Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

So, going off some of the descriptions of how this impacts budgeting and hiring from [0], I feel like this is a bit of a double edged sword:

- Under the new model, corporations will be able to more aggressively influence funding, and thus be better able to ensure their interests are represented by new staff members responsible for shaping debate on features.

- But under W3C's old model, where budgets and hiring were subject to approval by university liasons, staff couldn't be hired with enough agility and bandwidth to prevent those corporations from being overly aggressive anyways. Perhaps with more non-corporate-aligned humans being able to wholly focus on standardization now, there will be more attention paid to community engagement.

I suppose time will tell. When it comes to things like FLoC (now Topics) [1] the privacy implications of having an agile standards board are more important than ever, and may actually have significant impacts on people's physical safety.

[0] https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-consortiu...

[1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/get-know-new-topics-api-...

It was frequently the case the hosts didn't want to be sinking money into the W3C previously: this is the reason for many of the recent (controversial) moves (especially around WoT, advertising, etc.) to try and attract further members to try and increase revenue.

If anything, this is likely going to result in the W3C having fewer staff and lower costs, and thus only needing membership fees to cover a lower sum than it has previously.

They have been a rubber stamp for Google for years now anyway so there is no functional difference.

What ever Google wants, the W3C approves as "standard"

That's pretty transparently untrue. Plenty of examples of Mozilla and/or Apple refusing to give the go-ahead.

Whether or not this has been true historically, all three companies are under massively increased pressure in the current environment, and may not be sufficient checks on each other the way they have been in the past.

Genuinely: what do you believe the W3C has published as a standard (and not as a draft, not as a community group report) without support from multiple vendors?

Agreed, though I'm not sure the W3C has much choice. When WHATWG wrested control of HTML from W3C it drove home that browser implementers determine the standard. Given chromium's ~75% market share[1] and Apple's ~18% market share it increasingly seems like the purpose of the W3C is performative, to lend more credibility to what has become a proprietary standard driven by Google and Apple.

[1] tallying across chromium-based browsers: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2022...

It's not true, to w3c's surprising credit.

What Google does, is publish a "draft" which is as far from a standard as their authors are from the Moon. This gives Chrome the leeway to call it an "emerging standard" and just ship it. It doesn't care if there are objections, or that other browser vendors will not implement it. It's now a "standard" in Google's dictionary.

For something to become a W3C standard even in the present world, you need a consensus and at least two independent implementations. None of that exists for stuff Google pushes out (hardware APIs, web transport, constructible stylesheets [1], the list goes on...).

The correct name for those is Chrome-only non-standards.

[1] These one isn't even a draft. It is.... "a collection of interesting ideas" in a working group https://wicg.github.io/construct-stylesheets/ Shipped by default in Chrome, of course

Chromium only, not chrome only

Those non-standards are aggressively pushed by Chrome, and shipped by default by Chrome first.

Calling it Chromium makes it sound like they somehow originate in the "open-source" version. They don't. We have to call them what they are.

TIL, I though chromium always was ahead of chrome, so all changes end up in chromium first, therefore also other chromium based browsers get the patch/nonstandard behavior.

Chromium might get those features purely due to Chrome's release cadence. So the code may be enabled the code base without flags before it ships in Chrome (Chrome releases are monthly).

Most of Chromium-based browsers will probably lag on those features because they either don't want them, or have their own release cadence, or are running an older version etc.

And it's only Chrome that pretends that their non-standard features are standard, and employs a large network of propaganda from web.dev[1] to dev rels[2] to advertise them as standards.

[1] Example WebTransport https://web.dev/webtransport/, multiple non-standard hardware APIs https://web.dev/devices-introduction/

[2] I sadly lost the link to tweet from either Justing Fagnani or Alex Russel where they called the decision to ship Constructible Stylesheets "bravery to move the platform forward". Context: trivial deadlock issues in the spec, both Mozilla and Safari were dead set against it until issues could be fixed, Google-led lit-html wanted the functionality, so Chrome just shipped it.

Remember the good old days, when Google didn't have a browser and Googlers donated generously to public benefit nonprofits like Mozilla?

The real issue is allowing folks with a fat salary to advocate in bad faith against a healthy internet. (Along with shit like moving the Chrome team into the same building as Mozilla HQ and poaching employees for years.)

Isn't Google still donating generously to Mozilla?

Individual Googlers might be, "Google", the company, is relentlessly ratfucking the organization as it perpetually threatens to yank the search deal.

To maintain the appearance of a healthy competition.

> When it comes to things like FLoC (now Topics) [1] the privacy implications of having an agile standards board are more important than ever, and may actually have significant impacts on people's physical safety.

This sounds like needless fear-mongering. Is there anything to backup any concerns about people's physical safety?

Don't take my word for it: WordPress treated FLoC as a security concern in 2021: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-fl...

A good overview of the context: https://digiday.com/media/we-cant-un-floc-ourselves-googles-...

More detail: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

When it comes to Topics, it's essential that there be hands on the wheel at W3C that approach the solidification of e.g. the Topics taxonomy https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... from a neutral perspective that takes into account the various ways in which proposed topics could be dangerous, and how strongly to word the specification to prevent it from creeping in increasingly privacy-eroding ways in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com