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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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