Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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).

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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