26 ms·

Web by Google (TM)

• matthewfelgate 6y ago
  I will care about Chrome being the top browser when people care about Windows being on 90%+ of consumer computers.
  • kapp 6y ago
    Actually, since 2017 most consumer computers run Android. Windows is second.
• markosaric 6y ago
  Completely agree! Google also plays a part in majority of websites. Pretty much every website has to call at least one if not two or more domains owned by Google. Analytics, DoubleClick, fonts... it's not looking healthy.
  • mulcahey 6y ago
    Not to mention Google owning one of the leading front end frameworks - Angular!
• zpeti 6y ago
  It does look pretty tragic at this point. But it’s worth noting that every tech business so far was talked about as if it’s taken over the world, forever, and without 5-10-20 years they were overtaken. IBM, Intel, Microsoft. I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.
  • alangibson 6y ago
    I'd argue that they tend not to lose on their home turf, but rather the ground moves under them. Google only increased it's hold in the web as Facebook took the new territory of social media. Likewise Microsoft still is a massive player in enterprise software even as AWS became a virtual synonym for cloud computing.
    • PaulHoule 6y ago
      Azure actually has significant market share. An interesting thing I have noticed is that Amazon has made staggeringly little progress at user facing SaaS -- think salesforce.com. I went to an AWS conference years ago and the gap between the speaker's enthusiasm for zocalo and the crowd that couldn't care less (e.g. The crowd that was pumped for IAM and T2 instances) was striking.
  • freedrock87 6y ago
    So another large company will take them over. We need to legislate this now to avoid this endless cycle
    • creddit 6y ago
      Why?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • alangibson 6y ago
        Because monocultures are intrensically unhealthy. Ironically though they're very profitable for as long as they last.
  • nightcracker 6y ago
    Microsoft is overtaken by who exactly? In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.
    • innocenat 6y ago
      Back then Windows is >90% of all consumer computing devices. Right now it's 87% of just desktop & laptop.
      • nightcracker 6y ago
        I don't think it's a fair comparison. Microsoft still dominates the exact same market they did before (desktop & laptop), with roughly the same market share. What you're describing is a new market bundled with the old market. "Consumer computing devices" is such a vague market. If you study markets at such a big scope something like Texas Instruments wouldn't even make a blip while if you're paying more careful attention you'll find they absolutely dominate the scientific calculator market.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • crispyporkbites 6y ago
      Microsoft are an absolute beast, their revenue is diversified across so many areas in b2c and b2b, and they are selling real products / services that solve problems that people actually need and pay for. Contrast that with fb/google who are selling ad space for others to buy to fill with actual products, it’s clear who’s driving real value. I would bet that MS will outlast all the other tech giants by a long way.
      • avh02 6y ago
        I'm by no means Google's biggest fan but this definitely misrepresents things it offers such as gsuite
        • 6y ago
• tomschwiha 6y ago
  You can blame Google for a lot - however I believe if it wasn't about Google someone else would dictate the game. In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.
  • FridgeSeal 6y ago
    So what, we just sit around passively and wait for something to happen to Google and friends? Doesn’t that strike you as a poor move? I don’t see why we should be relegated to put up with another x-number of years of these companies behaving (arguably) badly, just so things can change and they can be replaced with another company that will do the same thing.
    • tomschwiha 6y ago
      What do you think could be actively done to "stop Google"? Dont use AMP? Well you will lose money / power. Dont use search? Maybe miss out opportunities. How can I as marketeer convince my clients as Google traffic is 90% source of income? I get your point but I'm not sure what could be done without harming economy (aka people).
      • FridgeSeal 6y ago
        Breaking them up would be a good start. Obviously those tools are important, not debating that, the problem is that they’re all the product of a single hegemony with an agenda, partitioning it so that it can no longer push the likes of AMP to the detriment of everyone else.
  • alangibson 6y ago
    > however I believe if it wasn't about Google someone else would dictate the game. Always worth reading: https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/
  • deleted 6y ago
• texasbigdata 6y ago
  AMP still makes no sense. On iOS, Android and Windows it’s completely broken and friction increasing to grab a link to send to a friend in another medium. Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes. For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse? Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)
  • mattacular 6y ago
    It's a lot of effort to maintain AMP pages for all your site content alongside the standard pages over time. That's why they tend to degrade.
    • texasbigdata 6y ago
      Seems like a ShowHN opportunity: upgrade your AMP code (ugh) automatically when you update your regular web facing presence. Call it antitrust.ly! :)
    • 1f60c 6y ago
      This is by design. They want your canonical web page to be AMP.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      Reminds me of the old-fashioned "m.<domain>" sites we used to have to maintain for mobile browsing; often using wonderful tech like WML. That sucked.
      • mattacular 6y ago
        Yes, it is effectively like operating an "adaptive" site alongside your (probably) responsive main site
  • alangibson 6y ago
    AMP is the most transparent land grab Google has pulled. It's technically unjustifiable, is arguably value destroying, and as a bonus you can't disable it. It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.
• eiWit7oo 6y ago
  > Google’s capture of the Web is a fait accompli. Only legislation will keep the World Wide Web from finally becoming Web by Google (TM). I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching, and then they ask their contact to do the same, who ask their contact to do the same, I think we could have fast and massively parallelized trust based searches. Then you can rank the results based on how many times they appeared.
  • staticelf 6y ago
    Google, the original author behind cancel culture /s
  • Spearchucker 6y ago
    Somehow asking a contact for a recommendation or search result has never felt right. I have many friends I value very very much and yet I don't share their political views, I don't like their technology preferences and I sure as damn don't agree with their musicsl tastes. Right now I'll settle for a centralized search engine/service that works like Google did before all the crazy, like before Amp, and before penalizing non-mobile-optimized sites, and so on. Federated search scares me because it might constrain search results by being tainted with a localised world view.
  • tomschwiha 6y ago
    Wouldn't this cause filter bubbles? And could open up privacy abuse because all your history is available?
  • alfonsodev 6y ago
    >Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. Has this been attempted before? does it have a name?
    • teddyh 6y ago
• mnd999 6y ago
  I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.
  • mattacular 6y ago
    Don't forget that Amazon dominates a lot more than just retail on the internet. With AWS they effectively run large portions of it as well.
    • thdrdt 6y ago
      Don't underestimate how Google is becomming the storefront of all retail on internet. Google can now dictate which webshop is shown first in search results on a product level. I know retailers are sick of this. They need Google to be found on the web but they don't like how Google is destroying retail.
      • threatofrain 6y ago
        There isn't really a strong narrative that Google Shopping is any kind of threat to Amazon or Walmart. Nobody knows if it's going to catch momentum, or if Google will just kill in a few years.
      • alangibson 6y ago
        There's a huge opportunity for Shopify to launch a slick shopping service that puts a (much nicer looking) Amazon-style interface in front of all the various shops. Combine that with Etsy's marketplace and you'd really have a contender.
        • andromeduck 6y ago
          They already do that.
• lol768 6y ago
  > And let’s not forget that most people now access the web via mobile devices, 75% of which run Google’s Android. Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines. Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use. I imagine if you told the user they could have a browser with extensions, ad-blocking, background playback etc they might be a bit more inclined to consider using Firefox.
  • emteycz 6y ago
    No, they will be inclined to not use that device and use one that does not ask weird questions.
    • lol768 6y ago
      > No, they will be inclined to not use that device and use one that does not ask weird questions. Weird questions that they got asked already on their Windows machine as part of BrowserChoice.eu? They're only "weird" because this practice of forcing your own browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari) down the throat of your users has become commonplace.
      • emteycz 6y ago
        I have literally never seen that prompt, and I have turned hundreds of computers on for the first time. So yeah, just like that weird, never seen dialog.
        • yoz-y 6y ago
          I have seen it but only briefly at a time. I've installed windows 10 twice recently and never got to it. Only Edge begging to not be removed from the launch bar.
  • darepublic 6y ago
    Firefox mobile is good but not as convenient for using Google maps
• staticelf 6y ago
  This is depressing, we as developers have to take the bull by its horns. Simply stop using their services, advocate against AMP etc. But in the end, the US government will most likely have to split the company in order for stuff to really change.
  • jachell 6y ago
    I'm not convinced that legislation, created by politicians who are unfamiliar with the internet, will break up Google and transform the web in a good way.
  • NateEag 6y ago
    I'm posting this from Firefox Mobile. Works just fine for my day-to-day surfing. DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, and it's not perfect or a panacea, but it works well enough (and there's "!g" for when it doesn't). What we really need to do is be willing to pay for our tools, though. Wikipedia estimates there are 21 million developers in the world, so if one out of twenty developers donated $1 / month to Mozilla, they'd be getting $1 million / month. You could sustain a few small dev teams on that. Not tons, but it's something. If you took it to $5 / month, now you're looking at a lot more manpower. If donations are given to specific software projects rather than the foundation as a whole, and bookkeeping is in the open, you can have decent confidence your money is actually going where you'd like it to go, too. Just some half-baked thoughts.
    • avasthe 6y ago
      Yeah I believe many programmers don't like their donations going to a non technical overpaid CEO's salary or activism instead of browser or technical projects like rust.
    • staticelf 6y ago
      Well except that donating to Mozilla, is donating to a bunch of diversity projects and people, not to the browser or tech. I would gladly donate to mozilla the day I knew my money didn't go to Bakers already filled pockets or to some worthless diversity cause like a "queer feminist filmmaker" that is obviously on their payroll. Mozilla as an org takes in a lot of money already, it is just that they seem to spend it on nothing of value for the most part. It's sad, but it's the reality.
• cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  The issue is not the fact that Google owns the web. It is that the web itself has become decimated to the point where a company like Mozilla does not have a future. Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. None of them are optimized for Google index. Most top consumer internet applications don't take place in your browser.
  • alangibson 6y ago
    You could make a case that all the 'social' platforms serve a fundamentally different need than the Web. Those are all more about immediate communication of lots of relatively ephemeral, low-information messages. The Web is more suited to publishing more enduring, long form and complete information. Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.
    • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
      You could make a case that most internet platforms are increasingly social. Think about what would be left if you took away all "social" apps from the internet. Even if we don't go that far, think about non-social online apps that don't use the "web". For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Office, Adobe creative cloud, etc. Most users of these apps use native apps instead of a clunky browser.
      • PaulHoule 6y ago
        I dunno. It is what you've been taught. Some people think Microsoft Word is a clunky native app, others that Google Docs is a clunky browser app. Maybe they are both right.
        • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
          This has nothing to do with my argument. My point is that the reality is a huge chunk of internet usage does not happen inside a browser. Whether it's a good idea or not is irrelevant. The fact that there exists a Microsoft Word powered by the Internet but not inside a browser. And the fact that every cloud powered app on mobile does not use the browser. These are facts.
• biophysboy 6y ago
  As a non-programmar, what are some web standards dictated by google that make it worse for me, the uninformed user? Im sure they exist, but I don’t know them.
  • doublerabbit 6y ago
    Google Amp. Whenever you see the amp symbol, avoid visiting that site.
    • ceras 6y ago
      As an end-user, AMP sites load faster and with less clutter. The only downside is a clunky URL, but I rarely care about that. AMP improved my mobile search experience. The main AMP concerns seem philosophical, which I don't think OP was asking about.
      • doublerabbit 6y ago
        And this is the problem for anyone outside of the CompSci field. To those it looks like URL non-sense but it's rooted far deeper then that. This isn't philosophical. By choosing to use AMP, you are ultimately choosing to destroy the internet. You're granting the power of one company to run and control what you visit, do, use. Your surrendering your data for them to make money off to use and abuse. Your supporting the downfall of innovation. Your eliminating development of opportunities and innovation. Denying fairness. Nothing there is philosophical, that's all real all because you choose to use Google Amp. --- The internet is made up from many devices connected somehow Without a search engine how would you locate information? You can't unless you knew Computer X has the information on what you need. Just as an encyclopedia has an index telling you to look which volume and page to open. A search engine crawls from computers to computers in hunt for information and then records it in a catalog. So when you search "dogs" this is then retrieved within the catalog for any computers that hold information on dogs. This costs money, so what's a way of making money? Sell search results. My information on dogs is not that useful but I do like users visiting my webpage because I may sell pet related items. So I pay google £100 to list my website at the top when someone searches "dog". Great, I am now top of the list. Others do the same and get their search results on the top too. However, my friend who is a vet has a information piece on if a dog is sick, and the remedy on what to do. Unfortunately they don't have the money to boost their page to the top, so it gets buried. Some pseudo science website makes a page about dog cures and pays for it's rank. The information I need on how to cure a dogs cold is now buried further but that's okay, I now have a fake remedy on how to cure a dogs cold. Next up is Google Amp. Amp is disguised to load the pages faster, but all it's really doing is collecting information about the user who visits, and redirects them to a branded copy-paste version of the original website and sells the users information. I'm really a company who sells placebo medicine for dogs, my medicine has killed a few dogs in the past but no worries, it's trusted because I'm with Google Amp. At the same time google implements a new policy "You must use AMP to be part of google search engine pages 1 to 6" -- This in return costs money to implement. So now the vet piece on how to cure a dog's cold is now on page 7. Who goes to page seven on google? The average user normally stops around page three. Well, now you've got to pay money to get a listing and now that anybody can cram an illegitimate idea into a web page and in which so long as it's encoded as AMP content – it'll look like it's from a legit new organization endorsed by Google. On top you are at Google’s mercy when it comes to how (and even if) your content is actually displayed. If google doesn't like your page, swipe, there goes your listing. Your a vet, you don't have money to implement AMP, nor do you have the money to get your page to the top which you now can't because your not using AMP. So the vet isn't getting any visitors, your vet practice is unknown in the world apart from local town folk. So not only are you crippling businesses from thriving because of Amp, your supporting a dominated chosen google market. Google wants you all within googles walled garden. Above is a jist of it. But AMP is bad, there is NO good coming from AMP. By supporting amp, your support death of freedom.
• bsanr2 6y ago
  I posted a while ago about how chilling it was to me how dysfunctional Google Search (and really, every search engine) is these days. It is still your best-bet "front door to the web," and it's been fundamentally broken by the pivot towards ML-based natural language search (e.g., dropping of whole search terms to fit the model of what it "thinks" you're searching for), its bias towards recency and "brands," and its inability to properly index the content on platforms like Facebook. The result is that large swaths of the web are essentially inaccessible. It's contracting. I feel it as acutely as amnesia.
  • alangibson 6y ago
    The recency bias and a bias towards 'N things to X in YYYY' lists kills me. It's so bad.
• walrus01 6y ago
  I would be very interested in seeing HN commenters' theories on the following scenarios: A) what happens if Google decides to stop funneling money to Mozilla? What becomes of Firefox? B) at what point do you think the $350+ million/year cash flow to Firefox will get cut off? C) do you think Mozilla has a reasonable chance of success of replacing that amount of money with a deal with Microsoft/bing?
  • acomjean 6y ago
    I’m optimistic and think they’ll get some other funding, when the money starts to dry up. There are some companies that probably have a strong interest in google not controlling the web entirely. Though it will be hard to replace that revenue entirely.
  • konaraddi 6y ago
    > B) at what point do you think the $350+ million/year cash flow to Firefox will get cut off? I think there's at least 3 reasons why Google wants to continue funding Firefox: 1. To get access to 200M+ users for their search ads 2. To have a competitor that helps Google make money and so Firefox can serve as evidence, that Chrome has competition and Google isn't trying to stomp out competition, in anti-trust cases. 3. To stop other search engines (e.g. Bing) from partnering with Mozilla. If Google were to not renew the contract next time, then they take two risks: 1. What if a lot of former Firefox users switch to something other than Chrome? 2. What if someone continues funding Firefox so Google loses out on the additional reach for their search ads? The benefit of cutting off the funding could be quickening Firefox's downfall and, perhaps, the bulk of Firefox users switching to Chrome. I think Google will cut off the deal when the number of Firefox users drops enough for the risks to be negligible. Until then, Firefox will continue to slowly lose users and the bulk of those will switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari. I wonder what the breakdown is. I'd suspect the platform default largely dictates which browser a former Firefox user switches to.
• doliveira 6y ago
  Didn't we do this to ourselves, though? The tech community did decide that vendor lock-in is okay, walled gardens are okay and also that a browser monopoly is okay. My impression is that this is what's different this time: it was chosen by developers themselves
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    Didn't we do this to ourselves, though? Does it matter? We still give cancer treatment to smokers. We still give dialysis to alcoholics. We still pull the plastic out of our own oceans.
    • searchableguy 6y ago
      Not for free where I live. They have to pay for the treatment.
  • dakna 6y ago
    I think Chromium/Chrome won because it was the better tech product and also mostly open source and free to use. Closer to web standards, faster to use, isolated process rendering etc. This was and still is fueled by lot's of money, coming from platform economics, not from a walled garden strategy in the sense of AOL (proprietary standards, locked down access). Users actually like it, because it's free and works well. Developers like it because it's actively supported including dev tools and has a large enough user base to treat it as the default platform. It's just not possible to have a competing product based on the same open standards if you don't have the same amount of cash to give it away for free. And IT budgets are cash-strapped outside of the VC bubble too, it makes sense to choose the market leader and code against that platform. Similar to the old "Best viewed with Internet Explorer 3" back then, but now at least with better standard compatibility.
• pilinia 6y ago
  I hate Safari, but Apple here have really good opportunity to step up. With opening Safari for PC and Android and at the same time improving Safari along, they could cut quite a share from Chrome and stop this nonsence. But they seemed to dithched focus on web platform as it is still such mess for both users and developers, so meh. Chrome for me is done, using it only for PWA.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    In a way it's a shame Microsoft went for Blink rather than WebKit.
  • hu3 6y ago
    Some of the market share that Safari would gain would be taken from Firefox. That could be the last blow to any meaningful Firefox market share.
• simias 6y ago
  The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. You'd need a constant pressure to prevent this situation and given that the USA would be in the best position to do that I'm not holding by breath. The internet started decentralized because there was no money to make and we were still figuring things out. As soon as it became mainstream it started to coalesce and we're just now reaching the final stage of this evolution. Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Good luck convincing the internet population at large. Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.
  • andromeduck 6y ago
    IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such a change between their market share independence affording them the opportunity to create such a market without drawing immediate regulator scrutiny as all the other browser players would have; their failure to do so will ultimately seal legacy and fate.
    • searchableguy 6y ago
      https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-experiment-web-monetization/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/introducing-our-exper... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-firefox-reality/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...
• dewijones92 6y ago
  A good idea would be to state fund Mozilla.
  • person_of_color 6y ago
    Fund Mozilla by mining crypto (with permission)
    • zelly 6y ago
      CPU mining is notoriously unprofitable. If you got every single Firefox-running desktop to mine Monero or some other coin that can be CPU mined, you'd be lucky to break a couple thousand dollars a year. This would be at the expense of wrecking batteries, wrecking SSDs, and annoying all users.
• cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-mail is seen as arcane and tricky, lots of these people do no searching, and rarely leave Facebook. If they can't find it through Facebook (or a Twitter feed sometimes) they act bewildered. This may sound like exaggeration, but there really are people like this. I think this is even more problematic.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • huffmsa 6y ago
    I was very unaware that people use Facebook as their source for forums and groups until my wife started talking about the groups she's in and the wild stuff that goes on. My facebook experience is similar to how it was in '08. Updates from friends, though those are getting less common.
  • kristopolous 6y ago
    Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally
    • searchableguy 6y ago
      What's the difference between hn and a facebook group?
      • chrisco255 6y ago
        HN does not have 2 billion users and teams of thousands of developers working to exploit psychology and an ad monopoly to keep you on HN.
• saos 6y ago
  > AMP, a technology no one asked for !!!
• emptyparadise 6y ago
  Chromium should be taken away from Google and put in the hands of some truly neutral non-profit entity.
  • flowerlad 6y ago
    Use Edge instead of Chrome. If Edge's market share increases at the expense of Chrome then eventually Microsoft will have equal control over Chromium. Microsoft is not a better company in any way, but two companies controlling the most widely used browsing platform is better than one company controlling it.
    • emptyparadise 6y ago
      Good point. It's not an ideal situation, but it beats Google alone holding the keys and could even lead to the outcome I mentioned in my first comment if non-profit free software advocates play their cards well.
• cloudking 6y ago
  Surprised the article doesn't mention Microsoft Edge built off Chromium, that was the nail in the coffin. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/08/03/microsoft-edge-overtakes-firefox-to-become-number-1-chrome-alternative/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/08/03/micr...
  • The_rationalist 6y ago
    Microsoft is shipping huge improvements to chromium for the benefit of everybody. They prove that with enough non-google human resources, chromium can be just fine. Mozilla will die before realizing they were the most needed chromium contributors.
• Eiskugel 6y ago
  and? I'm using the internet to buy things, research things, share memories, call people, pay, get payed etc. Just because 20 years ago people build small websites (including me) doesn't mean the internet should be a bunch of private niche websites. Not many people ever found my websites. No one cared.
• acdha 6y ago
  The point on video is missing the real problem: relying on ads as the default funding model. It’s never been easier to serve high-quality video but many places use YouTube or Facebook instead because they don’t want to get an unexpected bill for bandwidth and search remains a problem in some applications.
• mvn9 6y ago
  >I think it’s safe to say that Google’s AdWords is the dominant advertising platform on the open Web, which means it holds a commanding position in the Web’s finances. That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. (Which is enhanced by content providers being threatened by AMP.) I don't see Google in a very secure position. Their employees nowadays don't seem to care which will become a huge problem once Google has to actually react to a changing market. Amazon is getting product searches and Facebook can take over everything else whenever they want because Google's results don't come from analysing the web but from showing the pages that other people with the same queries are visiting. Additionally, Huawei is forced to setup their own app store. If they have the better TikTok app, and online payment with wechat, the next generation of users will switch. China has so much more developers that a Chinese app store will become the more interesting place for new apps. With Zoom and TikTok, they have shown that they can create competitive apps.
  • nqzero 6y ago
    agree that I see google as vulnerable and the space could move very quickly - for end users, there's no lock-in (compared to eg facebook with the network effect) but is Zoom chinese ?
  • cheph 6y ago
    > That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. Can you elaborate on what a native payment option would entail? How would it be different from non native payment options? How would it be different from crypto or other payment options that already exist?
    • mvn9 6y ago
      Like barrenko said in another comment [1]: >Wasn't it that the creators of Netscape wanted to put some kind of payment protocol similar to crypto in the original browser but ran into trouble with the government, can't remember anymore. 402 error was famously reserved for money trouble. You could have one standard, in the same way that webpages are standardized. Then you could use your preferred option on any webpage. It would come with your browser, so no need to install anything. Unlike the Apple app store, you wouldn't have one player controlling everything, so the payment network wouldn't take 30% of all profits. Of course, whatever is feasible as a standard is also feasible as a plugin, or at least, like Brave, as a new Browser, if Google limits the plugin api. The difference is that nowadays, every payment option tries to be the winner, preventing every other player from advancing. With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything. I think the biggest difference would be that people would pay for single articles and videos from obscure sources. Nowadays you have to hand out your credit card or register for an obscure payment network like Brave or patreon. People register for Netflix, but not for a blog they visit one time in their life. It's very likely that a webpage and a visitor use different payment options, thus payment is not possible. As a consequence, everything is paid with adverts, like the article states. With a standard, that would shift and the default option would be a clean article without ads. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177888
• barrenko 6y ago
  Wasn't it that the creators of Netscape wanted to put some kind of payment protocol similar to crypto in the original browser but ran into trouble with the government, can't remember anymore. 402 error was famously reserved for money trouble.
• barrenko 6y ago
  Maybe the search itself will die to this monopolization. You go to Wikipedia for basic stuff, Hacker News for drama and shame you don't know Lisp, Khan Academy for math, Facebook/IG, Twitter, et cetera...
• jhoechtl 6y ago
  I thought hell will freeze first but ... can we please have Safari on Windows? Just to have one real alternative?
  • makecheck 6y ago
    Safari did exist on Windows, up to version 5 or so; was discontinued a couple years ago.
    • pjmlp 6y ago
      Yep, my last project using it on Windows was around 2011.
• mehdix 6y ago
  IMHO if Firefox could support publishers and creators with a kind of micro-payment, that would solve a fundamental problem that is basically killing the open web.
  • andrewkdinh 6y ago
    You may be interested in Firefox Better Web, in which Firefox partnered with Scroll to support publishers https://firstlook.firefox.com/betterweb/ https://firstlook.firefox.com/betterweb/
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  I love Google. Because the alternative is Apple which is literally an abusive relationship. Apple has the final say on what you run on your device. Apple blocks devs from developing for their devices unless you pay them thousands of dollars for inferior hardware. In comparison, Google is like an open utopia.
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    Google is anything but open and anything but a utopia, I can't see how they could be called 'an open utopia' by any stretch of the imagination. Also, Apple isn't the 'alternative to Google'. The open web is an alternative to Google and Google is doing what it can to strangle it.
• sbierwagen 6y ago
  > Lacking native distributed search allowed Google to grab a monopoly position as the entry point to the web. I am curious to hear what the author would propose instead. I’m not sure keeping a local cache of all web text would work very well.
• jhoechtl 6y ago
  The internet economy is a winner takes it all economy. With the US being so weak in market regulations, the development of natural monopolies is just a natural effect of that.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  "Looking at Mozilla's finances, it's reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay." There seems to be an implicit assumption by those commenting on Mozilla's downsizing that the antitrust case against Google is going to take the same path as the case against Microsoft. Google's anti-competitive conduct under examination will not be focused on Chrome, it will be focused on the markets for search and advertising. Mozilla does not provide any potential competition in those markets. The case against Microsoft focused on the software industry. Today, the focus is on the onlilne advertising industry. Netscape was a software company, like Microsoft. Mozilla however is not an online advertising services company like Google.
  • Dotnaught 6y ago
    Mozilla serves as a counter balance to Google in web standards discussions. Without enough Firefox market share, Mozilla will be less able to shape the web’s technical development.
• cs702 6y ago
  With our implicit mass approval, the 'Constitution' of the modern Web is being authored by a few giant tech companies. This 'Constitution' will give us the Web of a few giant tech companies, for those few giant tech companies, by those few giant tech companies. Many here on HN, including me, wish we could have a Web of the people, for the people, by the people.
  • err4nt 6y ago
    The individual (and so also teams of individuals) have never had more powerful technology available to build websites and web apps, and access to be able to put amazing things online than right now. We _should_ be able to do all kinds of things previously unimaginable. When people start caring about competition and a healthier ecosystem more, I don't think it will take long for good competition to arise, the issue right now is that some people don't care because they don't understand why they should care (these people can be educated) and some people just don't care (not sure what we can do about these people except give them time).
    • erichocean 6y ago
      > * The individual (and so also teams of individuals) have never had more powerful technology* The issue, as always, is relative power—which absolutely skews heavily in Google's favor. Individuals accessing the web today have far less relative power than 25 years ago, even if they can accomplish "more" with less effort.
• ramon 6y ago
  I myself only build websites with Google Authentication I don't see any other competitor in this space everyone has a Google account and I don't have to deal with Infosec. Who doesn't have a Google account? Yes Google rules the web and there's not much we can do but live with it, I also like the fact that Google gives us a bunch of things for free and many people don't take this into account. Think about all the free things Google is giving you at this moment? Do you use Gmail? Do you search in Google? Do you want a paid alternative to Gmail or to searching? Come on let us not be children.
  • biztos 6y ago
    I dislike AMP because it's Google trying to own parts of the web that should not be ownable. Every non-Google service I log into that allows external auth supports at least Facebook and plain old e-mail in addition to Google. Maybe your experience is different, but I use a lot of very mainstream services both free and paid. I know people who don't have Google accounts. I only use Gmail as a throwaway address for when I expect spam (e.g. signing up for dodgy-looking web sites). I happily admit I'm a huge fan of Google Maps and would not at all mind paying for it, and I actually do pay for YouTube, but everything else from Google has pretty good alternatives as far as I can see. (And even Maps has acceptable alternatives, it's just that much better.) AMP is like putting all the non-Gmail mail you receive on your Gmail account into a separate folder, and only including Gmail senders in your Inbox.
  • andrewkdinh 6y ago
    I hate when websites do this. I don’t use anything Google unless I’m forced to (work email, Google Drive for my school, etc.). And unless I absolutely need to use your site, I will avoid it like the plague. It’s not just limited to Google; it’s for any site providing only third-party OAuth login. I can never remember which one I signed in with, and if that service ever shuts down, it’ll be a pain to figure which of the hundreds of services I’ve signed up for using that OAuth login. It’s much easier to change an email. And yes, I do use a paid alternative to Gmail (ProtonMail)
    • ramon 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dvduval 6y ago
  302 Redirect: Just an observation that whenever there is something critical of Google here, the leading comments always are talking about something besides Google. There is sort of a redirection at work.
• krm01 6y ago
  > Looking at Mozilla’s finances, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay. This insight seems highly plausible and sad at the same time.
• notjustanymike 6y ago
  Well this is all horribly depressing.
• tambourine_man 6y ago
  > AMP, a technology no one asked for I love that. Quoting for emphasis.
• lxe 6y ago
  The original 'classic' web is still there. It's just harder to find, ironically, thanks to Google.
• cheph 6y ago
  > Two deficiencies have determined the course the Web has taken: lack of native search and lack of native payments. What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why. Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds". Given that we still don't have good solutions to either of these problems it seems the right answer according to this person would be to just skip the internet. This feels like a gripe without substance, yes we know these are hard problems, saying that Google's dominance is a consequence of the IETF not integrating these into HTTP is absurd and baseless.
  • mjburgess 6y ago
    Just read it as an interesting counter-factual: if the web had had search/payments via some native protocol, then it would have developed without google. There is also a reasonable argument to saying that search/payments are so fundamental to what the web became that a solution at the protocol-layer would be appropriate.
    • cheph 6y ago
      Well I would agree if those things were easy to solve universally, and were solved universally, it would be nice, but nothing in the development of the web has been easily solved universally, and there is no central committee choosing to solve these problems or to not solve them. IETF has an open process, open to everyone. If the author wants to integrate it into HTTP, well they can actually try and make that case through the open standards process. The questions of what does native suppoert imply and in what protocol should it be integrated are still unanswered. It seems very low effort to me, at least give a high level rundown of what that practically means and what he expects to see. Bitcoin runs on open standard protocols, why is it not native? Is it because it is not ratfied by the IETF? Same question goes for existing P2P search engines. And even with protocols, you still need infrastructure. HTTP being an open protocol does not give me free HTTP hosting, and search indexing and lookup similarly won't be free. I think if it was easy to solve these problems and integrate them into HTTP it would be easy to solve them outside HTTP and it is not clear why the solutions must be integrated into some existing protocol like TCP, IP or HTTP.
• Maha-pudma 6y ago
  What happens to people like me, no Google search, no Facebook, no amp, etc if this came about?
• bambax 6y ago
  The real mystery is why nobody has ever been able to do better search than Google, or at least just as good. Of course search is really hard, but how is it possible that huge companies with nearly infinite money and talent (MS / Apple / Amazon) were never able to do it? MS actually tried; it's unclear if the others even gave it a thought. The rest of Google is different. I use Gmail but could easily switch. I've not used Chrome for over a year now and really don't miss it (either on desktop or mobile). Google maps are the best but others would be good enough if need be. But search? Every time I try to use Duck Duck Go I'm extremely disappointed. Google search is something I don't think I could live without.
  • mjburgess 6y ago
    I suspect people optimising for google over the last, c. 20 years has made the difference. ie., people have spent years writing their sites explicitly with google SEO in-mind... add-in all the data google has via adwords...
    • why_only_15 6y ago
      Why can't other search engines just hook into those same signals though?
      • dmitriid 6y ago
        Because they don't have the traffic/market share to do that. And it's not just search. Every single Google property ultimately feeds into Google's search engine.
        • why_only_15 6y ago
          The traffic and market share shouldn't matter if these are SEO signals inside the application itself, like in the HTML. Those are independent from traffic.
  • lazyjeff 6y ago
    I did my Ph.D. in information retrieval and had studied the workings of the 3 major search engines from the inside during various points about a decade ago. Without giving away any trade secrets, part of it is the power of search behavior data (for example, what you click on after a search, how long before you go back to the search page, etc.). The more popular your search engine, the more search behavior data you have, which makes the search results better especially for tail queries (the less common searches). So then you attract more searchers, and it's a cycle that is hard for a newcomer to break into. It's why academia has given up on competing with commercial search engines in the web space, and why alternative search engines are just begging at the table right now.
• jacquesm 6y ago
  This article hits the nail squarely on the head in a number of important ways. There is one small silver lining: when and if Google manages to successfully turn the rest of the web into ca. 1992 style information providers for their updated version of videotext there might be just enough breathing room to create something even better. After all the web killed AOL, with Google going after the AOL playbook they set themselves up for a similar debacle. When it isn't 'the internet' anymore a service will quickly lose value.
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  Have you not met capitalism before?
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  The original web didn't even have images, but you think they should have just invented the most advanced neural net ever built instead of urls? Monday morning quarterbacks...
• dmje 6y ago
  Asking a rhetorical and irritating question - but one which web nerds need to be much better at answering: why, exactly does it matter? Don't get me wrong, I'm totally uncomfortable with a monopoly of this scale; I'm a Firefox user, a Pihole user, a non-FB user. But when people (non nerds) ask me why, it's hard to answer. They're all happy enough: Chrome is fast, AMP is faster, they get to find out the stuff they want to find out from incredibly accurate search, or Facebook - so what's the actual problem here? My answer is normally about principles or competition or fairness but in practical terms, I haven't got a lot of answers. Help me out here.
  • lisper 6y ago
    It's about the extent to which you want to allow a very small number of very rich people to control your life and your voice. If the open web dies, if FB is all that is left, then effectively no one will be able to say anything in the public sphere without Mark Zuckerberg's permission, and no one will be able to even participate in daily life without paying Mark Zuckerberg for the privilege, even if only indirectly. Is that really the world you want to live in?
    • sukilot 6y ago
      Compared to the world before Zuckerberg where there was not even that way?
  • TekMol 6y ago
    Many reasons come to mind. Here is one: When one entity controls the web and you run a web based business, then you have to live in constant fear that they will destroy it. By accident or by malice. One example how this is already happening is AMP. Google says "Give us your content or we will send people interested in it to your competitors instead". And they get away with it.
  • zanny 6y ago
    Having any infrastructure controlled by a publicly traded corporation has enormous historical precedent to lead to the dissolution of that infrastructure for shareholder profit. Once Google feels comfortable with doing so not allowing arbitrary routing in Chrome will be on the table to control what websites people visit. The only things stopping that is a feeble threat of state intervention or the threat of competition in the browser space reclaiming market share as a result. They can, and probably will, take Chrome wholly proprietary at some point. Microsoft kowtowing to their engine is in their favor for now, but long term its in their business interests that Microsoft not have a browser anymore. That they present Chrome as the only option to users. We can mire in the details of what a browser is, but for 99% of people Chrome is a program you run that shows you the stuff you want. The http, html, etc underpinnings are totally irrelevant. Chrome could be doing anything as long as it were showing the content the user of it expects. Google has already done this in the past with things like SPDY. I'm sure standards realize this - its why http/2 was a thing after all - that at this point if Google creates a new protocol it is de-facto required to become a standard because that is the only way for alternative browsers to keep pace with Chrome. As such Google gets to dictate the future of hypertext. Not the users of the platform, not standards bodies formed to collaborate, the board of directors of a publicly traded US company.
• parasubvert 6y ago
  This article’s core premises are somewhat nonsensical. 1. Lack of native distributed search led to Google’s monopoly. “The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.” This doesn’t make any sense. Google’s entire early innovation was to use hyperlinks as an indicator of popularity and thus a proxy metric for veracity, and PageRank was born. Original attempts at distributed search based on other metrics like text analysis were tried (Webcrawler, AltaVista which was used by Yahoo, Inktomi which was used by Lycos, HotBot, etc) but didn’t produce better results, and Google eventually grew to #1 by 2004 (6 years after intro). Google could not have existed without the hyperlink. The reason it has a monopoly today is largely due to investment cycles and intellectual property law: after the dot com bust, there wasn’t exactly an appetite to build new search engines given PageRank was patented and would need to be licensed (it expired in 2019). This monopoly doesn’t matter as much: generic search engine use has been declining for years in favour of other approaches to finding content (social media, syndication, domain specific aggregators, etc). Decentralized Index/search (not just distributed but truly decentralized) remains an open research problem. it may be possible to improve and deploy with the right incentives and investment, but it’s ludicrous to think this was possible in 1992-1998. 2. Lack of native payments led to advertising to take off. This has no factual basis: CGI-bin scripts to purchase things with HTTP POST calls existed as early as 1993. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. PayPal started when Google did, in 1998. More importantly, most viewed the web as another visual media like Television, which was ad-driven. People generally didn’t like paying for things that felt free, like information, or music, or movies. But again, the Ad Words monopoly remains tenuous. Facebook has been steamrolling it in growth and will eventually eclipse it. We are also seeing a lot more willingness for people to pay for content to avoid ads. 3. “poor native video support (it is hyper_text_ after all)” It was called hypermedia widely by around 1995 when images and audio (Real Networks in particular) took off, there just wasn’t the processing power, bandwidth, or compression algorithms available to make this real until 1998 when MP4 came out. Google’s early attempt at video, Google Videos, was a market failure. They had to buy YouTube which (most importantly) made it easy to publish videos compared to others, but it took many years for it to reach #1. And that position too is threatened between Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc. In summary, Google is #1 in a number of markets due to a combination of smart business moves, smart technology, being an early player, and the business/investment climate at key inflection points of the industry. There are a large number of competitive pressures against Google that make this lead tenuous. Google is as vulnerable as AOL or Microsoft were in the late 90s, when they were thought to be unassailable. As for the health of the web, let’s remember that regardless of all the claims of the death of the web, whether native mobile, or WebSockets, or walled gardens, GraphQL, or single page apps or accelerators like Amp (which had to change offer direct hyperlink access due to complaints), the web remains entrenched, omnipresent, and has no clear replacement. This matters because the core architecture of the web: URLs, HTTP, MIME, and (to a somewhat shrinking extent) HTML remains the foundational glue that holds all this mess of media and technology together, and is fundamentally about enabling decentralization. URLs still are the main way that native mobile apps integrate with the network. HTML is still the default fallback UI. HTTP is still the primary application protocol by far. All of this was the design intent of the architecture of the Web: to last decades, regardless of how the origin servers or user agents evolved. It’s an architecture ripe for innovation to make decentralized alternatives to today’s incumbents. To paraphrase John Lennon, centralization is over, if you want it. But this requires the experience to be actually better for users, and not just in an “eat your vegetables / don’t give your privacy away” manner. Starting a new venture to take this on requires a combination of investment, insight, and commitment that’s not easy to assemble. But it can and probably will happen, relative to legislation or very possible social catastrophes that entrench the current players longer than needed.
• monkeydust 6y ago
  Well I am fully of chrome onto ms Edge. Better performance and features, really hope ms keep investing in it.
• gego 6y ago
  Well, the EU should just fork or support existing open source Mozilla projects and pay developers... but looking at the budget there seem to be a lot of... unnecessary... money sinks. 80 Mil for management... 200 for dev... but the security team had to be downsized... yeah right. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
  • hu3 6y ago
    I don't get why someone would downvote your proposal funding Firefox directly. Mozilla never provided a way of donating directly to Firefox.
• z3t4 6y ago
  If Google kills the web it will be suicide as Google depends on the web for search.
• grumbel 6y ago
  I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. You can consume on the open web just fine, but for publishing you need to own a server, not just a client. That in turn gave growth to Youtube, Facebook and Co., as they allowed people to publish content with just a web client. Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web.
  • sukilot 6y ago
    Does NAT and Dynamic DNS count as a server?
  • Lammy 6y ago
    It was called RSS, and there were plenty of free and paid providers who would host your feeds and even feed content (like podcast audio) for you. The most popular was called FeedBurner, and you can imagine what became of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79408?hl=en https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79408?hl=en
    • the_other 6y ago
      These are fine for techies. Non-techies prefer the Facebook “Post” button (or whatever it’s labelled today).
      • Lammy 6y ago
        You are comparing this frozen-in-time 2007 (pre-iPhone!) UX to your modern ideas of publishing workflows. The RSS ship has sailed, and that’s why I am explicitly talking about it in the past-tense here. It’s important to not forget the things that came and went, lest we convince ourselves that that’s how the world has always been and start mistakenly speculating about why a particular category of thing has “never existed”.
  • adamnew123456 6y ago
    > I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and read what John Carmack was doing on any given week [1]. The problem with this approach is that the internet (not just the web) is not end-to-end. Assuming your ISP isn't using CGNAT, I have to: - Punch a hole in my firewall or setup up a DMZ host. Unless my workstation is the only thing on my network and hooked directly into my modem, but nobody does that. Everybody has a LAN with private addressing. - Setup dynamic DNS, since there's no guarantee that my ISP has given me a static address. In practice this isn't that bad, but if I lose power in a thunderstorm you need to have the same name you had before. - Harden and update whatever service I run. It'll get probed regularly, and is a high value target since it presumably runs on the same machine where I run my password manager or buy things using I credit card. A VPS is just a convenience and security measure here. You get a public IP address without any additional management (default-deny firewall, NAT) and can isolate your private data from the VPS which is more likely to be compromised. The alternative would be to make a new network which gets rid of all the extra layers of management - just your machine, with a publicly accessible name that you can point people to. No smart network appliances in-between imposing NAT, DHCP, or firewalls beyond the one on your machine. I think there are P2P networks which work like this, or Tor if you give your machine a name in the .onion namespace. I don't know of any which are better on the security aspect though. [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html [1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  And what are we doing about it? The majority (even webdevs) use Chrome, we don't use Firefox or other alternatives out of principle, we just pick what's easiest. A lot of us could be participating either in Firefox or a web-engine that's easier to integrate, but we aren't? What are we doing instead? It doesn't seem as if most of us care.
• bshanks 6y ago
  Anti-monopoly legislation is important, but it is also important to create a mechanism for funding public goods. Browsers are necessary to keep the web open, and there should be a mechanism for society to fund that, even if it does cost $400 million a year. Current funding mechanisms for this sort of thing are focused on the creation of new scientific knowledge, but we also need funding focused on widely used open software.
• fencepost 6y ago
  Relevant here is a discussion of Google's big shift from sending you to sites into keeping you on Google controlled sites. Worth a listen: https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2020/08/what-went-wrong-with-google-search https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2020/08/what-went-w... (transcript available on the same page, but auto-generated and not great) And from the same journalist, words to not use if you work at Google and are talking about your employer or its offerings. https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
• mawise 6y ago
  Why is there so little interest in helping people self-host their own content? I know it wouldn't be a panacea, but it feels like at least a step in the right direction. This is a big part of the motivation for my side-project to help people run their own private blogs - https://simpleblogs.org/ https://simpleblogs.org/
  • Lammy 6y ago
    Hard to get paid for altruism. Who’s going to pay my rent for me if I want to help humanity?
• kqvamxurcagg 6y ago
  A bit late to the party here but Google's monopolistic tendencies are only increasing. When you login to any Google service, Chrome automatically recognises your login and keeps you logged in. The only way to disable this is in advanced settings. These kinds of practices should not be allowed. We need anti-monopoly action to avoid complete dominance by these tech companies. Google services need to be split up and run independently.