What's wrong with that?

I never claimed everyone has the same hourly income. Nor should they. Some people work hard (on their career - not necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy. Both are valid options, but there will be consequences for the respective groups (both good and bad).

If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave none to your own children. Respect if you actually go through with this.

Nobody in this discussion has said they're against inherited wealth. Just that its existence is one reason to favour "one person, one vote" over "one dollar, one vote"

Again, incorrect in every way.

> There's no such thing as passive income; there's only delayed income.

Wrong. If you have $500k in assets, that yields an average of $35k/year, market average over interest. You get paid money for already having money. This is not additional work. This is additional money as a result of having money.

> Some people work hard (on their career - not necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy. Both are valid options, but there will be consequences for the respective groups (both good and bad).

The difficulty of work is absolutely unrelated to the amount paid. Many low wage jobs, such as customer service, landscaping, or meat packing are absolutely ruinous on one's physical and mental health. They are high effort, and low pay. Other jobs are low effort and high income.

Edit: For comparison, Jeff Bezos is 57 years old, and has $192.5 billion. If he were working 24/7 throughout his entire life, that comes out to $107/second. That is 53,140 times the minimum wage. There is no humanly possible amount of effort that is 50 thousand times harder than a minimum wage job.

> If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave none to your own children.

Complete non sequitur. Inherited wealth is an example of how money, time, and effort are absolutely uncorrelated.

Following up on that non sequitur, though, there must be limitations to inherited wealth such that society doesn't separate into a landed gentry. You are also ignoring the middle ground between being against a generational aristocracy and forbidding inherited wealth altogether, such as an estate tax. Even if somebody is morally against inherited wealth, it is not inconsistent to still give wealth to their children, such that they can use it to lobby against inherited wealth. It's the same reason why I donate money to groups pushing for economic and tax reform, rather than deliberately paying more than the current tax rate. I still spend what I consider to be my fair share supporting society that way, and it goes toward making sure that others do as well.

It's interesting that you always preface your arguments with a conclusion. I wonder if that's how your thought process works as well.

You get paid for already owning money... that you had to earn previously. There are many other examples of something similar. If you do a really good job on a particular month, you might still get the same wage at the end of the month. But you might get a bonus at the end of the year. Or you might be promoted next year when a position becomes available. However, you will not get a bonus and will not get promoted if you quit your job/get fired in the meanwhile. Do you also consider this unfair?

I never talked about the difficulty of doing a particular job, be it meat-packing or customer service; I meant the emotional difficulty of leaving a bad job and the mental difficulty of making the right choices and being excellent in what you do. Working not for others, but for yourself.

If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them? Why don't you personally those low-income workers that investing in the stock market (to give an example) is 'easy' and 'guaranteed' to yield high returns?

In fact, many manual jobs are already being replaced by robots/AI. Yet people are complaining about losing their jobs. If you took my high-effort, low-income job away, I'd be eternally grateful.

In the case of billionaires, they don't get to spend all their money, so the comparison between them and a minimum-wage earner is not apt. Jeff Bezos is surely holding lots of paper, but until he spends it, it has no value. Do you have proof his spending is out of line? Besides, when you're rich you overpay for everything, which means higher income (with arguably the same amount of effort) for those who provide goods and services to you.

And I've never heard of children using their inherited wealth to... lobby against inherited wealth. If anything, they'd be more in favor of it. But I see the point you're trying to make. You're not part of the 'aristocracy' (whatever you mean by that word), which you means you hold a grudge against them. Little do you know that people poorer than you hold a grudge against you too (you're considered relatively well off) and would use the first opportunity do redistribute your wealth amongst themselves.

Dude, you're the personification of the bad-faith meme: Mister Gotcha.

While I entertained the idea of arguing with you, there is simply no point and I've come to the conclusion there are better uses for my time.

I'll just burn some points to point out how disagreeable I find your position.

Thank you for posting this, both for the support against his disagreeable position and for the reminder that engaging with people isn't always the best option. Sometimes I start by wanting to make sure that an abhorrent viewpoint has at least a visible reply, so that any readers don't see the comment as evidence of a community consensus. But that leads to me getting emotionally invested in an argument, trying to address whatever tangential non-arguments get pulled back in.

Partly, the interface of Hacker News or any vote-based commenting system makes it hard to track comments overall. I can look up comment trees relative to my own posts, but that doesn't show me that the user "ilovepitchdecks" has been arguing along the same lines with multiple other people in sibling comments. Their viewpoint isn't in any way a community consensus, and is being soundly addressed by the community, but that wasn't readily visible just from one thread.

All in all, a bit of a ramble, but I wanted to say thank you for posting this and that sometimes I need to just downvote and move on.

Well, your motivation is my motivation too, we just happen to have a different idea of what is 'abhorrent'. I'm just tired of seeing these kinds of political comments go unchallenged. It was my interest in tech that made me come on HN (I don't know about you) and I didn't expect to see so much one-sided political rhetoric here.

Who exactly is part of this 'community' you speak of? This site is on the public internet and open for anyone to join. I don't remember being asked to accept some political ideology when registering.

And this is exactly the problem with consensus: There never is one. Just because nobody speaks up, doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. Nor should they. I have been to those kinds of meetings where the majority of people don't voice a dissenting opinion or, in fact, any opinion at all. To interpret silence as agreement is just bad faith.

In fact, your narrow definition of 'community' is elitist and closely mirrors its use in the mainstream press (such as in 'international community', which just means 'the West').

So, this is against my better judgment, but I'll try to give a bit more description. You sound earnest here, and heck, you remind me a bit of myself from 15 years ago. That said, I want to focus entirely on the meta argument. I don't think there's any use in going further on the argument itself. To caricature our positions, at the end of this conversation, you can still think of me as a liberal communist who wants to tax away all of John Galt's hard-earned money, and I can still think of you as an idealist libertarian who thinks their lottery ticket into capitalism will pay off. But hopefully we'll be able to have better conversations in the future.

Many of your arguments are insufficiently defined. You make a statement, and then force others to assume what you meant from it in order to have any further conversation. When people do, you instead say that there was a different intended interpretation. For example, in the thread between you and me, the ambiguity of what you meant by time and effort earning money. Or, in your thread with "teddyh", your ambiguity about what you would like done to government.

In other cases, you ask questions that have obvious follow-ups or obvious follow-ups. They don't function as rhetorical questions, because the obvious follow-up works against the point you are making. Instead, they come across with the impression that you are deliberately wasting somebody's time by requiring somebody else to give the bare background information on a topic. For example, when you ask "If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them?". To me, the obvious follow-up is that there are structural imbalances that allow access to those jobs only to subsets of the population. We can talk about what those structural imbalances are and how they manifest, but needing to first establish that different people have different opportunities available to them is one step removed. That is what makes people feel that you are arguing in bad faith, because it makes the argument be on something that had been taken as given when entering the conversation.

Another part is that it is just so damn hard to tell the difference between earnest people and trolls. I know people personally who have your views. Heck, I had pretty close to your views for a while after reading Terry Goodkind's "Faith of the Fallen". But this is also the internet, where I don't know people other than by the few words in an individual comment, or a single comment thread. And depending on how far off somebody's views are from the Overton window of any particular forum, they can easily be the troll positions taken in order to rile up a crowd for their own amusement. Some people become desensitized to these attempts, and then assume that anybody with those views is automatically a troll. (See also, Brandolini's Law.)

I do honestly hope that you are sincere, and that this helps you to better express and examine your views in the future. It's hard to have conversation in a text-only medium, both because it is asynchronous communication, and because it doesn't have the side channel information of tone or facial expressions. Hopefully in the future, we can have more productive conversations and both come away the better for them.

You're welcome. I chose to earmark my dissent precisely for the same reason you ch engaged. I'm pretty done with the "silent majority" argument, but otoh I cannot drown myself in every quicksand :)

have a good one...

I didn't know that meme; it's actually funny. What's wrong with asking people to put their money where their mouth is? I thought engineers are not like these managers/salesmen/'talkers' that say one thing on the TED stage, then go do something completely different IRL and find that A-OK.

Don't argue with me then - but you should at least explain how anything I've said was in bad faith if you accuse me of that.

>Stop forcing your choices on people

This will never stop, and essentially defines the realm of "politics". Either you and people like-minded that share your views collectivize to protect your preferences from others forcing theirs upon you, or you lose.

This includes monopoly corporations that acquire power to restrict your ability to choose. And just wishing it weren't so, or asking people to stop achieves nothing. People won't, so your only choice is to protect your own turf however you can. "Libertarian" style abstaining from this fight ensures you lose, so is an impotent strategy.

Interestingly, this type of perspective is only gained in hindsight.

For example, I could see a future, say in 10 years, where we have a vastly better way to browse the web and then we will look back on today and think that Chrome(ium) was coasting on its past success and only providing minor new features (while ensuring that ads continue to be as profitable as possible).

I definitely remember takes in the genre of "who cares if IE is never updated. What else could you possibly do on the web?" back when websites were mostly static, JavaScript was still a toy, and all the people who could imagine better were trying to convince everyone to switch to [Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox]. Microsoft had the inspiration for XMLHttpRequest right there and couldn't see past its Windows-centric strategy.

There's an alternate timeline where Microsoft leaned on anyone implementing it. We never would have gotten as far as Sun suing Google over the Java API because no one crossed Microsoft.

No AJAX. No web 2.0. No SPAs. It would be a different world.

> No AJAX. No web 2.0. No SPAs. It would be a different world.

Is it better this way? I'm not so sure.

Uh? Did you even remember IE? How are the two scenarios even remotely comparable? It was abandon-ware, after Netscape was crushed Ballmer couldn’t imagine anything useful for IE.

That worked back then. Ten years ago, browsers were, compared to today, ridiculously simple and thus could easily be replaced. I wouldn't be surprised if today's Chrome had more LoC than Linux in 2010.

Also, the mobile platform might be a good indicator of what ordinary people are willing to put up with. Chrome doesn't support extensions there, so everybody and their uncle is browsing the web with the full ad experience. I've never seen a non-tech savvy person use Firefox, or just anything but chrome (or the system browser), on an Android device, which easily allows to install uBO. Yet on the desktop somehow even those people somehow learned to install uBO or ABP. It appears that "apparently you cannot do this on your phone" is an acceptable answer to most people.

Let's get that quantified:

Chromium LoC: 34,900,821 [1]

Linux 2010: about 12 million [2]

It appears that Chromium has more LoC than Linux. (With LoC being a bad measure, Linux being GNU/Linux, blah). Browsing is hard.

[1] via Google since OpenHub appears down [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linu...

I'm afk so I can't check the current numbers, but as of a year ago Linux was up to 27.8M loc: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_sys...

It would be hard to write a browser from scratch now that had the features of a modern browser, but creating a first-class browser is much easier than it has ever been because of Chromium and Firefox.

I agree that mobile is the direction many things are headed, but currently it's very easy to install any number of (sometimes shady) browsers from the Google app store that include ad blocking.

If a browser bans ad-blockers and people start to fiddle with DNS, wouldn't it be easy for a browser to use it's own DNS system? If a browser turns hostile there is nothing you can do.

IIUC that's what DNS-over-HTTPS is trying to do, methinks.

Exactly. Same for the nextdns.io service which I'm happily subscribing to.

Yes. Golang actually encourages developers to use their own resolver in applications instead of the system one. Google itself uses its "Public DNS" cache addreses in software and hardware it distributes. Neither decision may have been made with the intent of thwarting DNS-based evasion of ad/tracking, however, the resulting consequences may well be the same.

"... there is nothing you can do."

I am typing this comment through a text-only browser. HTTP requests, with a bare minimum of HTTP headers, are being sent from a proxy I control, not the browser. Yet the comment looks no different than any other comment. It works. I have freedom to choose whatever software I want to make HTTP requests.

I try to avoid any software (not just browsers) that access the internet and bypasses the system DNS settings. The word "hostile" is a good choice of words I think to describe such programs.

Is any browser written in Golang?

Go's UI tooling is... not great. It's more aimed at server side and CLI usage. In those niches it is awesome though

> Go's UI tooling is... not great.

Hopefully https://gioui.org/ quickly fixes that.

>Yet the comment looks no different than any other comment. It works. I have freedom to choose whatever software I want to make HTTP requests. //

I mean, sure there is, some form of DRM is possible. It might be circumventable, but it would be a PITA.

> Funny, I see the possible future differently. I am inclined to predict that the option to use ad blockers may come to an end because browsers and other software financed with online ad-derived revenue have full control over what extensions users are allowed to run. They have full control over that system for extending the functionality of their software.

They are starting to do that. Therefore, better web browser must be written, with the user having full control, and not having things that the user cannot override (assume the user knows what they are doing; you must have enough ropes to hang yourself, and also a few more just in case).

It's ironic that the browser that presents the biggest red flag for removing user control of DNS is Firefox, with their push for DNS over HTTPS. It's true that you can turn it off (for now), but until Firefox baked DoH in, DNS was a sacrosanct user control switch mostly unimpeachable by corporate meddling.

I don't know the internals of Firefox, but keeping DNS support alive seems like a fairly small patchset. I'd think that someone would provide a fork if Mozilla decided to drop support.

Firefox cannot remove that option to use system-provided DNS API instead of own implementation of HTTPS DNS. Doing that will prevent using it with intranets.

System DNS should always be used (unless the user configures it otherwise, e.g. by using a proxy for all connections). If you want DNS over HTTPS, this should be implemented as part of the system DNS, so that it can be used with any program that accesses the internet, rather than only the web browser.

So long as DoH servers are configurable, why is it a problem?

I use /etc/hosts daily to access computers with only an IP address and no DNS entry, or to override them for testing.

I don't want to have to self host a DoH server when it's so easy to edit a test file.

Furthermore, until every ISP has its own DoH server we are centralizing control of the basic internet infrastructure even more than now.

/etc/hosts works in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1616252

DNS also leaks your domain lookups to anyone and everyone. If you make it opt in, then opting in becomes incriminating in some contexts. IDK, this sounds very much like a problem specific to people who don’t need to worry about the state controlling their internet access.

Dns blocking is limited, very annoying advertising such as in video ones needs scripting to get around

As long as there remain viable open-source browsers there will be forks allowing ad-blocking.

The only danger is Google switching Chrome to closed source and adding lots of complex extensions that get widely adopted faster than they can be reverse engineered, but this seems an unlikely scenario.

The other danger would be general purpose computers or smartphones no longer available, but that also seems unlikely.

The final and most plausible danger is different and it is advertisers switching to ads that cannot be reliably distinguished from the rest of the page (currently it seems they don't do it because that removes any direct access to analytics by the advertiser and thus requires them to trust websites and they don't trust them).