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Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web into a walled garden

653 points by vord1080 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
Federal prison. Say it. Now call or email your representatives. Forget the fact that they're using anticompetitive tactics to embrace, extend, and own the web. They're illegally inflating ad prices and forcing everyone into it. Federal prison.
- dadarecit 5y ago
  If prison is the instrument through which we remove freedom and deliver rehabilitation to citizens, then what would be the equivalent instrument of justice for corporations? People who had done bad things are sent to prison; you can't apply the same process to corporations - even though corporations are considered legal "entities" you can't really jail a corporation; the few people who take the fall are usually designated fallguys and serve laughable sentence, anyways.a So, how can we truly "rehabilitate" a corporation? How do we decide which ones to send to "death row"?
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    The argument is to hold the decision-makers personally responsible.
    - dadarecit 5y ago
      Read up on apartheid - there are no decision makers. Maybe a few bad apples, some sociopaths, sure, but by and large if you look at Google, for example, you'll find mostly average people, content with doing whatever it is they are doing to get by, maybe cutting a few corners here and there and trying to get promoted so they can afford that new Tesla model. Product manager responsible for introducing the auto login in Chrome sure wasn't trying to think about how he's helping embezzle billions of dollars; poor guy was just trying to get to that sweet L7. There are no grand master minds here that you can put in prison and make an example of - and if there are, these guys would be way too well connected, and isolated with 10ft of 2000$/hour lawyers. We need to stop looking for the responsible, evil, individuals that are making this happen and start treating the problem like the systemic problem it is. We need to dismantle the systems and organizations that allow these things to happen. The US government is using these techniques against other governments, and often against terror organizations (if not against its own citizens via the justice system), so why not do the same for domestic organizations and corporations? Because they (govt & corpos) are all intertwined, to such a degree that this relationship is itself is codified into a "system" (one aspect of which are the lobbyists). We live in a world of systems and rules - we've been living like this since before Jesus walked the Earth but recently this trend has accelerated significantly: individuals can no longer be held responsible for much of anything: they depend too much on the state, on the organizations they work for, etc. etc. If you think on it every single significant aspect of your life depends on someone or something that is external to you and you have no control over. And so, good policing isn't chasing after criminals in the streets while shooting at them; good policing is preventative and in the more advanced states wouldn't even be necessary since all people would've not been allowed (or rather, given a chance) to misbehave. You don't blame or punish a man, you make it so that he can no longer do anything bad. p.s. Shit sucks, I know, I want to be free too but what can you do; we were born into an age of hyper connectivity and over socialization. We are basically slaves of the machine that I can't even name. Used to be capitalism, but I don't think that word has any real meaning left behind it any more... not when China is the most successful capitalistic nation in the world.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  Prison because someone implemented single sign on/sign out? The way people are maximalist and hyperbolic about every issue these days is disturbing. Not just on HN with regards to tech but all of the cancel culture on Twitter and other networks. When I log into my iPhone it also logs me into iCloud and starts using iCloud services for various phone related functions. I expect this rather than having to separately log into these things. In fact having to type the Apple store password is annoying. When I lose Keychain access I’m also “punished” by losing access to things it was helping me to sign into. To me this is straight up a usability issue. Passwords suck, and having the browser manage all of your credentials and authorizations is a huge win. About the only thing I might agree with as iffy is loginning you into chrome if you log into gmail without prompting you, but does Chrome actually do this without prompting you at least once? Before we send people to the gallows maybe some confirmation is needed.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Craig Federighi, you have the right to remain silent. We're taking you in today for 'conspiracy to construct a walled-garden', do you understand the charges being leveled against you?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
po1nt 5y ago
Remember "Don't be evil?" what the hell happened at Google? They appear more and more like supervillain company yet they used to be somewhat fair.
- baremetal 5y ago
  if they started out overtly evil no one would have trusted them. maybe this was the plan all along.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  They drank of the poisoned chalice of ad money. It is bad enough for most, but terrible for them because ads are worse information and search is about getting great information and making it useful. If google is to be rescued, it must do so by removing it from ads.
  - pm90 5y ago
    > They drank of the poisoned chalice of ad money. Lol, I’m going to steal this one. That’s indeed what happened. If you’ve worked in any ad tech company, you will know that the people in charge are some of the most unethical sleaze bags you will ever know. It’s all about scooping up as much data as you can: most adtech tech companies operate out of the public eye and many of them barely comply with regulations designed to protect consumer data. I was surprised that Google was so different. But then they drank from the poisoned chalice. So did Facebook, Snap, TikTok … and Reddit is trying hard tooo.
    - tomjen3 5y ago
      I meant to say that they drank of that chalice the moment they started adwords. The rest was always going to happen, though the exact timing might be up for debate. It does not matter that they are ethical sleeze bags, that is just what was eventually going to happen. Maybe the poised chalice is a bad metaphore, perhaps it would be better to say that advertising was Googles original sin, and one that will eventually undo them.
    - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
tgv 5y ago
Get Firefox now, install uBlock Origin, and live with the minor pains.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Yes!! I install uBlock Origin on every computer and browser I come across. People love it.
- vord1080 5y ago
  Seconded. Firefox is better than ever. Can't believe there isn't a Chromium derivative with multi-select, table selection, and shift+right click. Containers are also incredibly useful.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    I just want tree tabs. Vertical tabs is so much more space efficient than horizontal.
    - d3nj4l 5y ago
      If you want a chromium skin with vertical tabs, both Edge and Vivaldi offer them built into the browser.
      - patall 5y ago
        As does Firefox with the tree-style tabs extension.
        BiteCode_dev 5y ago
        Unfortunalty it requires manual css entry to hide the horizontal tabs.
      - ajvs 5y ago
        Vertical tabs are not tree style tabs, the latter is far more flexible.
emilfihlman 5y ago
Is this as damning as it sounds? Which is insanely damning?
- peakaboo 5y ago
  It's been completely obvious what Google wants to do for over a decade... Most people are just not paying attention to what they are.
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  I didn't read the whole document linked in the tweet, but no. This is equivalent quite simply to someone putting out an inferior product - for example a phone that needs to scan a government issue photo id, so the phone maker - not your carrier - can identify you. There are people who don't care, and they are the target market. There are people who laugh at it and just buy something else. They are not the target market. They did not try to change the web into anything. They tried and to some extent did change their browser into an inferior product, and change their ad network into an inferior product. Websites placing ads and ad exchanges are free to not use google's products. Web users are free not to use their product like their browser. I use google translate - that's about it. Not even maps, since heremaps is and always was simply superior. They also tried to change regulations to suit them better. But they are allowed. Trying to change here simply means making their opinion known to the people who make the rules. They didn't bribe anyone. They emailed pdf files describing their ridiculous point of view. The takeaway is they are a corporation with inferior products, who will do what's legal to make more money. Most people don't care. Some people are free to choose other products. Azure and AWS for example completely destroy GCP This is because google treats the people who do care about google's inferior points, like they're a phone user who doesn't care if they're tracked. So google can't get any marketshare there for their inferior products. Despite GCP from a purely technical aspect being superior. When packaged with the worst customer service available, and the risk of losing all your data and backups permanently w/o notification, because you mistakenly hire a guy who is known to google as a hacker? They're not even a player for any customer that plans to be successful long-term. It's a choice, pick what you want to do and who you want to do. Google is not hiding who they are. Or doing anything wrong. They just make inferior products. But VHS won the format battle.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Google shouldn’t be trusted as a key steering voice for web standards. However given their browser share and that these issues have visibility mostly in tech communities, I’m not sure if they will get the political attention they deserve. Or perhaps that is only true in the US and someone like the EU will use all these controversies as motivation to clamp down on big US tech companies and encourage local competitors.
- skohan 5y ago
  It would have to be the EU. Unfortunately anti-trust has been completely eroded in the US over the past decades.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    Impressive to be able to erode anti-trust and trust simultaneously.
    - esarbe 5y ago
      I see what you did there.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Google's fingers are going deeper than just "web standards." Filippo Valsorda, the Go lead for security, was one of the authors of TLS 1.3. He has refused to allow for configuration of TLS 1.3 ciphers in Go: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29349 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29349 Thanks to this decision: if a particular cipher is found to be weak or vulnerable, people using Go won't be able to immediately disable it. Instead, they'll be forced to wait for a release or patch, and possibly have to backport it to the version they're running in production. Another scenario, as pointed out in that ticket: sometimes other vendors don't properly implement ciphers on their end, and there's an incompatibility. Prior to TLS 1.3, one could just disable that particular cipher, perhaps even just for a particular connecting client. His response was, paraphrasing: "TLS 1.3 is amazing and awesome and will not have the same problems prior TLS versions had. It needs to Just Work, if there's a security issue we'll issue a patch, and if you can't apply it in a timely fashion you're incompetent." He seems unaware that not everyone uses Google's "just roll it out to a few hundred nodes and keep an eye on them" approach to SRE, or that major organizations don't have time to wait for a patch - they need a quick switch flip until the patch is out and can pass their normal validation before moving to production.
prvc 5y ago
The Twitter thread doesn't actually explain how this plan was supposedly to be implemented, but does contain a link to the original document.
- agilob 5y ago
  I didn't read the document, but it seems "forced Chrome login" is major step in this, the new WebExtensions manifest which reduces abilities of adblockers is probably a milestone in this process.
mupuff1234 5y ago
Having a plan vs executing a plan are quite different things. I'm sure you could find all sorts of different "plans" that never came to fruition and stopped at the brainstorming/ideas phase.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Not really surprising that states with major tech/datacenter presences aren't on this lawsuit: California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Washington (state) and North Carolina all come to mind. Texas being on it is a bit of a surprise.
- gadrev 5y ago
  Also, out of the 16 states, 15 are republican, the exception being Nevada. Hm.
  - shuckles 5y ago
    It is quite an odd coalition. And to counter GP's insinuation, California and New York prosecute large industries in their jurisdictions all the time -- in fact, that's a criticism of those states which is popular in these parts!
ebanana 5y ago
maybe plan to censor the web was so that certain dirt doesn't get out about certain people.. all these algorithm "fixes" seem to working out real well. again i don't know it just seems to be gettinb darker with certain bigger corps. hoping that it's not as bad as it seems
kwdc 5y ago
So the path was: Don't be evil. Do not be evil. Do be evil. Be evil. Evil. What an utter disappointment amongst so many. Plenty here for future generations to be further disappointed. But not necessarily surprised.
- penguin_booze 5y ago
  That's the message you hear as you move the slider over the company: from the left, the founding conscientious engineers, and to the right, the profit-maximizing, late and lateral entry executives.
  - joseloyaio 5y ago
    They just moved the slider further left IMO. Further centralization, control and censorship.
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      Centralization, control and censorship are on the authoritarian–liberal axis of the standard two-dimensional political compass, not on the left–right axis.
      - joseloyaio 5y ago
        You basically just described China.
  - pm90 5y ago
    The Google founders have managed to create this amazing narrative that they’re the good guys while all the bad decisions are just taken by the new money grubbing execs. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think they presided over a hyper growth stage of the company and left well before the pressures of profit maximization started to direct the company. It’s extremely difficult for a company to not do things that would maximize its profits. I don’t think the Founder-Good narrative is productive, it doesn’t work. One possible way to limit the harm is by regulations (or enforcement of existing ones), to make “evil” activity more expensive and thus not an option.
mikevm 5y ago
It's nice to see the hypocrisy of the people who run these companies, who on the one hand virtue signal with all the woke nonsense externally, and yet behave immorally internally.
- pm90 5y ago
  Google can both want to be hypocritical and continue to hire/promote people from marginalized communities and contribute to “woke” organizations (which to their credit, they seem to have, although recently we’ve seen the limits to what they will do).
account-5 5y ago
I've never understood the criticism of Firefox on HN. I've been a happy user since 2004. I viewed chrome the same as IE. Owned by a big US tech company that only cares about one thing, and that one thing isn't you or me, only what your and my data/views are worth. As far as I'm concerned all criticism leveled at Firefox is neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware.
- irrational 5y ago
  Same here. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively since the Firebug days, both for development and personal use. It has worked fantastically for me. But I have real issues whenever I try to use Chrome. I think it mostly comes down to what you are used to.
- 3f3ufjfde 5y ago
  Well, there are a large number of users for whom "all criticism leveled at Firefox" are/were not "neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware." For those people it's probably a combination of things which include Chrome's 'always works' factor (less of a problem these days), Firefox on mobile being trash for a long time (this has also shifted for the better), and most people not sharing your view of what spyware is.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  At some level I understand when people on HN get mad at FF increasing the size of the tab bar and the occasional changes they make in the UI/UX. I've never had a major problem with them - it's been at most an hour of getting used to the new style, if at all - but I am honestly astounded by people who think it's a good reason to switch to Chrome. Cutting off your nose to spite your face?
  - TAForObvReasons 5y ago
    Let's not pretend Mozilla is a saint or Firefox is close. Mozilla made a huge number of questionable moves over the years ("death by a thousand cuts") I personally felt that the 2014 introduction of in-browser ads (pitched as "user-enhancing") marked a huge shift. For others it was the deep integration of the proprietary Pocket extension. For still others it was the weird Mr Robot cross-promotion that was pushed via a side channel or the Cliqz in-browser tracking or the booking.com in-browser ads. At this point, it really feels like Mozilla and FF are "controlled opposition" / defense against anti-trust claims, and many of the naysayers would probably jump to a clean implementation that isn't bogged down by the lack of trust.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
This is my favorite quote: > First, Google started to leverage its ownership of the largest web browser, Chrome, to track and target publishers’ audiences in order to sell Google’s advertising inventory. To make this happen, Google first introduced the ability for users to log into the Chrome browser. Then, Google began to steer users into doing this by using deceptive and coercive tactics. For example, Google started to automatically log users into Chrome if they logged into any Google service (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). In this way, Google took the users that choose not to log into Chrome and logged them in anyways. If a user tried to log out of Chrome in response, Google punished them by kicking them out of a Google product they were in the process of using (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). On top this, through another deceptive pattern, Google got these users to give the Chrome browser permission to track them across the open web and on independent publisher sites like The Dallas Morning News. These users also had to give Google permission to use this new Chrome tracking data to sell Google’s own ad space, permitting Google to use Chrome to circumvent reliance on cookie-tracking technology.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  That's disgusting. What a reprehensible company.
- dragonelite 5y ago
  Yeah it was super annoying I had separate accounts for gmail/android and youtube. It is always a hassle to make sure im logged in with the correct account.
llimos 5y ago
It looks like xkcd #792 has its answer.
splatzone 5y ago
So it seems to me the most pressing issue is still creating a viable alternative to Google Search. I've tried to use Duck Duck Go and even Bing in the past but I've just not found the quality of the results to be nearly the same. However - recently I've found G Search is getting steadily worse. They've made UX changes that make it harder to view cached pages, and it seems to ignore search operators frequently. This is the biggest foothold to their dominance. YouTube, Gmail, Maps and everything else is in a supporting role to this core product. Who is actively working on this and what is proving so challenging? What is stopping us from creating a viable Google clone, with the same level of high quality results?
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  Yea I really wonder why they don't have competition. You'd think a search engine built with java in the mid 90s would be easy to replicate at least to it's 2005 era standard using modern tech.
  - erezsh 5y ago
    The unique value Google has is the mass of users who provide them with data, by clicking (or not clicking) their search results. It's the same way with most of the big websites - they wouldn't get to where they are if they started out today. But having all this pre-existing traffic is a huge part of why they're more useful than their competitors.
    - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
      A lot of super technical stuff I'm googling at work all day I feel like is fairly static content that I think old school google excelled at. Modern Google is great for finding a local restaurant but not so much at figuring out the nuance in some searches.
- pembrook 5y ago
  > I've tried to use Duck Duck Go and even Bing in the past but I've just not found the quality of the results to be nearly the same. I’m not surprised you found no difference in Duck Duck Go or Bing. Duck Duck Go is just a whitelabel version of Bing. Pretty much every search engine that isn’t Google uses the bing api. It’s only the illusion of choice.
dschuetz 5y ago
Welp, it's time to de-google my networks then. Facebook traffic is already blocked, now I wonder how much Web content I will lose when I block all google traffic.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Genuine question: knowing you know and have apparently known for a while, why is this the thing that puts you over the edge? Or did you not realize that Google was just as bad as Facebook?
  - dschuetz 5y ago
    I have been thinking about de-googling for quite a while now, far longer than de-facebooking, but it's not as easy. Half the web depends on google services (and it's even worse with AWS) and I was considering how much pain it would cause me to block all google traffic at once. Now I don't care. Now I will try and block most of it, while still having some degree of usability, or having the option using anonymizing tools. Example: Youtube is almost as ubiquitous as google, and some of my friends use it for good content. How can I still use it and still give google the least amount of personal data as possible, if any? It's far easier with facebook, I just don't care about it as much as with blocking google.
vander_elst 5y ago
It might be true, but what's the source? Is there a link to some screenshot of some internal email?
- mtmail 5y ago
  Page 94 of the document (which is page 99 in the PDF).
Beggers1960 5y ago
Yikes. Imagine our shock at this one.
tyingq 5y ago
Are there some guesses on what the NERA acronym means? Now Everyone Reads AMP?
- tyingq 5y ago
  Read up on the Celtic story of "Nera", and maybe there's a tie in? At a feast, King Ailill made a dare of sorts, for anyone who would put a wicker band around the foot of a recently deceased corpse. In their land, the recently deceased were rumored to have great power, so nobody was willing to take the bait, even though the King was offering a vast reward. Until Nera stepped up to do it. So, perhaps analogous to harnessing (tying a band around) the (mostly dead but still powerful) old free/open internet?
achairapart 5y ago
I see, used to be called NERA, today best known as AMP.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nyx_land 5y ago
A lot of people here saying to install Firefox in the comments for a thread about how Google goes to pretty much any lengths it can go manipulate the market in its favor, when Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from Google and Mozilla has been making many suspiciously baffling and stupid decisions for years now to destroy its own market share, is really rich. I use Firefox when I need a fat modern browser and not something like Netsurf or Nyxt, but that's mostly just a futile symbolic act of defiance on my part. Anyone who thinks Mozilla is the company they once were and that they really are trying to fight the good fight for the open web is kidding themselves. Their brand is being the underdog non-profit open web activism company, but I can't think of anything they've done to meaningfully fight for that. They've sure wasted a lot of time on stupid side projects and ad deals, and I guess they still have Gecko because the code already exists and it'd destroy any facade of competition in the browser market if they switched to Chromium, but if they really were the company people think they are they wouldn't have laid off so many critical teams in 2020. They certainly wouldn't have shitcanned the Servo project, really the only possible threat to Google's de facto monopoly over the web and the biggest meaningful way to fight for the open web. I know it's been said a ton but the fact that they did that while giving their incompetent CEO a raise and are continuing to put funding into cancerous Web 3.0 shit (VR in the browser? really?) and dumb side projects like their VPN grift should be enough of an indicator to anyone with a brain that Mozilla is controlled opposition at this point and probably being paid off by Google to tank their market share. Maybe it sounds like I need to take my tinfoil hat off, but after everything that's been happening lately with Facebook and Google I don't think this is much of a stretch at all.
- vord1080 5y ago
  > They certainly wouldn't have shitcanned the Servo project, really the only possible threat to Google's de facto monopoly over the web and the biggest meaningful way to fight for the open web. Anyone that followed Servo closely knows it was a dead end. It was literally never going to ship, ever. They freaking started a rewrite of the layout component at some point. Simple pages like google.com kept breaking. It was an R&D project, the good stuff already got merged into gecko (Stylo, WebRender). A lot of top servo contributors and GFX people got moved to Gecko. The project fulfilled its purpose, it made Gecko better.
DeathMetal3000 5y ago
I tried Chrome long ago. It was a fine browser. But the it tried to log me in way too hard and gave me the creepy feeling of being followed in a dark alley. I’m sure I could have turned off that functionality but the fact it even existed was unsettling and I knew then that this was not the browser for me. Not surprised in the least by these revelations.
eterevsky 5y ago
> [...] Google went to market falsely telling publishers that adopting AMP would enhance page load times. But Google employees knew that AMP only improves the "median of performance" [...] How on Earth does it NOT mean that AMP improves load times?

653 points by vord1080 5y ago

Federal prison. Say it. Now call or email your representatives. Forget the fact that they're using anticompetitive tactics to embrace, extend, and own the web. They're illegally inflating ad prices and forcing everyone into it. Federal prison.

dadarecit 5y ago
If prison is the instrument through which we remove freedom and deliver rehabilitation to citizens, then what would be the equivalent instrument of justice for corporations? People who had done bad things are sent to prison; you can't apply the same process to corporations - even though corporations are considered legal "entities" you can't really jail a corporation; the few people who take the fall are usually designated fallguys and serve laughable sentence, anyways.a So, how can we truly "rehabilitate" a corporation? How do we decide which ones to send to "death row"?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  The argument is to hold the decision-makers personally responsible.
  - dadarecit 5y ago
    Read up on apartheid - there are no decision makers. Maybe a few bad apples, some sociopaths, sure, but by and large if you look at Google, for example, you'll find mostly average people, content with doing whatever it is they are doing to get by, maybe cutting a few corners here and there and trying to get promoted so they can afford that new Tesla model. Product manager responsible for introducing the auto login in Chrome sure wasn't trying to think about how he's helping embezzle billions of dollars; poor guy was just trying to get to that sweet L7. There are no grand master minds here that you can put in prison and make an example of - and if there are, these guys would be way too well connected, and isolated with 10ft of 2000$/hour lawyers. We need to stop looking for the responsible, evil, individuals that are making this happen and start treating the problem like the systemic problem it is. We need to dismantle the systems and organizations that allow these things to happen. The US government is using these techniques against other governments, and often against terror organizations (if not against its own citizens via the justice system), so why not do the same for domestic organizations and corporations? Because they (govt & corpos) are all intertwined, to such a degree that this relationship is itself is codified into a "system" (one aspect of which are the lobbyists). We live in a world of systems and rules - we've been living like this since before Jesus walked the Earth but recently this trend has accelerated significantly: individuals can no longer be held responsible for much of anything: they depend too much on the state, on the organizations they work for, etc. etc. If you think on it every single significant aspect of your life depends on someone or something that is external to you and you have no control over. And so, good policing isn't chasing after criminals in the streets while shooting at them; good policing is preventative and in the more advanced states wouldn't even be necessary since all people would've not been allowed (or rather, given a chance) to misbehave. You don't blame or punish a man, you make it so that he can no longer do anything bad. p.s. Shit sucks, I know, I want to be free too but what can you do; we were born into an age of hyper connectivity and over socialization. We are basically slaves of the machine that I can't even name. Used to be capitalism, but I don't think that word has any real meaning left behind it any more... not when China is the most successful capitalistic nation in the world.
cromwellian 5y ago
Prison because someone implemented single sign on/sign out? The way people are maximalist and hyperbolic about every issue these days is disturbing. Not just on HN with regards to tech but all of the cancel culture on Twitter and other networks. When I log into my iPhone it also logs me into iCloud and starts using iCloud services for various phone related functions. I expect this rather than having to separately log into these things. In fact having to type the Apple store password is annoying. When I lose Keychain access I’m also “punished” by losing access to things it was helping me to sign into. To me this is straight up a usability issue. Passwords suck, and having the browser manage all of your credentials and authorizations is a huge win. About the only thing I might agree with as iffy is loginning you into chrome if you log into gmail without prompting you, but does Chrome actually do this without prompting you at least once? Before we send people to the gallows maybe some confirmation is needed.
smoldesu 5y ago
Craig Federighi, you have the right to remain silent. We're taking you in today for 'conspiracy to construct a walled-garden', do you understand the charges being leveled against you?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

po1nt 5y ago

Remember "Don't be evil?" what the hell happened at Google? They appear more and more like supervillain company yet they used to be somewhat fair.

baremetal 5y ago
if they started out overtly evil no one would have trusted them. maybe this was the plan all along.
tomjen3 5y ago
They drank of the poisoned chalice of ad money. It is bad enough for most, but terrible for them because ads are worse information and search is about getting great information and making it useful. If google is to be rescued, it must do so by removing it from ads.
- pm90 5y ago
  > They drank of the poisoned chalice of ad money. Lol, I’m going to steal this one. That’s indeed what happened. If you’ve worked in any ad tech company, you will know that the people in charge are some of the most unethical sleaze bags you will ever know. It’s all about scooping up as much data as you can: most adtech tech companies operate out of the public eye and many of them barely comply with regulations designed to protect consumer data. I was surprised that Google was so different. But then they drank from the poisoned chalice. So did Facebook, Snap, TikTok … and Reddit is trying hard tooo.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    I meant to say that they drank of that chalice the moment they started adwords. The rest was always going to happen, though the exact timing might be up for debate. It does not matter that they are ethical sleeze bags, that is just what was eventually going to happen. Maybe the poised chalice is a bad metaphore, perhaps it would be better to say that advertising was Googles original sin, and one that will eventually undo them.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago

tgv 5y ago

Get Firefox now, install uBlock Origin, and live with the minor pains.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yes!! I install uBlock Origin on every computer and browser I come across. People love it.
vord1080 5y ago
Seconded. Firefox is better than ever. Can't believe there isn't a Chromium derivative with multi-select, table selection, and shift+right click. Containers are also incredibly useful.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  I just want tree tabs. Vertical tabs is so much more space efficient than horizontal.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    If you want a chromium skin with vertical tabs, both Edge and Vivaldi offer them built into the browser.
    - patall 5y ago
      As does Firefox with the tree-style tabs extension.
      - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
        Unfortunalty it requires manual css entry to hide the horizontal tabs.
    - ajvs 5y ago
      Vertical tabs are not tree style tabs, the latter is far more flexible.

emilfihlman 5y ago

Is this as damning as it sounds? Which is insanely damning?

peakaboo 5y ago
It's been completely obvious what Google wants to do for over a decade... Most people are just not paying attention to what they are.
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
I didn't read the whole document linked in the tweet, but no. This is equivalent quite simply to someone putting out an inferior product - for example a phone that needs to scan a government issue photo id, so the phone maker - not your carrier - can identify you. There are people who don't care, and they are the target market. There are people who laugh at it and just buy something else. They are not the target market. They did not try to change the web into anything. They tried and to some extent did change their browser into an inferior product, and change their ad network into an inferior product. Websites placing ads and ad exchanges are free to not use google's products. Web users are free not to use their product like their browser. I use google translate - that's about it. Not even maps, since heremaps is and always was simply superior. They also tried to change regulations to suit them better. But they are allowed. Trying to change here simply means making their opinion known to the people who make the rules. They didn't bribe anyone. They emailed pdf files describing their ridiculous point of view. The takeaway is they are a corporation with inferior products, who will do what's legal to make more money. Most people don't care. Some people are free to choose other products. Azure and AWS for example completely destroy GCP This is because google treats the people who do care about google's inferior points, like they're a phone user who doesn't care if they're tracked. So google can't get any marketshare there for their inferior products. Despite GCP from a purely technical aspect being superior. When packaged with the worst customer service available, and the risk of losing all your data and backups permanently w/o notification, because you mistakenly hire a guy who is known to google as a hacker? They're not even a player for any customer that plans to be successful long-term. It's a choice, pick what you want to do and who you want to do. Google is not hiding who they are. Or doing anything wrong. They just make inferior products. But VHS won the format battle.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Google shouldn’t be trusted as a key steering voice for web standards. However given their browser share and that these issues have visibility mostly in tech communities, I’m not sure if they will get the political attention they deserve. Or perhaps that is only true in the US and someone like the EU will use all these controversies as motivation to clamp down on big US tech companies and encourage local competitors.

skohan 5y ago
It would have to be the EU. Unfortunately anti-trust has been completely eroded in the US over the past decades.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Impressive to be able to erode anti-trust and trust simultaneously.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    I see what you did there.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Google's fingers are going deeper than just "web standards." Filippo Valsorda, the Go lead for security, was one of the authors of TLS 1.3. He has refused to allow for configuration of TLS 1.3 ciphers in Go: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29349 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29349 Thanks to this decision: if a particular cipher is found to be weak or vulnerable, people using Go won't be able to immediately disable it. Instead, they'll be forced to wait for a release or patch, and possibly have to backport it to the version they're running in production. Another scenario, as pointed out in that ticket: sometimes other vendors don't properly implement ciphers on their end, and there's an incompatibility. Prior to TLS 1.3, one could just disable that particular cipher, perhaps even just for a particular connecting client. His response was, paraphrasing: "TLS 1.3 is amazing and awesome and will not have the same problems prior TLS versions had. It needs to Just Work, if there's a security issue we'll issue a patch, and if you can't apply it in a timely fashion you're incompetent." He seems unaware that not everyone uses Google's "just roll it out to a few hundred nodes and keep an eye on them" approach to SRE, or that major organizations don't have time to wait for a patch - they need a quick switch flip until the patch is out and can pass their normal validation before moving to production.

prvc 5y ago

The Twitter thread doesn't actually explain how this plan was supposedly to be implemented, but does contain a link to the original document.

agilob 5y ago
I didn't read the document, but it seems "forced Chrome login" is major step in this, the new WebExtensions manifest which reduces abilities of adblockers is probably a milestone in this process.

mupuff1234 5y ago

Having a plan vs executing a plan are quite different things. I'm sure you could find all sorts of different "plans" that never came to fruition and stopped at the brainstorming/ideas phase.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Not really surprising that states with major tech/datacenter presences aren't on this lawsuit: California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Washington (state) and North Carolina all come to mind. Texas being on it is a bit of a surprise.

gadrev 5y ago
Also, out of the 16 states, 15 are republican, the exception being Nevada. Hm.
- shuckles 5y ago
  It is quite an odd coalition. And to counter GP's insinuation, California and New York prosecute large industries in their jurisdictions all the time -- in fact, that's a criticism of those states which is popular in these parts!

ebanana 5y ago

maybe plan to censor the web was so that certain dirt doesn't get out about certain people.. all these algorithm "fixes" seem to working out real well. again i don't know it just seems to be gettinb darker with certain bigger corps. hoping that it's not as bad as it seems

kwdc 5y ago

So the path was: Don't be evil. Do not be evil. Do be evil. Be evil. Evil. What an utter disappointment amongst so many. Plenty here for future generations to be further disappointed. But not necessarily surprised.

penguin_booze 5y ago
That's the message you hear as you move the slider over the company: from the left, the founding conscientious engineers, and to the right, the profit-maximizing, late and lateral entry executives.
- joseloyaio 5y ago
  They just moved the slider further left IMO. Further centralization, control and censorship.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    Centralization, control and censorship are on the authoritarian–liberal axis of the standard two-dimensional political compass, not on the left–right axis.
    - joseloyaio 5y ago
      You basically just described China.
- pm90 5y ago
  The Google founders have managed to create this amazing narrative that they’re the good guys while all the bad decisions are just taken by the new money grubbing execs. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think they presided over a hyper growth stage of the company and left well before the pressures of profit maximization started to direct the company. It’s extremely difficult for a company to not do things that would maximize its profits. I don’t think the Founder-Good narrative is productive, it doesn’t work. One possible way to limit the harm is by regulations (or enforcement of existing ones), to make “evil” activity more expensive and thus not an option.

mikevm 5y ago

It's nice to see the hypocrisy of the people who run these companies, who on the one hand virtue signal with all the woke nonsense externally, and yet behave immorally internally.

pm90 5y ago
Google can both want to be hypocritical and continue to hire/promote people from marginalized communities and contribute to “woke” organizations (which to their credit, they seem to have, although recently we’ve seen the limits to what they will do).

account-5 5y ago

I've never understood the criticism of Firefox on HN. I've been a happy user since 2004. I viewed chrome the same as IE. Owned by a big US tech company that only cares about one thing, and that one thing isn't you or me, only what your and my data/views are worth. As far as I'm concerned all criticism leveled at Firefox is neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware.

irrational 5y ago
Same here. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively since the Firebug days, both for development and personal use. It has worked fantastically for me. But I have real issues whenever I try to use Chrome. I think it mostly comes down to what you are used to.
3f3ufjfde 5y ago
Well, there are a large number of users for whom "all criticism leveled at Firefox" are/were not "neatly mitigated by the reality of what chrome is, spyware." For those people it's probably a combination of things which include Chrome's 'always works' factor (less of a problem these days), Firefox on mobile being trash for a long time (this has also shifted for the better), and most people not sharing your view of what spyware is.
d3nj4l 5y ago
At some level I understand when people on HN get mad at FF increasing the size of the tab bar and the occasional changes they make in the UI/UX. I've never had a major problem with them - it's been at most an hour of getting used to the new style, if at all - but I am honestly astounded by people who think it's a good reason to switch to Chrome. Cutting off your nose to spite your face?
- TAForObvReasons 5y ago
  Let's not pretend Mozilla is a saint or Firefox is close. Mozilla made a huge number of questionable moves over the years ("death by a thousand cuts") I personally felt that the 2014 introduction of in-browser ads (pitched as "user-enhancing") marked a huge shift. For others it was the deep integration of the proprietary Pocket extension. For still others it was the weird Mr Robot cross-promotion that was pushed via a side channel or the Cliqz in-browser tracking or the booking.com in-browser ads. At this point, it really feels like Mozilla and FF are "controlled opposition" / defense against anti-trust claims, and many of the naysayers would probably jump to a clean implementation that isn't bogged down by the lack of trust.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

This is my favorite quote: > First, Google started to leverage its ownership of the largest web browser, Chrome, to track and target publishers’ audiences in order to sell Google’s advertising inventory. To make this happen, Google first introduced the ability for users to log into the Chrome browser. Then, Google began to steer users into doing this by using deceptive and coercive tactics. For example, Google started to automatically log users into Chrome if they logged into any Google service (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). In this way, Google took the users that choose not to log into Chrome and logged them in anyways. If a user tried to log out of Chrome in response, Google punished them by kicking them out of a Google product they were in the process of using (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). On top this, through another deceptive pattern, Google got these users to give the Chrome browser permission to track them across the open web and on independent publisher sites like The Dallas Morning News. These users also had to give Google permission to use this new Chrome tracking data to sell Google’s own ad space, permitting Google to use Chrome to circumvent reliance on cookie-tracking technology.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
That's disgusting. What a reprehensible company.
dragonelite 5y ago
Yeah it was super annoying I had separate accounts for gmail/android and youtube. It is always a hassle to make sure im logged in with the correct account.

llimos 5y ago

It looks like xkcd #792 has its answer.

splatzone 5y ago

So it seems to me the most pressing issue is still creating a viable alternative to Google Search. I've tried to use Duck Duck Go and even Bing in the past but I've just not found the quality of the results to be nearly the same. However - recently I've found G Search is getting steadily worse. They've made UX changes that make it harder to view cached pages, and it seems to ignore search operators frequently. This is the biggest foothold to their dominance. YouTube, Gmail, Maps and everything else is in a supporting role to this core product. Who is actively working on this and what is proving so challenging? What is stopping us from creating a viable Google clone, with the same level of high quality results?

0x0nyandesu 5y ago
Yea I really wonder why they don't have competition. You'd think a search engine built with java in the mid 90s would be easy to replicate at least to it's 2005 era standard using modern tech.
- erezsh 5y ago
  The unique value Google has is the mass of users who provide them with data, by clicking (or not clicking) their search results. It's the same way with most of the big websites - they wouldn't get to where they are if they started out today. But having all this pre-existing traffic is a huge part of why they're more useful than their competitors.
  - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
    A lot of super technical stuff I'm googling at work all day I feel like is fairly static content that I think old school google excelled at. Modern Google is great for finding a local restaurant but not so much at figuring out the nuance in some searches.
pembrook 5y ago
> I've tried to use Duck Duck Go and even Bing in the past but I've just not found the quality of the results to be nearly the same. I’m not surprised you found no difference in Duck Duck Go or Bing. Duck Duck Go is just a whitelabel version of Bing. Pretty much every search engine that isn’t Google uses the bing api. It’s only the illusion of choice.

dschuetz 5y ago

Welp, it's time to de-google my networks then. Facebook traffic is already blocked, now I wonder how much Web content I will lose when I block all google traffic.

nerdponx 5y ago
Genuine question: knowing you know and have apparently known for a while, why is this the thing that puts you over the edge? Or did you not realize that Google was just as bad as Facebook?
- dschuetz 5y ago
  I have been thinking about de-googling for quite a while now, far longer than de-facebooking, but it's not as easy. Half the web depends on google services (and it's even worse with AWS) and I was considering how much pain it would cause me to block all google traffic at once. Now I don't care. Now I will try and block most of it, while still having some degree of usability, or having the option using anonymizing tools. Example: Youtube is almost as ubiquitous as google, and some of my friends use it for good content. How can I still use it and still give google the least amount of personal data as possible, if any? It's far easier with facebook, I just don't care about it as much as with blocking google.

vander_elst 5y ago

It might be true, but what's the source? Is there a link to some screenshot of some internal email?

mtmail 5y ago
Page 94 of the document (which is page 99 in the PDF).

Beggers1960 5y ago

Yikes. Imagine our shock at this one.

tyingq 5y ago

Are there some guesses on what the NERA acronym means? Now Everyone Reads AMP?

tyingq 5y ago
Read up on the Celtic story of "Nera", and maybe there's a tie in? At a feast, King Ailill made a dare of sorts, for anyone who would put a wicker band around the foot of a recently deceased corpse. In their land, the recently deceased were rumored to have great power, so nobody was willing to take the bait, even though the King was offering a vast reward. Until Nera stepped up to do it. So, perhaps analogous to harnessing (tying a band around) the (mostly dead but still powerful) old free/open internet?

achairapart 5y ago

I see, used to be called NERA, today best known as AMP.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nyx_land 5y ago

A lot of people here saying to install Firefox in the comments for a thread about how Google goes to pretty much any lengths it can go manipulate the market in its favor, when Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from Google and Mozilla has been making many suspiciously baffling and stupid decisions for years now to destroy its own market share, is really rich. I use Firefox when I need a fat modern browser and not something like Netsurf or Nyxt, but that's mostly just a futile symbolic act of defiance on my part. Anyone who thinks Mozilla is the company they once were and that they really are trying to fight the good fight for the open web is kidding themselves. Their brand is being the underdog non-profit open web activism company, but I can't think of anything they've done to meaningfully fight for that. They've sure wasted a lot of time on stupid side projects and ad deals, and I guess they still have Gecko because the code already exists and it'd destroy any facade of competition in the browser market if they switched to Chromium, but if they really were the company people think they are they wouldn't have laid off so many critical teams in 2020. They certainly wouldn't have shitcanned the Servo project, really the only possible threat to Google's de facto monopoly over the web and the biggest meaningful way to fight for the open web. I know it's been said a ton but the fact that they did that while giving their incompetent CEO a raise and are continuing to put funding into cancerous Web 3.0 shit (VR in the browser? really?) and dumb side projects like their VPN grift should be enough of an indicator to anyone with a brain that Mozilla is controlled opposition at this point and probably being paid off by Google to tank their market share. Maybe it sounds like I need to take my tinfoil hat off, but after everything that's been happening lately with Facebook and Google I don't think this is much of a stretch at all.

vord1080 5y ago
> They certainly wouldn't have shitcanned the Servo project, really the only possible threat to Google's de facto monopoly over the web and the biggest meaningful way to fight for the open web. Anyone that followed Servo closely knows it was a dead end. It was literally never going to ship, ever. They freaking started a rewrite of the layout component at some point. Simple pages like google.com kept breaking. It was an R&D project, the good stuff already got merged into gecko (Stylo, WebRender). A lot of top servo contributors and GFX people got moved to Gecko. The project fulfilled its purpose, it made Gecko better.

DeathMetal3000 5y ago

I tried Chrome long ago. It was a fine browser. But the it tried to log me in way too hard and gave me the creepy feeling of being followed in a dark alley. I’m sure I could have turned off that functionality but the fact it even existed was unsettling and I knew then that this was not the browser for me. Not surprised in the least by these revelations.

eterevsky 5y ago

> [...] Google went to market falsely telling publishers that adopting AMP would enhance page load times. But Google employees knew that AMP only improves the "median of performance" [...] How on Earth does it NOT mean that AMP improves load times?