Don't like Chrome? Pick up Firefox, it's quick and easy to change. And it's the best product it's probably ever been.
Don't like Google search? There's Bing, there's DuckDuckGo and more.
Don't like Facebook? Try any of the bajillion other social networks. Hell, quite social networks and call your grandma instead. It's better for ya.
Antitrust isn't supposed to be a bludgeon to knock whoever is on top off the top. It's supposed to be a tool to break open markets where companies have successfully closed off competition and made it impossible for opponents to succeed. I just don't see that in the web right now. There is no conceivable reason Facebook couldn't be replaced and there's ample research showing that young people are already making that transition to other platforms.
Meanwhile, industries like internet service, cellular and in some places water provision, leave consumers with essentially no alternative and no choice. I see this wave of anti-web 2.0 furvor as people championing a good cause, antitrust, in utterly the wrong place for our time.
The article explains how Google through Chrome's dominance is doing and did exactly this via webstandards for DRM despite most of chrome being completely open-source via chromium.
Because Chrome has such a large footprint, it become much easier for google to make a non-standard feature become part of the standard. As long as there is a thoroughly unencumbered but still practically reasonable way to implement that standard everything is great.
But that falls apart for the DRM that enables browsers to play video files. Sure, google is willing to license that code to you, but that means you have to pay or play by their rules in order to keep being able to make a competing browser. And no, you can't just make your own version of the DRM: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom....
That's bad enough for hampering the ability for people to switch products, because it means that people can't make a practical chrome competitor without becoming a google vassal, which defeats many of their reasons to making a competing browser. But it gets worse.
If google makes a change to chrome that people dislike, say hampering ad-blocking via some as-yet-unstandardized change or pushing through a standard that most people dislike, they can then tie the licensing of the unrelated feature to implementing this other thing that people dislike.
For example, Google could refuse to license the DRM code to any browser that interferes with or modifies the playback of the DRMed video stream. Then, they could define modification and interference to include removing ads from the stream.
Or google could just decline to license at all for no reason: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
Yes, but it also fails to make much of an antitrust case about this. I mean, is Widevine licensing anticompetitive? Discriminatory? Surely it would be hard to make a competitor for it. But at the same time Apple and HBO seem to be streaming a ton of content without it.
The harm to open source media playback is real, but that's not an argument about market health. Frankly I'm pretty doubtful much antitrust hay can be made about this. We watch Microsoft choke Netscape to death in the 90's, and at the end of the day nothing happened. Maybe Google will be forced to spin off the Widevine IP to a separate company, I guess. No one is going to kill Chrome for you.
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Brave (Chromium fork, built in ad blocking)
- Opera (Chromium fork)
- Roku
- Samsung Tizen smart TVs
Browsers which support a similar selection of streaming providers through different DRM solutions:
- Edge (Chromium fork)
- Safari
Just because you can't get a license for "my personal open source browser" doesn't mean there's a barrier to serious competitors here. (At least, not at present.)
[1] https://castlabs.com/resources/drm-comparison/
[2] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023851591-How...
People need to stop thinking of Google and Facebook as if they offer consumer services. They don't. Their product is their ads, and their consumers are corporate marketing departments, and through this lens they are both thoroughly monopolists. Or at least "duopolists".
https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending-update
See also: AMP, internet.org
substitutability isn't often discussed because it's a minor symptom of monopolies and wholly insufficient by itself to prove monopoly power, as every monopolist will have some competition and substitutes. it's unrealistic to expect a monopolist to own 100% of a market (have no competition). it's even more unrealistic to expect no substitutes on top of no competition (a substitute is using an adjacent-market product).
Imagine three companies dominate a given market. In most geographies, say 75%, the two larger companies company with each other and a few other stragglers. But in 25% geography a single company dominates. Who is the problem? The larger companies, competing in their broader market or the smaller company?
As an example, Amazon is dominant in the online retail sphere. The have an incredible market share. But I've never once had this create a significant problem as a consumer. Why? Because the cost to me as a consumer to use something else is tremendously low. I can use Walmart.com which has gotten quite good. Or I can go to a physical store.
Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet.
To me monopoly is not dangerous because of marketshare. It's dangerous when the bulk of its customers cannot switch to another service. Particularly so if the market is difficult for new competition to enter.
I get all the open internet gripes about Google and what they've done with Chrome. And that thing could become a monster. But the reality is that you can switch today with minimal impact to an excellent alternative browser.
People buying a drug like HUMIRA are not so lucky.
Gmail doesn’t conform to email standards and eats random emails. Chrome ignores DNT and other things. Search pushes chrome, etc.
It’s a soft lock in compared to Microsoft’s 90s “bundle IE or we break you” deals with PC manufacturers, but it’s definitely not easy to move away from them. And this makes all the other anti-competitive things compoundedly bad.
What is a quality alternative to Facebook? Diaspora was DOA, Mastodon is a cesspit, Twitter is nothing like Facebook, and G+ is long-dead.
Independent forums and self-hosted blogging. They are about content and real connections with like-minded people. Instead of mindlessly posting little updates throughout the day just for the sake of posting updates, people should save it for when they actually have something to say.
In general: read books not timelines.
> Without Google Services and the Google Play Store, it’s a brick. They’ve mastered separation of the strategic openness of Android with the accompanying strategic closed-ness of everything that runs on it and makes it actually worth something.
It's scary how true this is. Especially how it's only obvious in hindsight (to me at least). Yet clearly this was orchestrated.
In both Chrome & Androids case it's the non-free tie-in that's the catch. Either play store or DRM/codecs. hmm...who owns the biggest video site..ah right.
We've really only got ourselves to blame for elevating consumer satisfaction above all else and losing sight of the long term.
Witness the premium Intel put on 4+ core CPUs for ages, then suddenly when AMD picked up pace, they could deliver them at half or a third of the price...
The proof is in the pudding on Chrome's tangible open source impact:
1. V8 is used in a multitude of projects, node being the most impact-ful. And node has changed desktop (with electron and CLI apps), server and developer workflow
2. Brave, Edge, Opera are just some of the WideVine licensed Chromium based browsers
On the contrary, iOS has banned almost every tenet of common sense general purpose computing:
1. Safari for iOS is purposefully crippled to drive devs and users to it's app store
2. App store has fluid, whimsical, retroactively applied approval laws, ahem whims.
3. It's a general purpose computer that you can own the hardware of, but need the manufacturer's consent to run software on. You know, like needing your fridge maker's approval for the groceries you stock in it.
4. They purposefully stymie competition:
- Spotify, Google-Maps, etc. are denied APIs that give competing Apple offerings an edge.
- 30% tax on external apps again gives Apple's competing offerings unfair edge
- Complete ban on Just-In-Time compiled code and alternate browser engines is intentional - to stymie features and quality to a default of "below Apple's competing offerings"
How one rationalizes Chrome to be more "anti-trust-y" is contrary to logic
Today I learned: the new Edge has both WideVine and PlayReady. I figured they'd just go with PlayReady and be done with it - does WideVine have any real advantages?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/chromium-mic...
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/04/03/chromium-based-microsoft-e...
I guess there's no reason not to include Widevine as well, but it's funny how this means the new Microsoft Edge supports features no other Chromium-based browser is allowed to use, including Google Chrome.
Getting rid of DRM in general is fine with me, but I don't understand why the focus on Widevine in particular given that its availability is relatively less restricted.
IMO it was not Chrome that was the problem as much as:
... the way Google has rammed it down the troat of the Internet
... the way Google keep sabotaging other browsers from the server side (yep, ask the Edge team about YouTube or Firefox users about GSuite)
... the way a number of developers has picked up these bad habits and forget (or "forget") to check their sites in all browsers
... and of course the bait and switch they are playing now.
So "ramming it down the throat of the internet"... not so much. It was eagerly adopted by everyone because the only alternatives at the time were IE (with it's curious off-standard interpretation of... well...everything) and Firefox (which at the time was unusably slow and difficult).
It's a huge shame that we've got to this point with it, because it has been the driving force behind the massive improvement in browsers over the last dozen years. It's like watching an old friend being forced to humiliate themselves to keep a job :(
> The proof is in the pudding on Chrome's tangible open source impact
Yes, the more influence Chrome has, the better it is for Google.
No, what you expect from Open Source software is to be able to fork it, modify it, recompile it, and use the modifications.
Open Source isn't about end-user features, it's about development freedom. A completely open source piece of software could have a set of APIs and UX that keeps you on the rails and doesn't let the end user do what they want. What Open Source shouldn't do, is prevent you from modifying it to edit the app to do what you want after a recompile, and ship and share your modifications with others, that's the freedom open source provides.
Arguably the DRM binary blob angle results in Tivoization, but the idea that this is some elaborate plot for Chrome lock-in by Google is ludicrous. Patent-encumbered compression codecs also created similar headaches and Google went out of their way to try break the MPEG-LA consortium monopoly. The DRM issue is basically forced on the industry by the content publishing industry. If you want to stop this particular issue from making open source browsers hard to develop, you need to talk Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and all of the other players.
Or you just accept that you can't watch most Hollywood produced content in a web browser and leave it up to native apps. Or, we could just mandate everyone have to continue to support Adobe Flash players.
DRM isn't going to magically go away if Chrome were a separate company.
What no one has articulated in any of these conversations is any actual harm that's been done to them. There's a lot of catastrophizing about theoretical harms, but the Web and Mobile industries are far more vibrant than they were in the 90s, and launching some device that includes a browser, mobile OS, or embedded kernel is a fraction of the cost and effort it was in the 90s to do something similar.
Things have gotten easier across the board. Someone launching a new IoT device these days forks chromium, webkit, or android for the UI. This would have cost you huge licensing fees a decade ago and a large engineering team.
How many successful startups are running off node (v8) now? Or Electron (e.g. Discord, Slack, etc)?
Thats wrong. What you expect from open source software is to be able to see the source. This source may be available without the right to modify or redistribute it in any way whatsoever. You're looking for free software as preferred by the fsf, not open source.
> Open-source software (OSS) is a type of computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
The difference between open source and free software is only ideological - you are probably thinking of shared source or source available.
If Chrome could somehow be forcefully split off into a decently funded nonprofit, I'd be all for it. I'm not sure that anyone but Google could make that happen, though.
Chrome is subsidized by the rest of Google.
I agree that without those motivations it would be hard to fund these projects without them going paid or taking donations, but I take issue with calling them "subsidized".
And ChromeOS is used in places that aren't just Chromebooks. For example, Google's Wifi points are based on ChromeOS[1].
[0] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromium-os-faq
[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
First, chrome isn't yet close to IEs peak dominance. Ie peaked at over 90% market share.
Second, DRM isn't necessary for watching video, it's needed for watching certain liscenced video. In practice, this means Netflix and streamed televison. You can still watch YouTube just fine, minus YouTube red originals, without widevine. Is a browser that keeps you off Netflix so bad for google?
Waiting until it hits that to do something about it would be pretty ridiculous. Based on some random stats website, Chrome is currently at 70% share, and Chromium-based browsers are at 77%
I guess if you literally only watch free YouTube videos it's not a problem? Totally not an anti-trust issue...
So... why would it cause any antitrust violation?
Widevine was not the first DRM for videos, it was already common practice for the big paid video websites to require DRM before it was created.
1. copyright owners forced Google to implement DRM
2. Or, Google welcomed DRM (with the intention of lock-in)
3. Or, Google should have kept Chrome DRM free and fought the copyright owners...
What is Amp, and why is it so scary?
Google has only one goal, which is selling advertisements. To do so, it provides, FOR FREE, the best technology services of the planet, including what is basically the entrance door to the internet and a piece of software to make the experience of browsing pleasant. Nobody forces Google to do so. They could easily make people pay for the services, and nobody could say a thing. And yet they give this all for free, even allowing you to block the only stream of revenue that they get from you (ads).
The antitrust controversy around Google is just a major case of wanting to have the cake and eating it too. It's like we've had somebody giving us free food for decades, and now we're suropriesd that the terms of a deal that is extremely advantageous for us are changing. We've become accustomed to the idea of fre Google, and we've forgot that Google could make us pay a fee for their services, and we would all shut up and pay.
I don't think people would pay for much of Google's products. Google is candy served so that the target is complacent while it is being invisibly surveiled.
Source: https://www.classlawgroup.com/antitrust/unlawful-practices/m...
A monopoly is when a company has exclusive control over a good or service in a particular market. Not all monopolies are illegal. For example, businesses might legally corner their market if they produce a superior product or are well managed. Antitrust law doesn’t penalize successful companies just for being successful. Competitors may be at a legitimate disadvantage if their product or service is inferior to the monopolist’s.
But monopolies are illegal if they are established or maintained through improper conduct, such as exclusionary or predatory acts. This is known as anticompetitive monopolization
So, what matters less is whether they are right or wrong and what matters more is what the before mentioned companies are doing about mitigating the risks of being confronted with excessive fines, rulings, and other forms of damage. The answer is, so far not a lot and that may become a problem as it seems pretty clear there is wide spread support for action against them.
I'd say both Google and Apple are pretty far down the road where they will have multi billion euro or dollar fines at some point. They are both highly profitable as well so that in it self would not necessarily be that much of a problem. What would be a problem is governments interfering with their business models.
IMHO, some action here would be good. These companies are getting a bit complacent about their position in the market and quite arrogant about casually snuffing out competition when it suits them. In general, it's time for a shake up in the mobile space. Google and Apple earned their position with the work they did last decade but nothing is forever and I remember a time when there were more credible options then just them.
Can Microsoft pay Google to have it recommend Edge on the Google search homepage?
Should Chrome, rather than have Google.com as the default homepage, offer a list of Search engines for the user to choose from?
Should Chrome be the default browser on Android or should the user choose from a list?
First, not having competition does not make one a monopoly. It's anti-competitive (unfair) practices that make one a monopoly.
IE, now that had the form of a monopoly, in its day.
Then, he goes on to ignore WHATWG, which is the real authority, and is comprised of Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft. I don't follow closely enough, but I'd be surprised to learn that Google has outsized power.
Lastly, to the extent that widevine is important, it isn't restricted to Chrome.
(With a bit of DRM needed for video, so those competitors can't be pure open source. But still, it's not going to stop Microsoft.)
The article admits to this, then kind of ignores it.
No it wouldn't, if the mustache-twirling villain's indent was control. Those competitors are following most if not all of Chrome's implementation decisions, and economically they're highly incentivized follow whatever Google does.
They'd likely remain mostly compatible because all browser vendors do try to follow web standards nowadays. But maybe not more than Safari and Chrome are compatible. And it helps maintain Microsoft's veto on web standards (like Firefox has vetoed previous Chrome proposals).
-- Jean-Luc Picard, Captain, USS Enterprise
