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0 pointslapcat2y ago0 comments

> giving themselves more cover on the antitrust front

There's no antitrust front on the MV2 to MV3 transition. You're imagining something that doesn't exist.

> Given the ways in which the story has changed about this rollout, my default is to assume that nothing that is projected is set in stone.

That's fine, and Google itself said in the announcement that they're doing a slow rollout in order to collect data and see the effects, but it has nothing to do with antitrust. The MV2 deprecation was delayed because Chrome extension developers complained that MV3 still had serious shortcomings that prevented them from migrating their extensions from MV2, so Google paused to address many of those issues.

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gnicholas2y ago· 2 in thread

> There's no antitrust front on the MV2 to MV3 transition. You're imagining something that doesn't exist.

My understanding is that there is a widespread perception that the transition is largely being executed to neuter adblockers since Google makes so much money on ads. Given how aggressive the federal antitrust authorities have been in pursuing novel claims, I could easily see them going after Google if they prevent users from accessing MV2 extensions at all.

lapcatOP2y ago

> I could easily see them going after Google

Like I said, you're imagining something that doesn't exist.

There are several points worth noting:

1) Mobile Chrome doesn't even have extension support. This transition affects only desktop.

2) Chrome is not the default web browser on either Windows or Mac.

3) Chrome's Declarative Net Request API is very similar to Safari's content blocker API.

4) Given what Adguard says about MV3 on their blog and indeed in HN comments on this thread, such an imagined antitrust case would seem very hard to win. https://adguard.com/en/blog/chrome-manifest-v3-where-we-stan...

5) I suspect that the majority of desktop Chrome users don't even have ad blocking extensions installed in the first place.

The more I think about this, the closer I come to the conclusion that an antitrust case here is wildly implausible.

gnicholas2y ago

> Like I said, you're imagining something that doesn't exist.

My point is that this is Lina Khan's specialty. Everyone knows it, and Google is undoubtedly calibrating many of their business decisions to make sure that they don't attract scrutiny. This would be especially true where the product involved has over 60% market share globally.

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