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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way.

This resonates with me. Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. I think that evolves way down the line. Initially it's just about getting stuff done.

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People are trying to anthropomorphise companies and that isn't a sensible way to understand them. The list of people who have your interests at heart:

* You (some caveats).

* Maybe your family (lots of caveats).

As Stallman has been pointing out since the early 1990s, if you give up your freedom you won't be free any more, and other people can do stuff you don't like to you. People still refuse to use that logic despite its excellent predictive track record.

Google hasn't actually asked anyone to give up any freedom, so little meaningful damage is being done despite the fact that Google is going evil. The Microsoft era was much worse for the internet.

I think company can care about certain interests of yours, if you are aligned. That’s why you want to work for a good one. Companies are made out of people and at least some people there care.

Every single atom in my leg could want to go left in its personal capacity as an atom, but they will still go right when my brain decides to go right.

These people aren't in control. What they care about isn't a major factor to be using in decision making. One of the core principles of western law, culture and corporate organisation is to centralise control in a tiny group with extreme amounts of skin in the game.

And those people almost always bend to the incentives they are put under. Sometimes it takes a little time.

Let me get this straight, you cite Stallman on freedom and then claim that Google hasn't done anything wrong? Google the company that manages the webs most widely used DRM module? You are aware that Stallman and GNU explicitly oppose digital restrictions management in the context of freedom?

I think he's not as internally inconsistent as you claim.

"Doing things i don't like" would be locking me out of purchases I made or bricking my devices if I don't subscribe to some new service.

Google isn't doing this, you can use their products mostly for free and you're unlikely to rub up against the 900lbs gorilla that famously doesn't have support.

Until you do rub up against that gorilla; then you will start to cry about freedom, and retrospectively realise you kept trading it away.

(see also: if they change the rules, usability, cost of entry, etc;etc;etc)

I don't understand what issue you are going to. I haven't installed Widevine.

I'm extremely disagreeable, most people do things I think are foolish/detrimental to the general good/philosophically bad. We all get along regardless. The idea that Google does something I don't like that doesn't affect me is not ideal, but is usual in all my relationships with any entity you care to name.

to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.

Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be.

You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better.

The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.

I think it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Of course google didn't exclusively use their increased control over the web for strictly evil purposes, but it's more about whether someone who has a vested interest should be the one controlling browsers. It's kind of like a manufacturer being in charge over the safety regulations of their own factories. Sure, you can argue that they might know better than anyone what needs to be regulated, and might regulate things for the better where other manufacturers are worse than them, but there's also a huge conflict of interest built into the scenario.

Of course chrome was an improvement over browsers at the time, it's hard to dispute that, but that doesn't really mean that googles intentions were pure. Or that it wasn't a strategic move to place themselves into a position of having a grip on a central piece of internet infrastructure.

If a wal mart shows up in your town and drives all the smaller stores out of business you can also argue that they might have genuinely lower prices and a wider selection, but that's also just part of a larger strategy to assume dominance.

From this narrow perspective, Internet Explorer was the exact same story. Starting around version 4.0 it really was a better browser than Netscape, implemented the new standards better, and also did essential new things that other browsers couldn’t (XmlHttpRequest anyone?). IE’s dominance really made the web better because developers could write to a single standard and end users had a unified browser UX.

Now, I disagree with this definition of “better” because it doesn’t consider the indirect effects on the open web platform. But my opinion is presumably a minority one because the community has sleepwalked into the same situation with Google and Chrome.

> Now, I disagree with this definition of “better” because it doesn’t consider the indirect effects on the open web platform. But my opinion is presumably a minority one because the community has sleepwalked into the same situation with Google and Chrome.

Yes, and meanwhile prevented the content being locked inside the walled garden platforms like Facebook and apps on Apple AppStore. It's really strange how none of you remember that having most news and other content locked off behind a mobile app was a serious trend that happened before web caught up?

Serious trend? It never stopped. Literally every website on the mobile version will outright demand I download the app. Even sites that are on a desktop will refuse to do anything the site should do and instead tell me to download the app.

It's harder to game app downloads than site visits, so companies chased app downloads. It has very little to do with the user experience or preference.

I don't remember that. When was any news locked in at Facebook? How even? When chrome came around, how many people even had smartphones? The majority of people still used Facebook via Browser then.

But even if; just like in the movies, when the good guy finally turns bad, you have to get rid of him.

> Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be.

For sure!

But what were the things they wanted to do that browsers couldn't? Was it removing tracking everything, shoving more and more ads down everyone's throat and turning Web into their walled garden?

It feels like we're dancing around the concept of Embrace Extend Extinguish.

The first two phases are prominently positive and benefit the users enough for the newcomer to gain traction up to a dominant position. It's also only if that position is reached that the third phase kicks in.

> Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious.

Chrome now sends all of your URL's you are viewing to Google by default.

So does Edge, to Microsoft.

Big Tech is Malicious.

I think the point is that it becomes malicious, rather than starting out that way.

Pretty sure Firefox does that by default. It gets highly annoying, sometimes.

> Pretty sure Firefox does that by default.

Ahem, no.

> It gets highly annoying, sometimes.

The thing you made up gets highly annoying, sometimes?

Firefox also has Safe Browsing and Pocket. How do these differ from what Chrome is doing?

> Firefox also has Safe Browsing

Safe Browsing checks against a local database. It doesn't leak the URLs of pages you visit.

> and Pocket.

Pocket doesn't do that either.

> Ahem, no.

I'm referring to this: https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561650689474011136

Maybe it was removed after August, but it was in Firefox only a few months ago.

And for the record, FF android prioritizes Google searches over history leading to accidentally visiting the Google search for a web page I often frequent.

> I'm referring to this: https://twitter.com/bert_hu_bert/status/1561650689474011136

That doesn't seem to say anything about what gets transmitted to or from Google? Certainly it's not your visited URLs.

> And for the record, FF android prioritizes Google searches over history leading to accidentally visiting the Google search for a web page I often frequent.

For search suggestions we send what you've typed, not full URLs. I'm not sure what happens when pasting a URL but I would recommend using Paste & Go in that case. Search suggestions can be disabled too in the app settings.

> That doesn't seem to say anything about what gets transmitted to or from Google?

It makes a noise every time a request is sent to Google.

> For search suggestions we send what you've typed, not full URLs. I'm not sure what happens when pasting a URL

That's the issue. I type the URL and press Enter.

https://imgur.com/a/shEFR2w

I get sent to Google for no reason.

It used to do that, but doesn't anymore.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

> Phishing and Malware Protection works by checking the sites that you visit against lists of reported phishing, unwanted software and malware sites. These lists are automatically downloaded and updated every 30 minutes or so when the Phishing and Malware Protection features are enabled.

Although it seems they're still doing that for files:

> In addition to the regular list updates mentioned above, when using Malware Protection to protect downloaded files, Firefox may communicate with Mozilla's partners to verify the safety of certain executable files. In these cases, Firefox will submit some information about the file, including the name, origin, size and a cryptographic hash of the contents, to the Google Safe Browsing service which helps Firefox determine whether or not the file should be blocked.

It still uses Google Safe Browsing API as a secondary check to the locally downloaded list.

> It used to do that, but doesn't anymore.

I work for Mozilla (on Firefox) and I was around when phishing protection was introduced. Pretty sure it never did that. Not leaking the user's visit has always been a top priority for us.

> Although it seems they're still doing that for files:

What exactly do you mean by "that"? What you quoted below for certain executable downloaded files never applied to phishing protection, I don't think.

Why not both? Originally it was benign (do no evil) and later became Machiavellian.

Really? I thought it was to simply guarantee that the search service in this browser would be Google--and that it would probably be cheaper (the cost of building/maintaining the new browser vs paying existing browsers for the right to be the default search service).

It's the predictable consequence of the things built. I don't think you can absolve yourself of responsibility for how your work is used just because you didn't realize that companies exist to make money.

> Just because you didn't realize that companies exist to make money.

There are many different ways to make money though. I work with green energy tech in what is essentially an investment bank. Like most companies our main purpose is to make rich people richer, but we do this by building solar and wind power plants along with storage. We do this in the most ethically correct way possible, which is often also a much more expensive way, but it gives us the opportunity to sell our products to customers who will not buy things that are build in what they view as terrible countries. From a cynical perspective, I can see how this could get interpreted as being done because of money. But the truth is that it has been one of the organisational goals from the beginning, and it's hammered into every part of the company in such a way, that we don't hire people we don't think are committed to doing things the right way. It comes from the very Scandinavian belief that there is enough money to be made by doing things right. This isn't necessarily a competitive strategy on the 1-10 year plan, but when you look beyond those 10 years, it's slowly turning out to be the only profitable way to turn out a healthy consistant profit in the green energy industry.

I think Google had that when they had their "don't be evil" spirit going for them. In many ways I still think they have that going for them. I also think the company struggles to become more than just an advertising company, and I think it's a shame, because they seem to have some genuinely great products that are completely unusable for businesses (especially here in Europe). Which is also where I think things get sort of interesting with stuff like ad-blockers and Manifest V3. Because ad-blockers are consumer friendly (sort of), but they aren't business friendly.

If you want to run a website that offers content that is paid for by ads, then you can't do that if everyone uses an ad-blocker. Google, Apple and Microsoft can, because they have ways around it by building ads directly into their core products in a non-skippable fashion, but you can't. This is what has been hurting journalism, or at least the journalism that people don't want to pay for, but it's frankly hurting any sort of content creation. If you want to create videos about something, you're going to put it on YouTube. Both because it gives you exposure, but also because it gives you an easier revenue stream with the (sort of) unblockable ads in their app. Once you get enough people following you, you may build your own content-site and rely on subscribers, but you're not going to do that when you're just starting out. This is a stark difference compared to the early web. I remember running a Diablo 2 fan site for the fun of it, that generated enough ad revenue from a single non-intrusive banner add, to pay for a laptop back when I was a teenager. You can't do that on the modern web, and ad-blockers are a big part of the reason.

I don't have a good answer for you, but I don't think you can say that ad-blockers are inherently good, or, that Google is inherently evil for wanting to change the way advertisement works. I'm also not sure you can expect power houses like the EU to uphold the right for browsers to be capable of blocking ads. They may but the EU is also looking for ways to save journalism.

Lastly. I'm as much a fan of the old punk saying "the guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to" as you seem to be, but I'm just not convinced it really applies here.

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