Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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Chrome's engine is open source, and there is literally nothing stopping someone from installing Brave, Firefox or Opera. They all render the same pages and are all standards compliant enough.

Did Google give Chrome a boost? Yes. Was that a good thing? Also yes. Chrome was the better browser at the time they did that - still arguably is. But that doesn't mean monopolies are involved. Apple gives privileged advertising to the iPhone, iPod and iPad on their website and they aren't a monopoly in any sense.

Google is arguably less of a monopoly in pushing Chrome because they sell advertising to other people. I'm sure Samsung would pay an absurd amount of money to get an ad on apple.com with any URL path. In theory Google could be a monopoly and put a chrome ad on google.com but the fact is that they aren't a monopoly and pushing chrome did good for the world, not harm. They're just providing exceptional products and people trust the brand [0].

[0] Trusting brands in software is silly.

Nothing that you said addressed what the person above you wrote.

roenxi: "Google doesn't have a monopoly. [argument]"

AlphaSite: "Google has a monopoly and used it to build a second monopoly [argument]"

There isn't much there to address. But I did directly address it.

(1) He claimed that Google had a monopoly, I ignored that because I'd addressed that in my original comment.

(2) He claimed that Chrome had a monopoly. I provided an argument that it wasn't (it is really easy not to use Chrome. You give up literally nothing switching to Brave for example).

(3) He claimed that Googe used monopoly tactics to build Chrome's market share. I provided a counterexample that the tactics used aren't monopoly tactics because other companies do more or less the same thing. Advertising your own products on your own site isn't monopoly behaviour. And even if Google was a monopoly and that is monopoly behavior - both of which I don't think are true - that isn't exactly an abuse of monopoly power, it is pretty tame.

It'd be helpful for me if you pointed out why you don't think that is addressing the comment. It seemed pretty direct to me.

Why wasn't it OK for MS to give Explorer a boost?

* Internet Explorer came bundled with the OS and therefore had a leg up on the competition. They made it impossible to remove that browser, so people targeting Windows would likely also automatically target IE in the knowledge that it would be available on the system.

* Microsoft controlled the Windows API and appeared to be sabotaging attempts to build cross-platform applications. And they seemed to think it was substantial interference. Take this for example:

"Microsoft's videotape showed the process as being quick and easy, resulting in the Netscape icon appearing on the user's desktop. The government produced its own videotape of the same process, revealing that Microsoft's videotape had conveniently removed a long and complex part of the procedure and that the Netscape icon was not placed on the desktop, requiring a user to search for it. Brad Chase, a Microsoft vice president, verified the government's tape and conceded that Microsoft's own tape was falsified." [0]

If MS had restricted itself to a banner on their website saying "Download and Install IE!" they'd have been fine; the issue was that they were creating an environment to destroy Netscape for no good technical reason, they just wanted to destroy Netscape. And that was part of a pattern of behaviour where they were employing consistent tactics against anyone trying to create cross-platform software.

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

> Internet Explorer came bundled with the OS and therefore had a leg up on the competition.

Isn’t Google doing the same by making their search engine default on Chrome, Android and even by paying Apple billions to make the default on Safari?

I did say about 3 comments up that I could see them being a monopoly maybe in the Android ecosystem. I don't want anything to do with Android phones because I don't like Google, so I don't understand what is happening in that world.

Then IMO they would be a monopoly on iOS in a similar way. You change the default search engine on Android too, most people don’t know how/don’t care/etc.

Now I’m not sure that something you could actually define as a monopoly but they do control almost the entire search market on mobile because they directly control Android and pay Apple huge amounts of money to achieve the same on Safari.

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