Google's Chrome antitrust paradox | Hacker News Reader

Google's Chrome antitrust paradox

papers.ssrn.com

101 pointswouterjanl147 comments

One of the authors of this paper works at Duck Duck Go. This was conspicuously not mentioned in the header information.

I wonder what other conflict of interest other authors have.

Anastasia Shuba, to save others the hassle of checking. https://nshuba.github.io/

I agree that it probably should be mentioned, but not enough to make me really doubt the rest of their paper.

Idk, I've recently gotten a popup shilling their version of chromium. I wouldn't be surprised if these are both a part of some PR campaign to push it.

Like parent said, the motivations might not be 100% pure, but I doubt it invalidates the whole paper.

When people here linked to the “pwease implement rcs so we can get adoption on our proprietary encryption extensions and become iMessage 2.0 but with google” page don’t you think maybe google might have had a PR campaign going on too?

Kinda odd this uniquely gets pointed out when it’s someone pushing back slightly on google, everyone is first in line to declare the player with 40% global market share anticompetitive and doesn’t even make a peep about google, even shouts down the attempts to bring the issue forward…

…tell me again why this isn’t just lawfare from android fanboys trying to get their choice of OS legislated?

People dumped on me when I said that knocking out safari would rapidly lead to a browser monoculture and anticompetitive usage of that from google. The excuse was “if that happens we’ll regulate that too”. Unsurprisingly, kinda seems like people don’t want that to actually happen now that it’s becoming an issue - you’re pushing back on it. See also: the "maybe a chrome monopoly is really better for consumers" downthread, gross.

Now, why is that, I wonder??? Maybe because it was just all an attempt to legislate a solution to google v apple after all?

Again: google and Tim Sweeney and netflix and facebook and Sony don’t care about you at all, and their goals don’t align with yours. The end state here isn’t user freedom, it’s iMessage with google banners instead. The hope was that you could hitch a ride on google’s PR effort until it was convenient and then discard them/override their wishes, instead it's the other way around.

This has always been a choice/anti-choice issue: for some people it's not enough that they personally can choose android, the option for walled-gardens needs to be removed entirely for everyone else too. And now you're seeing things move into the next phase, as they are discarded and google starts to flex the monopoly power that you lobbied to give them.

When competitors point out the flaws and scandals in each other they're often correct.

By that same logic, when competitors point out the superiority of their own product, are they also often correct?

Maybe we should just think critically about what we read, especially when there's a conflict of interest involved.

> when competitors point out the superiority of their own product, are they also often correct?

I would say they are in fact usually correct about the specific point they're making. However, it's also common for them to be drawing attention to the dimensions on which their product is better, which may not be the same as the dimensions that matter most to customers. They may be reporting selective truths and making correct-but-mostly-irrelevant points. This also goes for criticizing competitors, of course.

were you expecting a bunch of people working at google to write this?

Just because someone works at a competitor doesn't invalidate their arguments.

I would imagine they can see these issues more first hand.

The actual journal that this was submitted to is Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Vol. 27. The linked article is a pre-print. Hardly surprising that the pre-print website did not contact every author of every article for their affiliation.

The obligation to disclose potential conflicts (which is what this is, rather than merely 'affiliation') is on the researcher not the publisher or transmitter.

The website talks only about affiliation.

"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything. As such, its not worth arguing about. So your personal view of what is a potential conflict isn't something we can get into here. But what would be interesting is if you actually had evidence of bias in the article. That is definitely something we can discuss - regardless of who said it.

"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything.

There are common practices for that sort of thing and 'works for a competitor' falls well within them. The disclosure is so that readers can make their own assessment about whether the possible conflict has introduced actual bias. There really isn't anything complicated to discuss here.

>The disclosure is so that readers can make their own assessment about whether the possible conflict has introduced actual bias.

You are the reader here. Do you have any evidence of bias?

I'm saying the omission of the disclosure of an obvious conflict is a bad lapse. It's bad whether it results in bias or not and independent of what I think. The OG commenter was right to point it out and you're not right to suggest it only counts if there is evidence of bias.

For any journal, compliance is not the goal, the goal is the have high quality, impactful papers. If you care about compliance more than the paper, then sure, so be it, but its not a conversation I'm particularly interested in.

This isn't about 'compliance'. It's fine if you didn't know about the practice and its purpose but that's neither my fault nor a reason to misrepresent what wrote.

I don't agree with your opinion. Its no big deal, we can all happily co-exist! As a reader, you seem to care more about compliance than discussing the contents/quality of the paper. That tells me everything I need to know.

The affiliation not provided to SSRN looks ominous, but is just a standard form because she does not have ssrn profile. The other co-authors do have a profile. University academics are usually much better networked in Elseviers registers as both their institutions and themselves rely on it for carreer/evaluation purposes.

It depends on how the affiliation is stated in the next volume of VjET, if this is problematic or not.

Ironically deceptive of her.

NB. Although the paper appears in "Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law", none of the authors are lawyers.

SSRN is pathetic as a source for papers, IMHO. Quality control is nonexistent. Even something simple like the URL for Shaoor Munir's website is incorrect. The "a href" is http://https//. This is a PhD candidate in Computer Science.

In the paper itself,1 Shuba is listed as "independent researcher". Her website states "independent researcher by night". It would not make sense to list DuckDuckGo as the affiliated organisation as she is doing the work on her own time. Arguably her website should be listed though, so readers can discover that she works there during the day.

Here is an example of SSRN's quality control:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4576722

The SSRN paper submission instructions appear to make it mandatory to submit an affiliation. The reality is that we could list our dogs as a co-authors and SSRN would accept the paper.

SSRN is just plain annoying. The website tries to force people into enabling Javascript just to download a PDF. That is totally unnecessary. Look at arxiv.org.

1. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/files/jetlaw-chrome-antit... (No Javascript needed)

The pre-print now includes this information, and also that this work was carried out independently.

I cannot help but be reminded of the fact that DuckDuckGo also conspicuously does not mention that their founder has previously created a personal information gathering service and sold it, along with all of the personal information.

Twice is a coincidence; anyone have a third example?

Having just read the paper, I find their case for separating out Chrome pretty weak. A lot of their points have nothing to do with Chrome being part of Google really.

The failure of the (really weak) DNT standard had nothing to do with Chrome. While I get that Google is an advertiser, Chrome did implement DNT and wasn't even as big of a player back then.

Then they talk about Widevine DRM which, say what you want about DRMs, is something media platforms actively asked for due to their licensing. But in anycase, I don't see how this has anything to do with the fact that Google owns Chrome?

They also talk a lot about self-preferencing, meaning putting pop-ups to install Chrome on a bunch of Google properties (most notably on search). While I agree that this behavior should be condemned and is anti-trust related, it's mostly about Google leveraging their dominant position in search to gain an edge in the browser space, not the other way around... Barring Google from doing this is what needs to happen, not separating Chrome in a different company.

They talk a lot about how Chrome is strategically important for Google, which it is. Chrome is a pure strategy play from Google. But that doesn't mean the industry is suffering because of it (in fact I'd argue Chrome helped the industry tremendously). Until Google abuses their position with Chrome, which the authors haven't made a good case for, I don't see why Chrome should be the target they make it to be.

The FLoC (related to DNT) is absolutely Google leveraging their market position with Chrome to improve their advertising

This is an interesting point. Could you elaborate please?

Google creates and implements its own privacy solution in its browser. Once released, other advertisers are behind and no longer have access to their tracking -> Google dominates the market because it delivers better ROI for advertisers because it knows how to track on Chrome because it built the privacy solution.

> while giving its own ad teams inside details & time to adapt to the new paradigm

I've worked in ad tech my entire career and many years competing against Google ad solutions. To my knowledge, Google strictly separates Chrome privacy efforts from Google Ads, and these work streams are part of the Consumer Markets Authority oversight. https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-googles-priv...

I highlight these nuances for readers who are not closely tracking ads and privacy efforts. It is easy to make claims like "giving its own ads teams inside details" without proof, but in ad tech we know Chrome is working with multiple testing companies. Some of us happen to work in ads, but we also believe in greater consumer privacy and are eager for an improved ads paradigm.

i think it's worth noting that the 'CMA oversight' is the result of an investigation being initiated against Google for these exact anti-competitive practices and that Google has been forced to change their process by the CMA as a result of that investigation.

I don't think you work for Google or are a sock, but it is clear from your comment history that you are extremely supportive of Google and a considerable proportion of your comments on HN writ large are just defending Google across multiple different threads/issues.

My comment history probably makes it clear where I work (maybe years back) and it is not Google. I see my recent comments are reactively supporting specific Google products. I don’t have a strong stance for them at entity level and if anything I ding them for killing some of my favorite web tools. I earnestly believe that ad tech is fighting to maintain user level tracking with limited transparency, look at the efforts by LiveRamp and The Trade Desk. Those are overt efforts to use emails as currency where consumers would have limited control for relevant ads. I am surprised Google truly would eliminate 3p cookies in chrome and mobile IDs on android when both platforms benefited in ads revenue post Apple ATT and ITP. I support the privacy sandbox principles as an ad tech person and a regular consumer. I caveat that if new information comes to light regarding their intentions then I would change my mind.

I was fairly pro Apple until they half attempted to provide ads solutions in the wake of App tracking transparency and I realized their gain was on App Store ads revenue. Amazon wishes they had a browser but their stores and hardware provide sufficient ads signals. Meta has plenty of ads scandals over the years. It’s a messy landscape but only a few organizations are developing ad tech and consumer privacy solutions in the open.

The Topics API doesn't seem to have any abuse opportunity since it's entirely enforced by the browser itself. There's nothing the JavaScript API can do that could give Google an advantage here given as far as I know there's only a single function that can be called in the first place.

I think more research would need to be conducted to see whether this change is actually anti-competitive or not.

Although I understand the sentiment of the Google’s ability to create better ad products in this area, I’m very consumer focused on the topic of privacy, and I want further restrictions and even incredible fines on ad companies that are focused on eliminating personal privacy rights.

That being said, I personally think that the Chrome team might be choosing solutions that better suits other Google products instead of ease of implementation and security/privacy in mind.

And it flopped. I don't think its replacement, "Topics" is much more likely to succeed either. That being said I think it's important to note that those are at least designed to work for the entire advertising industry, not just Google.

> And it flopped.

Their opt out header was adopted faster than "do not track". Nobody wanted anything to do with it.

> are at least designed to work for the entire advertising industry, not just Google.

It is an API where the entire data flow is controlled by Google and was meant as replacement for one that Google had no control over. Meanwhile Chrome has always shared additional data with a hardcoded list of Google services (officially for debbuging and A/B testing ) and provides direct integration with Google accounts and related tracking. FLoC and Topics exist for the advertising industry the same way an eviction notice exists for its recipient.

> was meant as replacement for one that Google had no control over

That sounds like pure speculation. From what I've actually heard, it was meant to enable targeted advertising without exposing PII, because Google has a vested interest in both protecting user privacy and selling ads (because they suffer from eroding user trust).

FLoC is part of Google's Privacy Sandbox which is a multi-solution effort to improve consumer privacy on Chrome similar to Safari's ITP. I am curious how you perceive Safari's 1P and 3P cookie changes? And how would you respond to Safari's changes as a competing browser? Would you leave 3P cookies and avoid any privacy efforts?

I consider the Privacy Sandbox a dark pattern

A feature that records details of the types sites someone visitors and then shares them with any other site that asks isn’t really a privacy feature

Can you support your main claim? Privacy Sandbox has settings for publishers, SSPs, DSPs, and consumers to opt in/out of the solutions. It is not perfect. I would want zero tracking and zero advertising in an ideal world. Today, sandbox is in 1% of all browsers. Someone with Sandbox experience can correct me if I am wrong.

I am curious. How do you view 3P cookies from a consumer perspective? My mom would consider those a dark pattern without transparency or control for ads or general tracking. What about sharing your phone number with any entity? How do you feel about Apple's tracking transparency where it removes data from app developers but Apple retains data for itself or Apple's private click measurement?

Every company maintains data about your use on their platform. That’s expected. I don’t expect to go to Sears and shop for a refrigerator and see Sears ads on other pages advertising products I looked at specifically

The dark pattern is claiming that something that shares your information is a privacy feature in order to trick people into turning it on. An actual privacy sandbox (like uBlock origin) just blocks things like malware scripts and tracking pixels with no concession to the people who are trying to track you. An actual privacy sandbox does not have features for publishers, SSPs, or DSPs. It--as part of the user's agent--has features for the user.

Users can opt out of the Privacy Sandbox features if they know they are there and they understand the options, IMV the settings for this are unclear at best almost to the point of being misleading.

We all know the power of defaults which is why users have to opt-out of participating in Topics rather than opting in.

The browser is supposed to be the users agent but for most people the Topics API isn’t acting in their interests. I suspect if you asked people whether they we happy for any site that asked to know the sorts of things they browsed the web for they’d say no.

As for 3rd-party cookies they should have been killed off long ago, the reason the death is delayed is because Google is primary an AdTech company and other adtech companies persuaded the UK competition authorities that Chrome killing them off without a suitable replacement would be anti-competitive hence misnamed ‘Privacy Sandbox APIs’

Apple has its own set of issues e.g. why can’t content blockers block in app ads but Apple’s issues are a separate conversation

Great feedback for the authors.

Most people confuse the success of a company and their monopolistic behavior with their competency on what they do.

Regardless, the internet might benefit from Chrome being an independent company of its own.

> Regardless, the internet might benefit from Chrome being an independent company of its own.

I'd love to hear why you think that is. It feels to me that the web benefits and has benefitted a ton from Google's investment in Chrome and newer standards. Chrome itself doesn't make any money and so I fear to me that splitting it out would leave it scrambling for a revenue source and that there would be far less investment in it then there currently is.

It feels like keeping the threat of antitrust action on Chrome is a more effective way of keeping them in line. I don't see much abuse from their dominant position (in the browser space, search is another question) so far, but making it clear that regulators are watching them closely is IMO the best way to ensure interests align.

Here’s how I see it.

The web should rely on open standards to cultivate innovation and improvement. Having a separate entity would save the project from constant internal battles with other Google products and outside accusations of favoritism. My hope that being an independent entity, browser projects can push for further enhancements. For example, I’m very confused and frustrated about the fact that there is no standard to say “do not track me” that prevents those ugly popups. I already made my decision about ads, why should I repeat it for every website while the browser can enforce it. Just like the location preferences etc.

I do acknowledge however that like any other open source project, the funding would be a great issue.

> Then they talk about Widevine DRM [...] I don't see how this has anything to do with the fact that Google owns Chrome?

1. Google brought DRM to the web. Before Widevine, DRMed video and audio had to rely on stuff like Adobe Flash (which was on its way out anyway). Google's large market share means they got to write the "standard" and provide the only implementation.

2. Safari can't play Spotify any more. Beers all round at the Google offices.

Do you think Apple, the company that made iTunes, can't make DRM that's acceptable to the music industry?

I’m assuming you never read Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music”

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

Short version:

The music industry wanted Apple to license FairPlay. SJ said no. But Apple will start selling interoperable DRM free music if the industry allows it.

One of the major labels and independents took them up on the offer and Apple did it. The other three labels wanted among other things - a royalty from each iPod sold and for Apple to basically post a bond against piracy.

Apple refused and it took until early 2009 for the rest of the labels to come on board.

Jobs died a long time ago.

Apple do license Fairplay sometimes nowadays (especially the weaker music version), and all major music services absolutely support it.

This is absolutely completely wrong. No music service supports FairPlay aside from Apple Music. Why would they?

Music you buy from all services is DRM free and music you stream is only in the apps and have no need to support FairPlay. None of the music subscription services allow you to download music and use outside of the app.

Even the ability to play movies bought in one store and being available in another store as a purchased item is supported via MoviesAnywhere integration and not FairPlay.

> This is absolutely completely wrong. No music service supports FairPlay aside from Apple Music. Why would they?

Because they want to support Safari and Homepods generally.

> Music you buy from all services is DRM free and music you stream is only in the apps and have no need to support FairPlay

Every significant music subscription service has web based playback, which will use a DRM system to protect those streams, and will use a multi-DRM system to support multiple browsers. Safari doesn't support Widevine, so if the service works in Safari that means the service also serves FairPlay Streaming licenses.

> Even the ability to play movies bought in one store and being available in another store as a purchased item is supported via MoviesAnywhere integration and not FairPlay.

Very difficult to see what this has to do with the topic at hand, but Fairplay is used to stream those titles to devices that support it. MoviesAnywhere is back end, not distribution. Fairplay has been ported to non-Apple devices too, at least the lower levels.

> 2. Safari can't play Spotify any more.

That is not what Spotify says: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/supported-devices-for...

What are you going on about? Safari supports Apple DRM called FairPlay which "they brought to the web" like Google did.

Just to focus a bit on DRM/Widevine: the fact that Google decides who can use Widevine absolutely helps them to weaken competing platforms / OSes.

If you are an upcoming OS and want to get well known apps like Netflix and Spotify, you need to get Widevine support from Google. I'll let you imagine how that can go, from actual technical issues to bullshit reasons to slow down progress.

If we accept the idea that DRM is useful, at least the DRM vendors should be independent from OS vendors.

That is an interesting and somewhat fair point. I guess the argument here is that because of Google's dominant share in Chrome with Widevine for DRM, they can harm competing platforms by blocking access to that tech. There might be something to that argument. I'm having a hard time steel-manning it, but I can see some points to be made through it after all.

And before Chrome we (in streaming industry) had to negotiate and wait for the mercy of every single OS, set-top-box and mobile vendor specially and then cross negotiate with every single content provider (since they had to approve that DRM implementation for the platform is good enough for them).

It's indescribeable how better the current situation is for the state of the web and users themselves. There's a reason even Mozilla uses Widevine.

> Just to focus a bit on DRM/Widevine: the fact that Google decides who can use Widevine absolutely helps them to weaken competing platforms / OSes.

There are multiple other widely used DRM systems. PlayReady is very licensable (it's just not free), and used by many sites. Fairplay is also widely supported. Adobe would probably still sell someone Primetime if they could find someone to pay for it. Until very recently some of the largest pay TV operators in the world (Sky et al) didn't support Widevine and required installation of third party helper software from a different DRM provider.

Worth noting whenever you read about antitrust: is the writing coming from Europe or the US.

European law grounds antitrust in whether the marketplace is harmed. In that context, something could be an antitrust violation if it's hard to compete with, even if that circumstance is better for users.

US antitrust is grounded in consumer harm. One could, hypothetically, have an ecosystem where there is one browser and it's not an antitrust situation because the benefits to consumers outweigh drawbacks to competitors (for example, if users perhaps benefit more from an ecosystem with fewer browsers than more browsers, because the odds of any given website working on their browser are higher if web devs don't have to test against dozens of bespoke partially-compliant implementations). Microsoft ran afoul of antitrust because of the consumer harm demonstrated in bundling its browser (which, notably, was a bit of a bug-ridden mess at the time) into its OS (which made the whole experience worse). But nowadays? Everyone has bundled a browser into their OS.

(None of this is to say that the US or European model is better, just that it's always important to code-switch when comprehending arguments regarding antitrust coming from the two regions).

True, though don’t forget that the US consumer welfare standard dates only to the 70s, is rooted in judicial interpretation rather than explicit statutory wording, and has been challenged in recent years. In fact this is brought up in section 2.2.2 of the paper.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_welfare_standard

I've done front-end web development on-and-off for about 20 years.

One thing I've observed in the past few years is that Chromium (Open-source base of Chrome,) has come to dominate the browser platform: HTML has turned into a boondoggle where everyone's pet use case is integrated into the browser; and curiously, everything works first on Chromium. This makes it prohibitively difficult for competing browsers, (Mozilla, Safari,) to keep up with the evolving web standard.

As a developer, it "smells" like the Windows monopoly all over again; except this time, because Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.

> except this time, because Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.

Wouldn't this be actual market forces at work then, since it's open source? Anyone can use it (as the examples you mentioned).

It doesn't meet the monopoly standards since it's not in the exclusive possession/control of Google. It was extremely smart to make it open source, and very similarly so with AOSP.

No, because they just repackage the engine. The driving force of the core development is still Google and their whims.

I think the real market failure is that you can't not do what Chrome does. Having Chromium doesn't mean much if when you diverge from Chrome sites will break. Having a standard rings hollow when a standard generally means having two browsers implement a feature and Firefox gets their money from Google. And to developers a standard means "works on Chrome $current - 1."

It's hard to say that any of this can be pinned on Google like they're somehow to blame but at the same time we've nonetheless found ourselves in a market where users and developers have very little choice and this currently benefits Google quite a bit.

Good engineering discipline I think would ask major browsers to break themselves purposefully by randomly disabling any features that are browser specific or outside of some "core" standard saying you must only use these opportunistically but that's not a law you can write.

Google didn’t have to promote their browser to hell to ensure everyone was using it constantly. Tying is what got us here.

Open Gmail? Why not use Chrome?

Google chat? Tried Chrome?

Search Google? It’s better with Chrome!

Android phone within 1 mile of you? Use Chrome!

Breathing oxygen? Well…

This seems like using one monopoly (search) to create another (browser). Isn’t that exactly what anti-trust laws forbid? Let’s not forget not bothering very hard to make sure their stuff like Google Docs that you may be required to use at work work with other browsers. “Just use Chrome” they say.

You’re seriously blaming company for trying to make their product popular. Even if we assume that current Chrome state violates the anti-trust legislation, that’s still a pretty silly moral condemnation.

The law literally makes it illegal. No matter what you think. It’s in the tiny text of the law.

MS got hit. Apple is going to. Google should be too, but I doubt it will happen.

(I’d argue giving away Android is dumping and requiring Play is bundling, but that’s another rant)

This is some bizarre rewriting of history. We switched to Chrome because it was stupidly faster than competition and more responsive.

It's nasty to now rewrite history claiming it's some kind of conspiracy to make a browser that ran way better than IE and Mozilla one.

I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Yes it was way better than IE. And FF of the time.

The definition of anti-competitive behavior doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter if 100% of people switched because it’s better and their friends told them and not a single one did it because of the ads. The ads were still illegal.

I don't think it's not a practical solution but one way to "solve" this is by having folks from mozilla/apple etc sitting on the chromium board where they make decisions.

> Wouldn't this be actual market forces at work then, since it's open source?

The point of open standards is that anyone can implement them in a clean room, from scratch.

At this point, HTML is slowly drifting away from an open standard, to a standard where only one single implementation is practical.

> Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.

I agree. In the Internet Explorer days, there were also browsers that were custom UI built on top of IE Trident. The Chromium-based browsers of today actually offer little innovations beyond what browsers building on top of Trident have accomplished in the IE days.

> This makes it prohibitively difficult for competing browsers, to keep up with the evolving web standard.

Maybe Apple with their 2 trillion dollar market cap should make their browser not suck then?

I'm sure they can fund it.

It's not really in their interests: Apple pushes developers towards developing native applications in Swift that target their platforms.

In contrast, Microsoft has a very healthy web development platform. Edge allows debugging in-browser Javascript and C# (via WASM) in Visual Studio.

I understand that it isn't in Apples interest to make a good browser.

So, in other words, complaints about "Google's broeser is too good, it is unfair how fast they are moving!" Therefore ring hollow.

Yes, Apple could compete if they wanted to. There is no anti competitive pressure stopping them.

But Apple simply chooses not to make a good browser, even though they could.

> So, in other words, complaints about "Google's broeser is too good, it is unfair how fast they are moving!" Therefore ring hollow.

It's an interesting concept that a company could gain a dominant position in a market involving an open standard, then lead innovations in a way that would be difficult for other companies to challenge or follow.

It's not embrace, extend, extinguish because the changes are not proprietary. Chrome is simply able to out invest everyone else with their cash from their ad business. I am not a legal expert, so I don't know if this type of cross-market subsidization is legal.

> Chrome is simply able to out invest everyone else

Go back and read the posts even you just wrote.

We already established that yes Apple could compete if they wanted.

They have a 2 trillion dollar market cap.

My point was that Google is taking cash from their ad business to support their Chrome product to protect their ad business.

I was thinking out loud if a case could be made against Google, similar to the EEE logic.

Google is taking cash from it’s ad business to be anti-competitive in other ways too… for example analytics, tag management etc.

Safari doesn’t suck… it’s perfectly usable for most of my useage (across multiple platforms)

Chrome has some APIs that are more useful e.g. Serial, WebUSB etc. and it’s debugging tools are better plus it’s possible to extract and reprocess the devtools data to build other tools on top

One the bright side, baseline web API's are good enough that most websites and most web developers can ignore new API's entirely. That wasn't true in the old days. You had to be aware of browser differences due to crippling bugs.

It seems like that also means competing browsers should work on most websites? How bad is it, really? Some cutting-edge demos and games don't work?

I'm under the impression that a lot of idiosyncratic website bugs are due to browser extensions that somehow mess with web pages.

The sticking points for me are just the integration of Google services into Chrome itself.

I should be able to log into a website (say Google Docs) and have the browser be blissfully unaware of the semantics of being "logged in". It should do all the cookies and local storage necessary for this, but under no circumstances should this be part of the browser UI itself.

The side panel for "google search results" is worse in some ways, better in some. It's an optional feature, so that's better. But it does not allow you to disable the functionality. If people love it, sure, I don't mind Chrome adding support, but I should not have to have a non-removable "side panel" button in the main browser chrome.

The rest of the complaints here don't really bother me. Third-party cookie blocking by default would be great, but you can enable it now and I've been doing that for ages anyway, even though it sometimes breaks things.

US v Google antitrust trial is scheduled for September 9: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023...

(in case this article made you wonder what is happening with it)

I don't like Google being able to unilaterally dictate major internet standards in opposition of just about every non-Google group.

The manifest v3 stuff might be a sign of things to come if someone doesn't slap down Google's near-monopoly. Google has every reason to make ad-blocking difficult and ineffective.

Not just blocking but most of the Web<insert some device technology here> "standards" Google champions have little actual utility outside of better fingerprinting. Everything attached to the computer the browser can enumerate will be used to fingerprint individuals no matter their cookie settings or tab sandboxing.

The manifest v3 stuff was first brought onto the web via Safari and the HN defenders seemed happy about that. Why the double standard now with Google and blaming Google like they're the first?

Why reframe the topic to something irrelevant? What the standard started out as is not what it ended as.

The final result is the only thing that matters.

What's not relevant about Google not being the one that created that kind of extension standard? "slapping down their near monopoly" is nonsense when the other browsers also follow the same extension approach.

Because the problem is what Google did to the standard in opposition to just about every non-Google group, not that there was a standard called "manifest v3" at all.

The title is a nod to https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

Which was written by Lina Khan, (now) the current chair of the FTC. Very pointed.

There is still the non hexavalent [0] version [1], although it is strewn with blobs [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexavalent_chromium

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob

Direct link to PDF:

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/files/jetlaw-chrome-antit...

Got me suspicious, why google advertises chrome even heavily with TV ads. At least in Germany.

Can’t actually view the paper without making an account apparently, does anyone have a link?

With NoScript blocking everything, I hit "Download This Paper" and it downloaded -- no account needed.

The page asking to make account also has a "download without registration" box. Can click and gives link that starts the download.

It is just genius. After actually building a better browser, just implementing web standards while they are still on the standard track - or even before it - forcing competitors to implement them and also slowing them down in the process.

Chrome often only pays lip service to the standards process. They often spit out a semblance of the spec, and enable it by default almost immediately. See, e.g. most of the hardware and PWA/related APIs.

How else do you get to learn what works in the real world? Saying "you can't make a feature until everyone agrees" is a recipe for stasis.

> you can't make a feature until everyone agrees

Except that’s exactly how the web is supposed to work and the reason Google was able to build a giant search business in the first place. This is absolutely them shitting in the punch bowl. We made plenty of progress without fragmentation.

I think you're misremembering, there's functionally never been a time when any browser implemented only the standards. Fragmentation was much worse in the pre chrome era.

Sometimes you had standards, but they were often misimplemented because they were bad, the whatwg process is vastly less bad, since it keeps the beta features in beta and no single browser can force them through popularity alone.

In a sense though, the WHATWG was fragmentation and was what helped move the web forward after the W3C got too slow and hard to get anything through… Requiring consensus to add anything to the web is how progress will slow down to a crawl and we have precedent for this. The current process seems pretty good IMO

The whole point of a slower moving standard is that you are less likely to fuck yourself.

Plan Ahea

At some point whatwg is going to jump the shark. They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner and have to make the choice of "cut off some chunk of the web" or "go forward on a new stack". The all gas no brakes add features like were a start up forget about thoughtful or engineering is a bad way to sustain something.

> They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner

Has the web not done that, several times over at this point? We've lost too many online standards to count, from all of the FAANG vendors.

> The all gas no brakes add features like were a start up forget about thoughtful or engineering is a bad way to sustain something.

If native smartphone runtimes were not complete dogshit, I'd probably agree with you. Without the industry's cooperation though, expanding the lowest-common-denominator platform was an inevitability. People want emulators, game streaming, proper download management, the real features that the OEMs are too afraid to publish. If they won't provide that, then their users will find another way.

And so, these "all gas no brakes" features are a product of legitimate demand. It's sad, yeah; but what's even sadder is the miserly behavior from companies like Apple that market user freedom as a security apocalypse. The openness of the web has finally caught-up with it's most-restricted users.

> They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner and have to make the choice of "cut off some chunk of the web"

This of course is actually much more likely (and functionally happened) with pre-WHATWG standards because they'd standardize things that were infeasible and no browser ever implemented, ever.

And at the same time everyone had their own weird nonstandard extensions (does no one remember the whacky stuff like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Vendor_Pre... and how absolutely garbage-awful it was for maintainability?)

> Except that’s exactly how the web is supposed to work and the reason Google was able to build a giant search business in the first place.

No, because whether or not that's how the web is supposed (by whom?) to work, it is not how it did in fact work when Google built that business, in fact, it's farther from how it worked in the period Google was building a giant search business than it is now.

> ["you can't make a feature until everyone agrees" is] exactly how the web is supposed to work

That's just wildly incorrect as a matter of history. To first approximation every technology we use was implemented via Netscape and Microsoft jamming features in as fast as they could and implementing ones from their competitor only once it was clear they were reaching adoption. The interest in a "standards process" really only showed up after the turn of the millenium, once Netscape had faded and IE had begun to stagnate. And in fact Chrome was by far the biggest driver of this change.

It is literally described in the standards process.

Rough consensus and running code

There precedence: https://www.powermapper.com/blog/web-standards-implementatio... says draft spec, then candidate recommendation (unstable), then 2 independent implementations, then recommendation (== spec in w3c terms)

It's still in their docs, too: https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20231103/#implementation-exp... "are implementations publicly deployed?"

"Implementations publicly deployed" is widely understood as "released behind a flag to gather feedback and work out issues", not "release without a workable spec"

I struggle to think of any piece of software or any group on the planet that has better commitment to transparency & doing it right. Who do you think does a better job, and how?

https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#new-featu... shows the process followed. Creating an explainer comes first, which is to be presented immediately to an incubation venue like WICG. Prototype behind a feature flag. Then widening review further, getting request for positions. It's recommended to start an origin trial which will run for a quarter or more. If everything is going fine, then one can start the intent to ship process.

Looking at https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev paints such a picture of slow, controlled evolution. It's absurd to me this kind of flak blasted in the air trying to shoot down something that is generally so measured & controlled & steady in releasing. No one else has anything half this controlled. Who else does Intent to Experiment or Intent to Prototype? Few software has such a model where it's so clear what's coming, what's happening, where change & evolution is done in a controlled, slow, deliberate fashion, where prototypes are worked on & tested in the field for a significant amount of time before coming back to shipping. Few other softwares have such an extreme responsibility in going to working bodies, in soliciting requests for positions, where all manners of discovery are done.

> See, e.g. most of the hardware and PWA/related APIs.

Unclear what specific specs you are trying to throw under the bus here. PWAs took a long time to cook, in my view; hardly did they seem rashly done. A lot of people are really offended the web has MIDI & Gyrometer & other support, to the degree that they wouldn't let others enjoy this.

> shows

> paints

Exactly. You can show and paint all you want. And then there's reality.

> Unclear what specific specs you are trying to throw under the bus here.

Almost all the hardware specs (most of which are "not on any standards track", shipped in Chrome), things like Backround Fetch and Background Sync (same).

There are also others that Google shipped even before there was consensus and there were glaring issues in the spec (like Constructible Stylesheets)

> A lot of people are really offended the web has MIDI & Gyrometer & other support, to the degree that they wouldn't let others enjoy this.

To call this a misrepresentation of reality is a gross understatement

What? Generic-sensor API is a candidate recommendation from Devices and Sensors Working Group at the w3c, "intended to become a w3c recommendation". That's like 85% of the sensors. This seems incredibly weird to quibble over.

I'm struggling to see great difficulties in Background Fetch and Background Sync, specs from 6 years ago. WebKit's big fear in their position was that maybe a background fetch for a user who changes networks leaks more data than expected... Ok, maybe, yeah, but also an incredibly tiny corner case that'll affect like 1e-8% of uses.

FUD FUD FUD.

Go read the mailing list folks; figure out for yourself what if anything seems so onerous & terrible about what's happening. By all means, freak out & share if you have concerns. But this looks like a very useful benefit to us all, happening day by day, getting as much consensus and buy in as they can, to me.

> What? Generic-sensor API is a candidate recommendation

I said hardware APIs, not sensors. There are more hardware APIs than just the one you decided to cherry pick.

> I'm struggling to see great difficulties

Whatever you're struggling with, the status of these is literally "not on any standards track"

> FUD FUD FUD.

You asked which standards are not on the standards track and are enabled by default by Google. I listed some of them. No matter how loudly or hysterically you shout "FUD", reality remains unchanged.

I don't have time for your emotional outbursts. Adieu.

Sorry, which hardware APIs? Webusb? Others?

Excellent as usual chery picking. Way to be perpetually offended & antagonistic & address nothing. We should all be done with whining nothing's like this crap roll.

You have sold fear fear fear & your counter of trying to disregard & ignore is a strong strategy indeed. Strongly cast down then say nothing when the time comes! Well done. Expert moves. Have you at any point obeyed the HN guidelines that discussions should get more specific? No, you just moan and belly ache. Insult belittle & degrade. More broadly & pitiful than the last time.

Society would be better without these shit show tantrums. Sound & thunder, full of nothings.

> They often spit out a semblance of the spec, and enable it by default almost immediately.

On the flip side, standards committees can be painfully slow.

Can anyone explain why DOM access from WebAssembly hasn’t even been specced out yet (let alone even implemented) despite years and years (approaching a decade) of discussions around this? Like, seriously, what is going on with this?

To me, the genius part is how they've forced the industry's hand. There's demand for cloud gaming, USB APIs, Bluetooth functionality and graphics libraries, but many OEMs don't implement it on their system. Chrome tells them that they either brush-up their native APIs, or lose their users to an arena where their browser is more capable than their smartphone.

That part I fully support, and it's Google's "die by the sword" answer to Apple's stubbornness. Google's AdSense abuses are a horse of a different color though, and absolutely deserving of antitrust remediation. The impact of AdSense has been so harmful that I genuinely fail to imagine a "solution" to the scale of it's harm. Alongside the Apple case, it's a posterchild for "Things the DOJ Should Have Done Years Ago" in this industry.

How does Google abuse AdSense? And why is finding a solution difficult? I'm ignorant here.

Too many ways to count, really. It's an enormous system and I'm not qualified to explain it in detail, nor am I a customer of their products.

The long-and-short of it is that Google wields undue monopoly power by mediating their competitors in online advertising, and abuses that control to manipulate ad rankings and kneecap paying advertisers. They do this in several ways, like changing the font/frame/location of the advertisement and fixing it's ranking relative to Google's own products. This is the main argument against them, though there are tons of little inconsistencies that many highlight as salient.

There’s an argument to be made that it is abusive by simply existing. It’s a business that is built on network effects since it is a multi-sided auction (people offering ad space and people bidding to show ads in those spaces). There are massive barriers to entering the ad network space as a result, which lets incumbents get away with whatever they want. In my opinion, markets that are inherently not competitive, like ones reliant on network effects, need regulation and forced competition.

But more specifically, it is things like Google forcing site owners to enter anti-competitive agreements (see https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...). As part of the agreements Google required, site owners had to preserve the best ad space on pages for Google’s ads instead of ads from rival networks, they were not allowed to insert ads from rival ad networks on the pages that Google search results link to, and they had to get permission from Google before changing how rival ads were displayed on pages where both existed (allegedly).

Note that even if site owners found these clauses problematic, in a practical sense they have no choice but to just say “yes”. They need ad revenues to survive in today’s economic environment. And for them, the risk of not having ad revenue is existential while Google doesn’t have anything to lose by being aggressive. It’s an uneven situation where there isn’t really choice for anyone except Google.

Part of it is that they are just way better at building a web browser that works really well and advances fast and fixes security issues fairly quickly. There's an open source variant (it's degoogled). Google loves this because they have a lot of tracking for their ad platform, but also it works really well. I know that Google also provides a lot of important services like noting dodgy websites and (too late sometimes) noticing dangerous extensions, all the way though, tracking most people all the time for serving them ads.

Tesla is a little bit of the same thing with their superchargers. Tesla has done the amazing thing of building them in lots of areas with enough superchargers that they are usable. But the thing that Tesla did that the entire rest of the dcfc industry can't do is just - fix them when they break. It's just stunning that more than a dozen companies can't do this this (EA is the one that really wasted billions, there are known reasons). Tesla is in line to be the predominant EV gas station for the future. Maybe they had some early mover strategy, but as someone who had both a Tesla and a ccs car, there's little comparison. Now that Tesla opened their sc to ccs cars (first with an adapter, later by incorporating that plug in the car directly if wanted), they are likely to control that market. This is incredibly powerful and will set them up to be really successful. Similar things with the Tesla vehicles having fantastic drive trains. Musk is ruining their reputation with his X related comments - but earlier he started ruining Tesla vehicles by removing turn signal stalks, removing drive train stalk, removing physical sensors (for things like curb and rain) and replacing them with poorly working "ai" things.

But to get to their predominant positions, I really think Tesla and Google got there by making better mouse traps, which of course also helped their other businesses incredibly.

This is way too long but I also wish there was a 100% capable de-googled chrome browser.

Chrome is not a better browser because of the various ways it spies on you. It's essentially a keylogger for Google.

can we keep chrome and just stop the goddamn incessant messages every time i use a google property while not in chrome? it is sickening.

Every other website I visit asks me to log in with a Google Account using a popup. I feel very uncomfortable with Google's grip on the Web.

Here’s what they claim to be “dark patterns:”

* Prompts to install Chrome and make it your default browser. (Safari and Edge do the same; this is a tactic that’s been common since the browser wars between Netscape and IE.)

* The built-in password manager and synchronization using a Google account.

* Ads on Google Search for Chrome.

* Built-in DRM and the companies like Spotify that require it.

* Some Google services like Google Meet and Google Earth were implemented for Chrome first.

* Advertisers can place ads using AdWords on Google Search and this is first-party, rather than third-party advertising, which matters when third-party cookies are blocked.

* Google Ads provides Google with insight into the popularity of other websites. (As does running the most popular search engine, I will add.)

* Chrome’s long-delayed blocking of third-party cookies is finally happening, but first-party cookies are unaffected.

* Moving Google services from other domains to google.com subdomains means that they can share cookies without being affected by third-party cookie restrictions.

That’s quite a long list of competitive advantages! And there are more! It’s good to be a big tech company that most people use. They aren’t dark patterns, though? None of this seems surprising?

I still think Chrome blocking third-party cookies will be a good thing. I guess that’s the paradox, what’s better for privacy isn’t good for competition.

Prompts to install Chrome and make it your default browser. (Safari and Edge do the same

Where is it that people get nagged to install Safari? When visiting Apple's web site?

Since Safari is my primary browser, I don't get prompted to install it, so I'm genuinely curious.

No way they’d do it on ordinary Apple.com. They don’t give enough shits about people using their browser that’s only available at all if you already gave them money to let that interrupt any part of the process of giving them more money.

Maybe on the iCloud website? Which I never visit on Apple devices anyway because there are apps for everything…

Just tried Apple.com in chrome on macOS. Only nag I see is… for chrome, because it’s not my default browser but Google wants it to be.

I’m not logged into iCloud on there, but the site itself and the login form neither complain about my not visiting it in Safari.

I believe that if you own a Mac, normally use Chrome, and open Safari, it will ask if you want to make it the default. Maybe some other time? Not a big deal, really.

I remember this one being delightful: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252412228?sortBy=best

My MacBook keeps periodically nagging me via notifications to use Safari.

It's only somewhat related to Chrome, but I'm surprised this doesn't mention Google AMP - probably because it's thankfully on its way out. AMP broke web browsing on non-Google browsers, especially IMHO in iOS where scrolling was borked on every AMP page.

There's also the Chrome "feature" where logging into a Google property automatically logs you into a Chrome "profile" whether you like it or not. I don't want a Chrome "profile", I didn't give Google permission to create one, but I'm still apparently logged into one. Gee, thanks...

> Some Google services like Google Meet and Google Earth were implemented for Chrome first.

Chuckled at this one - "yes now they support all platforms but they were on Chrome first! Malice!"

The malice comes from them specifically blocking it from working on nonchrome browsers, if you changed your US to chrome it had no issues working on safari or Firefox.

YouTube is similarly made to be slower and less useable on Firefox, but if you change your us to chrome it suddenly gets better

>That’s quite a long list of competitive advantages!

Calling this list a list of "competitive advantages" seems about as accurate as calling them "dark patterns".

The only competitive advantages I see in your list is the fact that they get to use both advertisement data and search data, so they can better manipulate you into buying things.

The rest is either stuff that is on every browser, isn't an advantage, or isn't specific to Chrome.

The native support for logging in to Google services is unique to Chrome. This should either be expanded to support other identity providers, or (preferably) removed entirely from the browser.

Absolutely! Let's not dilute the meaning of "dark patterns".

Can you imagine the Mac without Chrome? The mainstream population would simply use Safari and a default Windows browser. The productivity of the Mac in particular would be downgraded to iPhone and iPad levels because everything we do nowadays is web based. Mail, Docs, storage, research, listening to Music, watching content.

Chrome's domination has been nothing but positive for the consumer because it's in Google's best interest to keep it as user-friendly as possible to keep its customer loyalty. When the browser is user-friendly, Google makes money. Let's compare it to Safari on iPhone and iPad where Apple is deliberately crippling it so the open web doesn't take a cent away from their App Store model.

If we didn't have Chrome, then what you'll get is a world where Apple cripples the open web and Microsoft on the other end only caring about their corporate-world interests. Google is the only company that is keeping the web open and consumer focused.

I use a Mac daily without Chrome. Firefox and Safari work great (the latter works even better if you have an iPhone and iPad and use iCloud, yet another antitrust issue).

I use Mac Safari exclusively except for a few sites (usually Google's products) that run terribly on it. There's nothing "iPad and iPhone" level about desktop Safari. It also happens to be much easier on the batteries than the Chrome resource hog.

> When the browser is user-friendly, Google makes money.

Nope, not at all. Google makes money when users view ads. As long as they have competition, they can't go hog wild with it but changes like those in manifest V3[1] show that ad blocking is their natural enemy - regardless of what users want.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-l...

Can you name me one thing chrome does that can't be done in safari or firefox?

> Chrome's domination has been nothing but positive for the consumer

In general, they've (Google) been controlling web standards for about a decade, if not longer.

It's almost impossible to create your own browser from scratch, which is why so many competing browsers are based on Chromium.

It's getting similar to the Windows monopoly all over again, where web developers write to Chrome instead of open standards. The difference is that the existence of Mozilla and Safari as alternate implementations, and other browsers being Chromium based, make it harder to see the consolidation around a proprietary technology stack.

Deeming a product with only ~65% market share as an antitrust issue feels wrong and reductive of actual market monopolies. I like Khan and what the FTC has been up to lately, but the contemporary antitrust school of thought feels diluted and overreaching as applied to tech companies

> ~65% market share

Careful there: A lot of competing browsers are based on Chromium.

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