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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find this line of argumentation nothing more than pure ad hominem. This is an open specification, open to review by everyone. If there were technological changes made to somehow support better data collection, people would be able to see that.

The IETF and the W3C has always had large companies involved in specs, often with their own agendas, I see no reason to attack Google in this way.

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An ad hominem would mean that I am saying they're wrong. My argument is not

    Google is an advertising company, therefore SPDY is bad.

My argument is

    Google is an advertising company, and the largest
    single entity on the Internet, and therefore, their
    actions deserve a healthy dose of skepticism. I'm 
    not sure that we've been giving them enough skepticism.

SPDY does have good points, and bad points. I just saw a lot of chatter from people who want to ignore the bad points simply because of where the spec came from.

But why is an advertising company deserve more skepticism than a company that sells operating systems or database servers?

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, an advertising company has incentives to collect and process as much data about individuals as possible. This is Google's core competency.

Oh, and in Google's case specifically, they now control the largest web site, one of the largest web browsers, (with this) the protocol it talks to, and they're attempting to supersede JavaScript too... and one of the largest client-side frameworks. The list goes on and on. The largest mobile phone OS. Email provider. (?) Working on social network...

Google also handles more traffic then almost any company on the planet, so their involvement in a discussion about transporting bits is, well, not really that shocking.

The issue is that you're throwing around them being an advertising company as a negative without any discernible proof that it has negatively affected the outcome.

What, specifically (and please spare us the 'rhetorical flourishes') has been proposed that is unfairly biased towards advertising? Which parts should we be skeptical about?

Sure, but bigger and smaller scale operations have different needs. The internet isn't supposed to be about what's best for the big guys, it's supposed to be about what's best for humanity.

I've mentioned specifics elsewhere in this thread, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6013468 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012906

The "specifics" in the other threads are more ad hominem. You're saying "we should be wary of what Google does" without actually mentioning what's there in the spec to be wary about. You're saying "we shouldn't trust Google to pass specs unchecked", people are saying "but we aren't: we've read the spec, and it's good", and you're saying "yeah, but we shouldn't trust Google".

> without actually mentioning what's there in the spec to be wary about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6013088

And, as I mention elsewhere, it's not just the spec, it's the general trend of Google dominating the web. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6013468

Sure, the general trend is a good point, just not entirely relevant to this specific thread. Your comment above does make good points about the actual spec, I agree.

It's not advertising that I'm skeptical of w/r/t Google. It's their amount of capital.

E.g., relating to the ASCII/binary discussion above:

A binary web would require advanced retooling and therefore investment. Smaller business entities are not in such a strong position to deal with such a large shift in their workflow. Therefore, switching to a binary protocol would disadvantage entities smaller than google.

Unless you can point to a specific point in this IETF draft which furthers Google's interests while diminishing others' I'm going to ignore you.

There is more to the world than a technical draft, you can't just abstract away the rest of everything else.

For technical critiques, I commented earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6013088

> There is more to the world than a technical draft, you can't just abstract away the rest of everything else.

Then maybe you should actually bring these things up. You seem to be playing coy and throwing around innuendo. If you have real, substantive concerns about something, I think the conversation would be greatly improved by actually bringing those up rather than just casting aspersions about Google.

I have brought them up, this isn't my only comment in this thread.

There are a large number of Google employees and stock holders on HN, and it would not be at all surprising if they leapt to Google's defense for non-technical reasons.

It would be enlightening to see the defenders of Google disclosing whether they have any financial or other interest in Google.

To complement that disclosure, any attackers of Google should likewise disclose whether they have any financial or other interests in Google's competitors.

It would help if people just criticize on the spec based on the technical merits.

I agree that technical critiques are good, but technology is social. You can't abstract away the rest of the real world. We need both kinds.

A reasonable argument would say that we don't need the social and political stuff in standards discussions, which should be based instead on engineering.

Absolutely. This is why I wouldn't make these comments on the IETF mailing list. I do think that HN is an appropriate venue, this is very much a social place.

"Should we be doing this?" and "How should we do this?" are two very different questions.

That's a fair point for why your argument is germane to HN, but for what it's worth I still don't agree with the argument.

Sure, but I don't find the social critique very useful either.

There are things that Google does, as a corporation, that you can find fault with, technological decisions that may or may not have been influenced by business model. For those, fire away. But the attack on SPDY/HTTP/2.0 because "Google is an advertising company" (which if you actually worked at Google, and knew how people made decisions here, you'd know is ridiculous from an intent or motivation point of view) is just pure mudslinging.

Examples of stuff that I, as a Google employee, would criticize Google for: Real Names, building "siloed" services and moving away federated/decentralized approaches (see my essay here: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...), most of what Yegge said about APIs, Google Hangouts going "silo" and away from XMPP model, etc.

People who work on ads and take their marching orders from ads are a small portion of employees at Google. The guys working on Chromium/Blink/SPDY do not report to ads, do not take orders from ads, and in general, work on technology without reference to monetization strategy. Their day to day job is to improve technology, with the hope that if you raise the tide, all boats will be lifted, and they'll be some ROI from that.

But that the idea that engineers are taking marching orders from shareholders to maximize profits based on ads by tweaking web standards is hilariously wrong for people working on Chrome.

I'm not talking about "Larry And Sergey have decreed that Evil Shall Happen!" I'm talking about broad economic incentives. Since I don't work for Google, I have to treat them as a black box; I see what goes in, I see what comes out. I know nothing of the internals, I only have one friend who actually works there. If I implied there was some kind of conspiracy, that is my fault. You're right that that would be ridiculous.

I would also criticize Google for your reasons, and they may be even more important. But this isn't a thread about those things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5992358

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