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Comment by LunaSea | Hacker News Reader

Should Google Chrome ask for 30% of web purchases?

I think it's funny people argue this when Google already does extract a massive pound of flesh from web purchases and uses Chrome to push "the web" where they control the market.

I have to pay the Apple tax to reach my customers where they are, iOS.

I have to pay the Google tax to reach my customers where they are, the web dominated by Doubleclick and Google search.

Do you care that a tech company is extracting huge sums from digital markets or do you just care how? Does it make a lick of difference that with ad spend it feels like you're buying something or when you put ads on your site you never see the money they took off the top?

> Do you care that a tech company is extracting huge sums from digital markets or do you just care how?

Everyone should care how! The how is the important part.

If there are alternative ways to access something then people are free to compete of product. That's a huge difference because competition is generally consumer friendly.

And the EU should look into Google's unfair practices from its domination of web search and ads. I suspect it will.

If Google starting charging site owners 30% of their revenues to index their website on Google Search, and there was no possible alternative, the EU would probably be looking at them pretty harshly too.

> massive pound of flesh

Technically, all pounds of flesh are the same mass :)

Love that, I fully expect "pound of flesh" to soon have an entry in the dictionary for "an unspecified amount of flesh" to annoy language prescriptivists.

Not in an interplanetary society. If you're on Europa, your entire body weighs approximately one pound.

In modern times, the pound is defined in terms of kilograms, so it's a unit of mass.

I can send you a link to my website, no Google required.

I can send you my Android app, no Google required.

I can’t send you my iOS app without relying on Apple.

They already do, you can't survive in ecommerce without google ads.

That was the case 5-10 years ago, but many e-commerce businesses are surviving solely on TikTok and Instagram ads. Look at most of the Google Shopping results for small items, all Amazon and Temu who have bigger pockets.

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