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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.

You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.

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Chromium being open-source is a red herring here. The web is not an application, it is a protocol between clients and servers. Google has immense influence on both sides of that protocol, and regularly attempts to use that influence in an anticompetitive way. Chromium being open source just means you can fork the client, but that gives you essentially no influence over the web as a protocol; if Google wants to take the web in a direction that your fork doesn't agree with (e.g. adding new APIs that you don't want to support or getting rid of APIs that you do), then you're out of luck regardless of your ability to compile the code.

What are the two sides of the protocol?

Google controls Chrome/Chromium on one side and Google/Youtube/Maps/Meet on the other side.

It can kill or force technologies.

Browsers and websites / web servers.

How do they control the "web servers" side?

Youtube, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive.

How many organizations and individuals use, and depend on, those services for their livelihood?

and? How does this all matter when you choose a web browser engine? You can write your own, but you still have this problem. So, this is not an argument against chromium at all.

I think they already answered this but their explanation simply bounced off you. When your market position and control over development is dominant you can steer the web in self-interested ways that hurt users and hurt the independence of the web as an ecosystem. That's a perfectly legitimate answer to your Q and it's basically stuff they already said the first time around.

You can't really replicate that unless you're a trillion dollar company that chooses software defaults on billions of devices and have the world's most visited website.

Thanks KHTML and the KDE Project!

The concern is embrace, extend, extinguish.

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