Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet
1) proof of identity, tying accounts to real-world things that are hard or impossible to replicate
2) proof of work, tying accounts or actions to the ability to run computations
Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.
Proof of work can be defeated but has the possibility of preserving privacy.
There are many issues with those, like the wildly different standards of living across the globe. OTOH anyone can acquire Monero if they want to. But someone from a rich country will likely be able to pay for more fake accounts/visits than someone from a poor country. With the ad market the difference between where the visitor is from is very important. Some ad clicks may cost a dollar if they're coming from a rich country and 0.01 cents if they're coming from a poor country.
I'm not suggesting cryptocurrency micropayments for accessing the web but it's on par with PoW in that it only requires money, not privacy.
Perhaps the way forward is for people to wake up and stop visiting sites that infringe on their privacy.
Analogous to hardware disparities and POW, wealth disparities make payment a toll but not a roadblock.
All current implementations: yes. I do think there are some privacy preserving solutions, but they're obviously imperfect. But assuming you have a central authority that can validate and sign valid government identification, it seems like some sort of ZK scheme could allow one to verify that they have a valid government issued ID, but without disclosing which one it is.
I still don't love the idea, but it sure seems better than everything else I've seen proposed.
Not everything calls for a purely technical solution.
RMS has offered broadly solutions/alternatives since the beginning, along with reporting early on trends that other people ignore.
I don’t mean to be rude but every single person who references RMS here seems to only have platitudes rather than solutions.
I don't know RMS's solution to spam or DDoS which are the real problems.
Because controlling a large number of accounts can allow you to manipulate the algorithms on Web2.0 websites. For example, this one. If you don’t combat spammers the front page quickly gets filled up with garbage.
Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.
In the category of ~1-3 years' performance lag you get Rockchip and friends, which are closed hardware that allows open computation. See computers made by the company MNT as an example.
In the category of ~5 years' performance lag you get "soft" cores, where you buy an FPGA (dynamically reprogrammable hardware) and make it run a CPU you design yourself. If you want to, for example, make your CPU have more cache and fewer ALUs, you can do that by tweaking some files and reprogramming the FPGA. This has a cost in terms of power efficiency and runtime speed, but you can absolutely run a full Linux desktop experience on an FPGA today, and the hardware has no way to try to prevent you from running any software.
You can solve the problem of all the cellular basebands being closed source with either software-defined-radio or using a closed USB/PCIe cellular modem connected to an open processor.
I don't think you've made a point about his abilities. I do think you've restated his proclivities, which reinforces the basis for the quip.
There's a reason there's a subreddit called "Stallman Was Right", and it's not that he was shotgun blasting opinions and landed a few of them. It's because he has a systemic understanding of the incentives our system sets up and is able to project decades into the future about how those incentives will play out.
It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched).
Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant.
Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record.
Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge.
Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing.
A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones.
HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.
When IPv6 was designed it was normal for each IPv4 address to be traceable to someone's desk. Fortunately, as that changed with IPv4 so did it with IPv6, so we got IPv6 privacy extensions.
Always has been.
Google was creating cartels like the "Open Handset Alliance" literally decades ago.
Via their control of Chrome and Search which are both monopolies, Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
I'm on Firefox and use DuckDuckGo.
How is Chrome, of all things, a monopoly? Have words just entirely lost all meaning and now monopoly just means "things which are popular that I dislike"?
Note, this is separate from a "so many things are just Chromium", which I agree is an issue, but isn't the same as a "Google Chrome is a monopoly". Because in the end there are still many non-Chrome browsers which support WebUSB which do not end up with a lot of the downsides of Chrome specifically about Google harvesting your data and what not.
You know full well what people mean when they say "Chrome"
Yeah, Chrome, the web browser made by Google that bugs you to sign in with your Google Account. Most people don't mean Microsoft Edge when you say "Chrome". Do you call Microsoft Edge "Chrome"?
Chrome is a product made by Google that is a web browser. If the argument is Chromium is too interwoven, that's a separate argument.
But even then, what does it mean that "Chromium is a monopoly"? Is Linux a monopoly as well? Why or why not?
Note you haven't actually given me any other ways one would be impacted like I asked. What are the other majorly missing features Chrome pushes that other browsers don't have that most sites require? What else am I missing by not using a non-Chromium-based browser?
As someone else said earlier, it is a monopoly by extending the internet in ways that force users into using their browser engine. Due to market share and Google's prevalence, they have the sway to introduce things that cannot meaningfully be avoided without extreme siloing.
> What are the other majorly missing features Chrome pushes that other browsers don't have that most sites require?
This is a different question, please don't move the goalposts.
And yet after multiple times of me asking you've yet to give me a single real feature lost.
> This is a different question
Its literally the thing we're saying is the problem, how is it a different question entirely?!
You're saying the problem is they're adding features that force Chromium, but asking about which features you're talking about is just bringing up unrelated and different questions.
Is Linux also a monopoly? In a way sure, but I think a big difference is they're not "doing evil" as people claim Google is, and all the development/decisions are still made out in the open in a democratic way.
Former Google execs have even compared their setup to "running the New York Stock Exchange while trading on it."
At least Linux isn't trying to tell people what to do with their software.
2 messages later that seems to be contradicted?
> It's not so much forcing people to Chrome/chromium for specific features
I might've misread.
> but trying to increase market share through more subtle means, like paying to have their search engine featured
This isn't Chromium, the open source basis of many web browsers. Now you're talking about Google the company.
> Is Linux also a monopoly?
Monopolies in the sense worth discussing are highly popular things that are held in place by things other than competition. If anything, Google props up Chrome's competitors to reduce this.
Seriously? That's our standard of what is a "monpoply"?
Words have no meaning anymore.
You can choose to use something different. The device you bought probably came with an alternative! Otherwise, the device next to it on the shelf on the store where you bought it likely would have had an alternative browser, because most devices on the store shelves outside of some hypothetical physical Google store don't come with Chrome.
No. That part of the post was answering your question about how it impacts people. Not what makes it a monopoly.
I find the discrepancy kinda minor though. It's enough that I have Chrome installed alongside Firefox and Safari, but not enough that I use it often. It used to be worse.
This is what I mean. How is it a "monopoly" when one can easily just use something else?
The only thing people are saying its "its a monopoly because it has high market share". But a high market share does not a monopoly make, there's more to it than just purely market share. A monopoly requries outsized market power, something that to me at least it doesn't seem like Chrome, the web browser has.
High market share almost always means high market power. That's why people focus on market share since it's easy to cite.
It doesn't take users five years to install a different browser. It takes maybe two to five minutes. If they really do things to piss off their users they'll be gone far faster than that.
What kind of lock-in does a browser even really have? Its not like some kind of social network or financial setup or anything like that. The browser itself doesn't have the content. Its run an installer, have it import bookmarks and extensions, and you're using a different browser. Its not like we're back in the days of ActiveX where there were entirely proprietary extensions to the web that only Microsoft blessed browsers could run that only ran on certain OSes.
> almost always means high market power.
It doesn't when the competition is so readily available, practically interchangeable, and also zero cost.
For most, for the purposes of market share (the type of "monopoly" I believe they are referring to), I think they count it as one and the same.
Are the security and privacy implications the same for Edge, Safari, and Chrome?
Seems to me like they're still quite different products despite having some similar codebases!
How did the user manage to install Chrome on Windows if Chrome is a monopoly, the only serviceable browser around? They copy the source code from a magazine or something? Get a floppy disk in the mail?
Ok, so enlighten me which standard of monopoly they're so obviously breaking?
> The threshold is not 100% market share.
I never once said so
I'm not arguing it requires 100% marketshare. I'm just pointing out there are tons of workable competitors out there, in fact one has to use a functional and fully featured competitors product to go and install Chrome on most platforms out there.
How can one claim Chrome is a monoply when there are tons of competitors out there which work just fine, and for most users their computers came with the competitors products?
Please, do enlighten me, how is Chrome a monopoly?
Breaking?
They're being a monopoly by having a huge market share. A majority of browers are directly branded chrome, and the chrome team has strong codebase control over most of the alternatives too. Especially on desktop. It's that simple.
> I'm not arguing it requires 100% marketshare. I'm just pointing out there are tons of workable competitors out there, in fact one has to use a functional and fully featured competitors product to go and install Chrome on most platforms out there.
> How can one claim Chrome is a monoply when there are tons of competitors out there which work just fine, and for most users their computers came with the competitors products?
The existence of competition doesn't change whether something is a monopoly. It only disproves 100%, which is why I mentioned 100%.
The choices of users don't change whether something is a monopoly.
Marketshare alone isn't a defining part of if a product is a monopoly.
> majority of browers are directly branded chrome
They're not Chrome, in many extremely important aspects.
> The choices of users don't change whether something is a monopoly
The fact users can make a choice is a huge part of the argument that Chrome isn't a monopoly. There are lots of competitors out there that can be freely chosen. So much so people have to go out of their way to install Chrome.
When AT&T was ruled a monopoly it was practically the only choice in many markets. When Standard Oil was ruled a monopoly it was practically the only choice in many markets. People can choose Edge. People can choose Safari. People can choose Firefox. All of these browsers work fine (I've yet to be told a single other major feature they're missing despite asking many times), and are not Chrome.
Lay's sells like 60% or so of the chips sold in the US. Are they a monopoly? Are you practically unable to buy any other chips at the store outside of Lays products? I guess it's not really just marketshare that makes the difference! So just pointing at them and saying they're a monopoly because they have a large marketshare is meaningless.
Yes it is. You're thinking of something else.
> The fact users can make a choice is a huge part of the argument that Chrome isn't a monopoly.
That argument is wrong.
It's size and market power. If users could change but don't, the monopoly company still has huge power.
> Lay's sells like 60% or so of the chips sold in the US. Are they a monopoly?
They're at least close, yeah.
Finally one states something other than its a monopoly because it has market share or because its advertised heavily. Its a monopoly because it allegedly has market power. But does it, really?
> If users could change but don't, the monopoly company still has huge power.
Is it that it has power or just that its currently popular?
I once again ask, what features actually force me to use Chrome over the other products on the market? If there are none, how does it actually have "market power"? What truly makes me use Chrome over the others? The fact its highly advertised?
Market power is usually defined as "a firm's ability to profitably raise prices above the competitive level (marginal cost) without losing significant sales to competitors." Clearly we're not talking about prices here, practically all the prices are free here. So we're talking other kinds of featuresets. What is this market power, other than users like it? I've asked many times, and yet everyone has refused to answer this core, critical part of the claim.
If people can make a choice for a competitor's product that's priced the exact same and has essentially the same feature set, how does Chrome have "market power"?
I pointed out WebUSB. For a bit pretty much only Chrome supported it. Is that really market power that's pushing everyone to use Chrome? What other things are actually giving it that immense market power you claim?
It's a core, critical part of a monopoly abuse claim, not a monopoly claim. I don't want to get in that argument.
They don't have some weird ultra low market power for their size. They're a monopoly.
> It's size and market power.
We both agree on the size. Its the most popular browser for sure. And I agree, a monopoly generally has to be quite large and it doesn't need to be 100%.
When I ask you for evidence of the market power side of the monopoly claim, you just throw up your hands and say "I don't want to get in that argument", make some claim about the self-evidence of their market power, and then just assert they're a monopoly.
I'm just asking someone to actually point out how Chrome, the web browser has outsized market power. Not just restate they have high usage numbers, but actual instances showcasing their market power. Real studies about how sticky Chrome actually is. Anything like that. But nobody here will actually point to anything other hand waving about how much its marketed and what not.
Ever thought about just not using those apps if you want to avoid the Google ecosystem? Too bad there's just absolutely no mapping application available on iPhone but Google Maps. Too bad there's no way to send an email on an iPhone outside of Gmail.
What's that? A user has to once again go out of their way to install those apps as well? Well isn't that strange. I thought Google was a monopoly on iPhones.
>> Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
This is still 100% correct. Google owns the dominant browser and the dominant search engine, this means that they get to dictate how websites function and pick winners and losers through their search algorithm. If you're a publisher (i.e. anyone who hosts a website) you're forced to fall in line or go out of business.
[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-05...
What features of Chrome are website publishers forced to fall in line with or go out of business that practically other browser makers aren't also pushing?
Ship with a chromium fork called Edge
Not quite the same thing now is it?
My god AMP was such an annoying thing ~4-5 years ago when I was working in a marketing-forward web dev shop.
"Google really likes when you pipe your words into their shitty UI because it saves some time for the user"
We were all like, cool so on one hand we're being given complex designs for sites to differentiate them, and on the other hand we're bowing to a megacorp who actually wants to skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI.
So glad it died. Should have known it would die in a matter of a couple of years with that being the track record for Google in general.
It's a shame this part didn't stick. I use reading mode every chance I get be cause the more design a page has, the worse it is. For some reason orgs agreed that it is ok to let medium or substack own their content, but hated Google's high speed CDN.
the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real...
that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.
People absolutely did like Google at the time, but the majority of its growth is actually shoveling hijackers into other software installs just like BonzaiBuddy.
There was a good, long period where Microsoft just decided to let the market run amok with malware for critical software, instead of providing something like Preview on macOS. As a result, the safest option for most lay people was to use Chrome, where they could quickly and easily view, and most important, save pdfs of websites, receipts, etc.
Then, once MacBook Airs were solidified + iPhone, I started recommending people use macOS simply because Preview could edit PDFs and easily allow signing them.
I haven't used Windows in a very long time, so I assume it's still the same situation.
I use Firefox right now. Occasionally I need to open a site in Chrome instead, but it's rare.
> Firefox usage share grew to a peak of 32.21% in November 2009, with Firefox 3.5 overtaking Internet Explorer 7, although not all versions of Internet Explorer as a whole;
Firefox was the browser that embraced open standards and was unseating IE. And ActiveX was used for corporate stuff, not general web sites, so the main reason it died was that Microsoft gave up.