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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

I know some people on here don't like the EU "over regulating/sanctionning" tech companies telling them what to do when they misbehave and refuses to play nicely (eg Apple usb-c, to take one that was clearly controversial on HN), but I really really hope some massive case is coming against the clear monopolistic walled garden abuse that is reappearing lately on the web, it's like the early 2000 all over again.

Google breaking stuff for Firefox, Microsoft breaking stuff for Chrome, ... There is a difference between not bothering to ensure full compatibility and showing a warning, and limiting to your own market.

We can keep pretending smart phones are not two different markets but one unified so apple and google are free to abuse users, but not computers and the web.

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We're so far beyond the 2000s in terms of bad behavior that it's not even funny. Remember that the case United States vs Microsoft [1] was about, literally, nothing but Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows! That was seen as (and is) anticompetitive behavior detrimental to competition from other browsers. And Microsoft lost that case, initially leading to the potential breakup of the entire company! Though they [obviously] managed to get a lesser penalty on appeal.

Now companies package all sorts of random crap, often make it impossible to remove or in many cases even disable, prevent users from getting apps except from their own walled in app-stores (where they take a huge cut of revenue), phone home endlessly for opaque purposes, forcibly impose updates which regularly reset user preferences to the benefit of companies, artificially promote their products in every single way (such as by being the automatically selected 'default' selection in every aspect of a system, knowing full well that changing the default is too onerous for the average user), and much much more.

The problem is not a lack of regulations or rules, but a lack of enforcement. As soon as all of these big tech companies started "lobbying" politicians, let alone becoming deeply intertwined with our intelligence agencies [2], it's like any concern whatsoever about antitrust just disappeared, or at least set to a practically unreachable level of villainy. All the rules in the world don't matter if they're simply not enforced for certain companies.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#Companies

United States v. Microsoft Corp. happened because Windows stood at 95%+ market share. It hasn't happened again because no platform has risen to that level of market share.

Monopoly is not a necessary condition for antitrust case.

Just as well! Oligopolies are almost as bad as monopolies, for rent seeking and stifling competition.

I don't know about US law, but EU competition law is concerned about “significant market power” and not (just) monopolies.

When talking about modeling oligopolies and monopolies, often oligopolies have worse results.

We need more antitrust on everything. Things are not working if consumers have no choices in practice. "Support Nestle or just never purchase any snack or drink," isn't a real choice.

It also isn't a reality, and if it was, it would be a monopoly, and it would be dismantled.

honestly, I don't think it would happen again even if a platform did rise to that level of marketshare

If you view $1000 iPhones and $200 Androids as the same market, yes. If you view them as different markets because no one’s picking between the two, Apple has 75% market share in premium phones and Android has 100% market share (I do not consider Jio flip phones as a real competitor) in non premium phones

The EU woke up too late for that MS/IE situation, but it did lead to some massively good thing (in my opinion): documentation of office file format, of SMB protocol, decoupling on IE and Windows Media Player ("Windows N" was funny, but the decoupling was real and is still to this day), etc ...

That's why I hope for them to react to this one. The EU has been stepping up lately about making sure enforcement match the rules.

Windows N and KN are still the best option to get working Windows without the wallpapers, game promotions, seasonal news in the start menu, weather apps etc. All windows editions should be like these.

I agree, it's essentially their proof of concept for "see ? it's not actually embedded we can work without"

I didn't realize the N ones dropped all those! I thought it was just that WMP wasn't installed by default.

Because that was the original pain point and the one that made the news ("Windows N is the version that can't play video or audio files" makes clicks), but Windows N is actually the version where every optionnal component is uncoupled and removed by default.

Now "nobody" buys Windows N on purpose, but its legally necessary existence force Microsoft to keep these components away from Windows' internals.

This is probably the first case I know of where software architectural design by legislation actually leads to improved software architecture!

Having a media player bundled with the OS is bad, but having it tightly coupled is bad and stupid.

I wish that the regulations would exist in America to begin with, and the American people would push more for it. Instead we have to adhere to whatever their laws are and try to play catch up with regulations. And when we threaten with lockout or gating, they threaten back to exit the market completely, because they don't have any ramifications in their own country, and are not super interested in the issues which the regulations try to address.

> where they take a huge cut of revenue

to be fair it was way worse in the 2000. Publisher’s cut, physical manufacturing and the brick and mortar store margin when added together was generally way more than 30%. Of course Apple giving you no choice but to use their appstore sucks and is something that should be fixed via regulation. However generally 30% seems like a good deal for some products (e.g. nobody is forcing game developers to publish on steam).

it wasn't worse when it came to computing. Hell even taking Microsoft as an example at 95% marketshare, at least Windows was a genuine platform people could build software on. Imagine Windows in 2005 working like an Iphone, the only way to install software being the Windows Store and MS taking 30% of literally every transaction conducted. Doom would have probably been kicked off the app store on day one as well because some concerned mom complained about it. Imagine Windows blocking your executable from running because you implemented your own payment system in your own piece of software.

As much as everyone loves to complain about MS, at least they sold us an operating system and we could pretty much do on top of it whatever we wanted.

And for some people, that is great. But for others, it simply lead to them getting their money and passwords stolen because they do not have the ability to discern malware from non malware.

> Imagine Windows in 2005 working like an Iphon

Windows wouldn’t have had 95% of the the market had they tried that. Also comparing a Desktop/PC OS with a phone is not completely fair, you can do all of that on macOS (assuming you’d don’t mind updating your app every few years since Apple couldn’t care less about backwards compatibility).

But I was mostly focusing on the 30% bit and I still don’t believe you could have reached a significant audience back in the 00s without having to give someone else a much bigger share than that.

Well yeah, physical sales cost a lot of money. App stores cost much less and Apple is blatantly rent seeking

I would argue it's even worse than that. Spoof your UA string or other behavior to achieve the best user experience, then find yourself blocked by 50K Cloudflare sites for spoofing:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/browser-integrity-check-b...

It's ridiculous, but we need a regulation stating that web sites designed for use by the public need to be accessible by the public. Of course I don't mean performing compatibility checks with the last 5 editions of three dozen different browsers, but simply avoiding situations that lead directly or indirectly to

if browser$ == a {render site}

if browser$ == b {render site}

if browser$ == c {render site}

if browser$ == d {render site}

else {echo "go away"}

Yes, IMHO it is the the old browser wars resurfaced and I don't really understand why. Arrogance cloaked by the veil of security? We've learned nothing. At worst I consider this a corollary to net neutrality...and we know where that currently stands. I would love for the EU to take notice, but they seem so obsessed with cookies. I briefly tried getting the EFF to take a stance, but don't think they bit. Maybe it's because everybody IS using Chrome?

if browser$ == a {render site A}

if browser$ == b {render site B}

if browser$ == c {render site C}

if browser$ == d {render site D}

else {echo "go away"}

is the nightmare situation we're circling the drain on approach

I'm going out on a limb, but I can't see a downside to making an "ADA for the web". Any for-profit company of a certain size or revenue has to have their content available in plaintext, including audio and videos being transcribed. Content should also be available without artificial restriction (like DRM), so you can use whatever software you like to process the text.

If everything is going digital, this will be necessary for visually impaired people to access critical information.

The only thing I can think of as a negative is that it raises the bar for new players to join.

You already will have a very tough time hosting your own materials without using a major player as an intermediary. Emails in particular are far more likely to be blacklisted simply because they're not originating from a known approved source regardless of your DKIM, SPF, or DMARC settings. Adding that every new website has to be fully accessible to the visually impaired when on top of that there isn't a single collectively approved standard to measure yourself against would be an enormous hassle and stop a lot of new people from even being able to take a chance with starting a new website.

However, that is remediable with an approved standard to meet and clear guidelines on the processes that must be followed to meet them, so that's not as big of a deal as it can be made out to be.

Also it's quite unfortunate that bots can easily use the same interfaces designed for screen readers, so just using a slightly-standardized REST API or plain-old HTML can expose you to bot attacks (ddos, spam, etc) once you reach a certain size.

> A browser that is intentionally deviating from how the rest of the common browsers works cannot expect to receive the same level as support

There should be no need to "support" it. The server should just send the data requested and be done with it. Whether or not it works is the user's problem.

What has the web turned into?

I know CloudFlare is an increasingly popular bogeyman but that's like blaming the Linux kernel for dropping your request to a website after its owner added a rule to block your IP...

CloudFlare does tell users of their services how their different levels of protection will impact their visitors. The site owners CHOOSE to add those barriers. CloudFlare didn't force them, they're perfectly happy being a mostly passive CDN if that's what the website owner wants.

There was more to the Microsoft antitrust case than just bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. But on that point, the funny thing is that they probably wouldn't have gotten in trouble if they had just built a web browser into the operating system from the beginning. When they first released IE they actually charged for it and sold it in shrink wrapped boxed at retail stores. Then to compete with Netscape Navigator they started giving it away for free before finally adding it to Windows. In retrospect it seems obvious that every consumer desktop OS should include a built in browser.

>In retrospect it seems obvious that every consumer desktop OS should include a built in browser.

It's amazing the insight 30 years of hindsight can provide. At the time of MS releasing IE, the internet was this thing unlike anything Gen Z can compare to what the internet is now. It was one step up from being something used only in CompSci labs at universities accessed via dial-up modems that were measured in bauds then kbps. Now we have Gbps, >50% of internet traffic is streaming videos (i'm probably shorting that %), everyone has a connected device in their pocket, and pretty much all commerce is done via the web. It did that in less than the 30 years since IE. What can you accurately predict will have the same "in retrospect" analysis applied to it in a similar manner?

* I'm rounding up to 30 years, since we're closer than not to it.

I noticed that on a 1994 copy of Microsoft Encarta it physically did not even mention HTTP in its article on "the internet".

Old encyclopedias are gold mines for seeing how society has changed. In 1950s encyclopedias, Christmas is listed as a pagan ritual. In modern entries, it is listed as a Christian holiday. I first became aware of this in the 90s, so in 40 years, a group rose to power enough to get encyclopedias to update as they saw fit. So, that in itself is information gleaned from an encyclopedia that wasn't actually written in the pages.

My issue as an EU citizen is how "lobby permeable" the regulations are. US tech is lobbying the EU too now.

Proposals start out strong and become PR operations after the watering down.

- Implement net neutrality but give data exemptions to mobile data operators if the traffic is from Facebook or Whatsapp.

- Implement ban on single use plastics but add so many exemptions that Nestle, Coca-Cola, Unilever, continue business as usual

- Implement Green New Deal but add a metric tonne of taxpayers money to support Hidrogen because Shell says so

- Start a Ban on ICEs but then push it back another 15 years because Exxon says so

Etc.

I don't disagree with you but an insufficient regulation is still better than none though.

Indeed but for all the plutocracy criticism we make of the US system we are pretty toothless at addressing conflict of interest and quid pro quos at EC level.

This isn't necessarily true.

Regulations that create exceptions for key big players entrench them further and their poor business practices against competitors that wish to usurp their market dominance. New entrants have to play by the rules, but established ones get preferential treatment.

That is a fair point, regulation often gets watered down as it undergoes revision after revision, though in fairness, most cases can not be solely blamed on US tech.

The stricter timetable for an ICE ban, to use something mentioned, was mainly changed due to pressure from European business interests, including in part Poland, Germany, Austria, etc. Essentially countries with a significant Auto industry that hasn't pivoted to EVs in the same way as e.g. France. I did not hear of Exxon lobbying to that extent in this case, but maybe I just missed that.

Basically, whilst US concerns definitely have their lobbying efforts in Brussels and Strasbourg, we need to be aware that European business is just as able and willing to engage in the same. The lack of interest in European politics compared to the national level tends to make this more frictionless and effective too, though that is a bit of a chicken/egg problem. People won't engage much with EU politics if the EU is seen as overly bureaucratic and lead by lobbyists, but there is little incentive to change without public interest.

Still feel that regulators can do tremendous good if motivated. The US has shown their abilities during Dieselgate, the EU in data protection. We, the public, need to tune in. Writing letters and calling does make a difference, as hard as that can be to believe.

> - Implement Green New Deal but add a metric tonne of taxpayers money to support Hidrogen because Shell says so

Hydrogen is pretty much the main hope for truly carbon neutral replacement of industry use of natural gas (huge in Germany for instance). Long range transportation could also probably use it - modern day batteries are simply impossible to use on e.g. medium and up range aircraft.

It's not simply a "because Shell said so thing". France is also investing massively in hydrogen, in multiple local companies Shell has nothing to do with.

> - Start a Ban on ICEs but then push it back another 15 years because Exxon says so

I'm fairly sure the ban on new ICEs is for so out in the future because it's simply impossible to replace all automobile manufacturing capacity much quicker; and if anyone is lobbying against it (do Exxon even do business in the EU??), it's existing EU-based manufacturers that have to retool their entire supply chains to produce EVs. Most are on their way, but EVs are still a small part of their portfolio and manufacturing capacity. Not to mention the drastic loss of employment that will come. It's just not something you can do with short notice.

> do Exxon even do business in the EU

Not sure if you are joking... Even if you don't have an Esso petrol pump within a few minutes' drive unlike the majority of Europeans, in their own words

"We are one of Europe’s largest oil and gas producers, a major refiner of crude oil for fuels and lubricants, and one of Europe’s leading petrochemical companies"

They have a pretty big shop on rotterdam https://www.exxonmobil.be/en-be/company/locations/netherland...

And in the bits where there's no Esso, you'll likely find them hiding as Mobil.

> Hydrogen is pretty much the main hope for truly carbon neutral replacement of industry use of natural gas (huge in Germany for instance). Long range transportation could also probably use it

In Switzerland the three big wholesalers got together and switched their whole truck fleet to hydrogen. They have the foresight to invest their money well.

using hydrogen for transportation is the same as saying you ate healthy because you ordered a salad at Mcdonald.

A salad in McDonalds is infinitely healthier than a large burger with fat sauce, lots of fries and a big sugary drink; in the same way that hydrogen, depending on how it's produced, could be infinitely better more eco-friendly than natural gas.

Yes, but there are also better restaurant you can go to, so why wasting money, time and your taste to eat a mcdonald salad?

You can produce hydrogen with surplus electricity generated from wind power. Can it get any greener? In Germany Greenpeace Energy creates Methane this way and adds it to natural gas. Hydrogen would be much better IMO. Feeding wind energy to the grid was stopped for a while because there was so much of it and nuclear reactors run when they do. There is a lot of potential to be tapped.

what you are missing is: 1. Keeping the hydrogen at high pressure requires a lot of energy. 2. Hydrogen produces H2O in gas form, which in itself it is still a greenhouse gas. 3. True, hydrogen can be produced by "green" technologies, but what is the energy lost throughout the procedure? It is quite a loss (about 20%).

Moreover, it is theoretically viable to produce all electric energy via renewables, albeit impracticle and 100 years away. Thus, I can't see how saying that """EVENTUALLY""" hydrogen might be renewable is good for the environment.

Hydrogen is good for a very niche part of our production system (and spoiler it is not car industry or house heating where better alternatives already exist[1][2]).

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/home-heating-with-hydrogen-is-ill-... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-021-00706-6

For aviation at least I doubt that hydrogen is going to be viable due to issues with fuel volume, storage, handling, and embrittlement. I expect batteries to be used for short flights and carbon-neutral synthetic kerosene to be used for long flights.

EV production is one thing, other is charging. I would love to invest in EV but in many EU countries there is basically no public charging infrastructure.

and if you live in apartment there is usually no way to charge at home.

It's a matter of competence. EU is a massive technocrat apparatus with countless incompetent unelected failed teachers, political scientists, and MBA's. How does anyone think they could possibly create sound legislation? It happens sometimes, but it's more of a mistake than a feature. It's because sometimes the lobbyists intentions align with ours, not because most of the MPs are working in our interests. I am certain that most of them do think that they are actually working for the betterment of our societies though.

Most societies at various times that built future proof infrastructure had a healthy amount of engineers at the higher levels. Germany, France, the US, China(whatever you make think of their society they are clearly at the forefront of hard tech and infrastructure investments right now), Taiwan(or R.O.C.). If you listen to older folks in Taiwan they will tell you that a lot of infrastructure including the heavy investment in semiconductors and other infrastructure early on was very much related to the amount of engineers they had in senior leadership.

> It's a matter of competence. EU is a massive technocrat apparatus with countless incompetent unelected failed teachers, political scientists, and MBA's.

With that level of "knowledge" about the EU and how it works and is composed, you should probably educate yourself a little bit on the matter before making such affirmative comments.

These companies are exploring bad business behavior all over the world. US is exporting wholesale anything that is detrimental for democracy. It's nuts

Isn’t this a word wide problem, though? Since we live in a capitalist society, if Big Money wants something, they use Big Money Lobby to get it. That’s true in Europe, US, China, India or Africa.

Lobbying is just legalised corruption

While EU regulations like the GDPR aim to limit big tech's power, they can unintentionally solidify it. These rules increase costs and bureaucracy, creating barriers for startups while major corporations absorb these burdens easily. The GDPR also legalises data trade, as users now routinely consent without understanding implications. This essentially gives companies the right to repackage and sell data, where before GDPR it was a gray area. Also, penalties for violations, although significant, may merely be seen as a cost of doing business for these giants. So, we must scrutinise whether these regulations genuinely promote competition or inadvertently strengthen the monopolies they're designed to control.

As the owner and operator of small (<25 employees each) companies in the EU directly affected by the GDPR, I disagree with you.

Implementing it has required work but mostly due to the need to change habits, it didn't add any real burden in day to day life, it promoted a much healthier and safer environnement for our customers, it allowed us to push something we believe in without disadvantaging us compared to our competitors, and it gave us a direct marketing advantage in that customers trust us much more than "web giants" to keep our words about this in the experience I have.

YMMV but the GDPR has been a massive gain on every front for me, both as a user, as a citizen and as a small business owner and operator.

>users now routinely consent

This is a weakness of the regulation, not an issue with the concept of regulation.

There should be a much clearer ban on applying these dark patterns to trick people into consenting.

It's arguably a problem with the enforcement not keeping up. Many of these practices are in pretty clear violation of the GDPR.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but time and time again these practices have been deemed illegal, in no small part due to the legal hijinx of Max Schrems.

Consider this alternative perspective: large corporations that profit from user data might have found themselves in a tricky position, facing potential lawsuits and lacking a clear framework to legitimise their data collection practices.

Perhaps GDPR came into existence partly as a solution to this issue. One could argue that its design started from a premise to make data collection and trade more manageable for big corporations, but then was reverse-engineered to present it as a policy protecting people's privacy. This way, the EU could maintain its image as a protector of citizens' rights, while simultaneously assuaging public concerns over data security. This could result in individuals being more willing to consent to data collection.

A significant contributing factor to this could be the EU's 'Cookie Law', which may have conditioned users to automatically agree to pop-ups without thoroughly understanding what they're consenting to.

While this perspective may sound cynical, it's worth considering that regulatory decisions can have complex motivations and implications, often beyond the most apparent intent to do good.

> lacking a clear framework to legitimise their data collection practices

Why should that be a goal of the legislation at all? The design of the GDPR makes their business model illegal, in the same way that the design of the EPA makes chemical dumping illegal. Providing a path to legitimize their data collection would be contrary to the goal of stopping their data collection.

And yet muricans are suing each other and companies over every small thing possible. Their government just milk them for money, aka healthcare.

And somebody doesn't like EU regulating tech companies on their own soil? Clowns...

And what exactly is the monopoly here, AI chatbots, or Edge as a browser used to access them?

I think monopoly is not the right term, but I don't know the correct one.

They control a huge share of one market, and they use it to force their way into another in an unfair way (Microsoft: windows to push edge and keep making it default and making it harder and harder and scarier to switch, and now using edge to push their own web services; Google: gmail & co to push chrome, ...).

One would argue "if it's not a monopoly is it not legal ?" but that's sort of my point, if it's illegal it should be punished, if it's currently legal it should be regulated.

We cannot keep treating browsers like a regular piece of software when they're becoming more and more like an utility. I sort of feel the same way toward OSes, but browsers are even more important.

"Free will and abuse of power"

I think the term here is centralization or lack of diversity

They only have 5.31% of browser market share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Which mean there is still time to stop their abuse in Windows, unlike last time with internet explorer when we reacted too late.

Changing browsers went from a simple and smooth experience in 7/8, to one with roadblocks and warning in 10, to one that's absurdely abusive in 11, all to push Edge forward.

what you’re advocating would only increase chrome’s dominance to 95%+.

there artificial limitations imposed by Apple and MS are the only things that are keeping the browser market marginally competitive.

Yes and no. I'm this thread's OP and like I said in the main post I believe they should go against google/chrome too to impose some rules.

> some rules

like what? and why do you think they could help? They’d have to somehow explicitly target Chrome to give it’s competitors a chance.

IE did not go to down because of some EU regulations or the bundling ban because Mozilla and Google simply released better browser.

Only realistic outcome from this would be Google/Chrome becoming even more dominant since there would be no reason for anyone to use any other browser.

In this case Microsoft is using Bing Chat to promote Edge use, but Bing Chat doesn't have anything close to a dominant position so it's hard for me to see an argument that this isn't allowed under US anti-trust (or that it should be prohibited).

There are forms of anti-competitive practices which don't involve abusing an absolute monopoly.

Yep. Back in the day, Outlook Web Access (OWA) in Exchange used to check to see if you were on IE and block if you were on any chrome browser, and then (mostly) work fine if you just spoofed user agent, leading to things like owa-user-agent. Same story, different day.

Google and Apple exert unbelievable levels of control over the entire Internet simply with their two app stores, even forcing various social media to censor legal speech.

You assume malicious intent. At work, developers are exclusively given Macs as corporate laptops, and all our internal developer tools, guidelines, and acceptance tests run on Chrome.

The side effect of this is that stuff is broken in Firefox all the time. And if you're using Firefox on anything other than a Mac, good luck getting anyone here to fix your issue.

Wouldn't that be an inefficiency of your organization?

i.e. not following defined standards and verifying interoperability?

Standards are made for a reason, I expect professionals to be informed of them and put effort into adhering to them.

Remind me where you work so I can avoid whatever it is your company makes.

Doesn't matter. I've worked at a lot of "top 100" Internet properties over the years, many of which you probably use at least once a month. You would be surprised how many companies don't test their product on anything other than Macs and Chrome.

>walled garden

this is marketing jargon. Say 'curated' or 'controlled'. Heck pick any word that doesnt have roses and delicious fruits involved.

I actually can see the MS perspective of not allowing applications to directly modify the default application for a given purpose. If apps can never do it, it removes some amount of vulnerability from OS. Applying fixes to block applications that work around the OS’s safety features seems valid to me. In this case, I don’t think I could reasonably claim this was MS’s concern/intent in breaking Chrome’s default app button, I’m only saying that I can imagine legitimate reasons to do purposefully do that.

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