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Yeah I reworded it - I meant Blink. And no, I'd argue that just because it's open source doesn't change that it's an antitrust-worthy browser. The obvious probl

Yeah I reworded it - I meant Blink. And no, I'd argue that just because it's open source doesn't change that it's an antitrust-worthy browser. The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are. --- In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up (kind of, Firefox had to give up on anything involving PWAs to do it and they take a large sum of money from the big G for putting their search engine as the default). Similarly, just look at how many web RFCs amount to "this was implemented by Chrome and technically a Chrome fork is a second implementation, so it can be OK stamped", which has squeezed the market for third parties to be able to develop their own browser just by making the amount of "required" features so large nobody could meaningfully implement them.[0] And then there's the utterly dismal state of the Android platform, where Google just uses their control over OEMs and the ROM to outright prevent anyone from easily replacing the System WebView (the browser Android uses to render stuff "in-apps", basically if you've ever used an app that seemingly opens external links without launching chrome, that's the System WebView) with a non-chrome engine (basically, Google lets OEMs specify a hash on what the System WebView should be - almost all mainstream OEMs lock it to the Google implementation -or Chrome Canary which is just the same fucking browser-, leaving the only option to circumvent it to be rooting, which has its own issues and limitations). There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own. The Vanadium dev also stopped anyone from using his work in the future by setting his System WebView implementation to GPLv2-only to prevent folks from forking it), since nobody wants to bother. Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition. [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

robertlagrant 3y ago
> In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up No - MS could too. They choose not to. Others could too, but it's not worth it. Either way, this is not a monopoly in the sense relevant to this discussion, as anyone can start a browser business and write from scratch, or use Chromium or Firefox as an enormous existing base on which to write a browser. > There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own If they lack the manpower to do something, but Chrome gives them with zero strings attached the core of itself, that's a good thing, not a bad one. Chromium enables browsers to be built that couldn't otherwise be. > Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition. Still though - competition over what? JS implementations? HTML rendering implementations? You're stating facts - in the most negative way possible - but without saying what you'd like to happen. If Chromium were never open sourced, would that be better?
tzs 3y ago
> The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are. Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users. [1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up No - MS could too. They choose not to. Others could too, but it's not worth it. Either way, this is not a monopoly in the sense relevant to this discussion, as anyone can start a browser business and write from scratch, or use Chromium or Firefox as an enormous existing base on which to write a browser. > There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own If they lack the manpower to do something, but Chrome gives them with zero strings attached the core of itself, that's a good thing, not a bad one. Chromium enables browsers to be built that couldn't otherwise be. > Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition. Still though - competition over what? JS implementations? HTML rendering implementations? You're stating facts - in the most negative way possible - but without saying what you'd like to happen. If Chromium were never open sourced, would that be better?

tzs 3y ago

> The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are. Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users. [1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.