I agree that it probably should be mentioned, but not enough to make me really doubt the rest of their paper.
Kinda odd this uniquely gets pointed out when it’s someone pushing back slightly on google, everyone is first in line to declare the player with 40% global market share anticompetitive and doesn’t even make a peep about google, even shouts down the attempts to bring the issue forward…
…tell me again why this isn’t just lawfare from android fanboys trying to get their choice of OS legislated?
People dumped on me when I said that knocking out safari would rapidly lead to a browser monoculture and anticompetitive usage of that from google. The excuse was “if that happens we’ll regulate that too”. Unsurprisingly, kinda seems like people don’t want that to actually happen now that it’s becoming an issue - you’re pushing back on it. See also: the "maybe a chrome monopoly is really better for consumers" downthread, gross.
Now, why is that, I wonder??? Maybe because it was just all an attempt to legislate a solution to google v apple after all?
Again: google and Tim Sweeney and netflix and facebook and Sony don’t care about you at all, and their goals don’t align with yours. The end state here isn’t user freedom, it’s iMessage with google banners instead. The hope was that you could hitch a ride on google’s PR effort until it was convenient and then discard them/override their wishes, instead it's the other way around.
This has always been a choice/anti-choice issue: for some people it's not enough that they personally can choose android, the option for walled-gardens needs to be removed entirely for everyone else too. And now you're seeing things move into the next phase, as they are discarded and google starts to flex the monopoly power that you lobbied to give them.
Maybe we should just think critically about what we read, especially when there's a conflict of interest involved.
I would say they are in fact usually correct about the specific point they're making. However, it's also common for them to be drawing attention to the dimensions on which their product is better, which may not be the same as the dimensions that matter most to customers. They may be reporting selective truths and making correct-but-mostly-irrelevant points. This also goes for criticizing competitors, of course.
Twice is a coincidence; anyone have a third example?
Just because someone works at a competitor doesn't invalidate their arguments.
I would imagine they can see these issues more first hand.
It depends on how the affiliation is stated in the next volume of VjET, if this is problematic or not.
"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything. As such, its not worth arguing about. So your personal view of what is a potential conflict isn't something we can get into here. But what would be interesting is if you actually had evidence of bias in the article. That is definitely something we can discuss - regardless of who said it.
SSRN is pathetic as a source for papers, IMHO. Quality control is nonexistent. Even something simple like the URL for Shaoor Munir's website is incorrect. The "a href" is http://https//. This is a PhD candidate in Computer Science.
In the paper itself,1 Shuba is listed as "independent researcher". Her website states "independent researcher by night". It would not make sense to list DuckDuckGo as the affiliated organisation as she is doing the work on her own time. Arguably her website should be listed though, so readers can discover that she works there during the day.
Here is an example of SSRN's quality control:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4576722
The SSRN paper submission instructions appear to make it mandatory to submit an affiliation. The reality is that we could list our dogs as a co-authors and SSRN would accept the paper.
SSRN is just plain annoying. The website tries to force people into enabling Javascript just to download a PDF. That is totally unnecessary. Look at arxiv.org.
1. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/files/jetlaw-chrome-antit... (No Javascript needed)
The failure of the (really weak) DNT standard had nothing to do with Chrome. While I get that Google is an advertiser, Chrome did implement DNT and wasn't even as big of a player back then.
Then they talk about Widevine DRM which, say what you want about DRMs, is something media platforms actively asked for due to their licensing. But in anycase, I don't see how this has anything to do with the fact that Google owns Chrome?
They also talk a lot about self-preferencing, meaning putting pop-ups to install Chrome on a bunch of Google properties (most notably on search). While I agree that this behavior should be condemned and is anti-trust related, it's mostly about Google leveraging their dominant position in search to gain an edge in the browser space, not the other way around... Barring Google from doing this is what needs to happen, not separating Chrome in a different company.
They talk a lot about how Chrome is strategically important for Google, which it is. Chrome is a pure strategy play from Google. But that doesn't mean the industry is suffering because of it (in fact I'd argue Chrome helped the industry tremendously). Until Google abuses their position with Chrome, which the authors haven't made a good case for, I don't see why Chrome should be the target they make it to be.
If you are an upcoming OS and want to get well known apps like Netflix and Spotify, you need to get Widevine support from Google. I'll let you imagine how that can go, from actual technical issues to bullshit reasons to slow down progress.
If we accept the idea that DRM is useful, at least the DRM vendors should be independent from OS vendors.
It's indescribeable how better the current situation is for the state of the web and users themselves. There's a reason even Mozilla uses Widevine.
There are multiple other widely used DRM systems. PlayReady is very licensable (it's just not free), and used by many sites. Fairplay is also widely supported. Adobe would probably still sell someone Primetime if they could find someone to pay for it. Until very recently some of the largest pay TV operators in the world (Sky et al) didn't support Widevine and required installation of third party helper software from a different DRM provider.
1. Google brought DRM to the web. Before Widevine, DRMed video and audio had to rely on stuff like Adobe Flash (which was on its way out anyway). Google's large market share means they got to write the "standard" and provide the only implementation.
2. Safari can't play Spotify any more. Beers all round at the Google offices.
That is not what Spotify says: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/supported-devices-for...
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
Short version:
The music industry wanted Apple to license FairPlay. SJ said no. But Apple will start selling interoperable DRM free music if the industry allows it.
One of the major labels and independents took them up on the offer and Apple did it. The other three labels wanted among other things - a royalty from each iPod sold and for Apple to basically post a bond against piracy.
Apple refused and it took until early 2009 for the rest of the labels to come on board.
Their opt out header was adopted faster than "do not track". Nobody wanted anything to do with it.
> are at least designed to work for the entire advertising industry, not just Google.
It is an API where the entire data flow is controlled by Google and was meant as replacement for one that Google had no control over. Meanwhile Chrome has always shared additional data with a hardcoded list of Google services (officially for debbuging and A/B testing ) and provides direct integration with Google accounts and related tracking. FLoC and Topics exist for the advertising industry the same way an eviction notice exists for its recipient.
A feature that records details of the types sites someone visitors and then shares them with any other site that asks isn’t really a privacy feature
Most people confuse the success of a company and their monopolistic behavior with their competency on what they do.
Regardless, the internet might benefit from Chrome being an independent company of its own.
I'd love to hear why you think that is. It feels to me that the web benefits and has benefitted a ton from Google's investment in Chrome and newer standards. Chrome itself doesn't make any money and so I fear to me that splitting it out would leave it scrambling for a revenue source and that there would be far less investment in it then there currently is.
It feels like keeping the threat of antitrust action on Chrome is a more effective way of keeping them in line. I don't see much abuse from their dominant position (in the browser space, search is another question) so far, but making it clear that regulators are watching them closely is IMO the best way to ensure interests align.
The web should rely on open standards to cultivate innovation and improvement. Having a separate entity would save the project from constant internal battles with other Google products and outside accusations of favoritism. My hope that being an independent entity, browser projects can push for further enhancements. For example, I’m very confused and frustrated about the fact that there is no standard to say “do not track me” that prevents those ugly popups. I already made my decision about ads, why should I repeat it for every website while the browser can enforce it. Just like the location preferences etc.
I do acknowledge however that like any other open source project, the funding would be a great issue.
European law grounds antitrust in whether the marketplace is harmed. In that context, something could be an antitrust violation if it's hard to compete with, even if that circumstance is better for users.
US antitrust is grounded in consumer harm. One could, hypothetically, have an ecosystem where there is one browser and it's not an antitrust situation because the benefits to consumers outweigh drawbacks to competitors (for example, if users perhaps benefit more from an ecosystem with fewer browsers than more browsers, because the odds of any given website working on their browser are higher if web devs don't have to test against dozens of bespoke partially-compliant implementations). Microsoft ran afoul of antitrust because of the consumer harm demonstrated in bundling its browser (which, notably, was a bit of a bug-ridden mess at the time) into its OS (which made the whole experience worse). But nowadays? Everyone has bundled a browser into their OS.
(None of this is to say that the US or European model is better, just that it's always important to code-switch when comprehending arguments regarding antitrust coming from the two regions).
Further reading:
One thing I've observed in the past few years is that Chromium (Open-source base of Chrome,) has come to dominate the browser platform: HTML has turned into a boondoggle where everyone's pet use case is integrated into the browser; and curiously, everything works first on Chromium. This makes it prohibitively difficult for competing browsers, (Mozilla, Safari,) to keep up with the evolving web standard.
As a developer, it "smells" like the Windows monopoly all over again; except this time, because Chromium is open-source, and there are plenty of Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, and Chrome,), it's less obvious.
Maybe Apple with their 2 trillion dollar market cap should make their browser not suck then?
I'm sure they can fund it.
Chrome has some APIs that are more useful e.g. Serial, WebUSB etc. and it’s debugging tools are better plus it’s possible to extract and reprocess the devtools data to build other tools on top
In contrast, Microsoft has a very healthy web development platform. Edge allows debugging in-browser Javascript and C# (via WASM) in Visual Studio.
So, in other words, complaints about "Google's broeser is too good, it is unfair how fast they are moving!" Therefore ring hollow.
Yes, Apple could compete if they wanted to. There is no anti competitive pressure stopping them.
But Apple simply chooses not to make a good browser, even though they could.
Wouldn't this be actual market forces at work then, since it's open source? Anyone can use it (as the examples you mentioned).
It doesn't meet the monopoly standards since it's not in the exclusive possession/control of Google. It was extremely smart to make it open source, and very similarly so with AOSP.
It's hard to say that any of this can be pinned on Google like they're somehow to blame but at the same time we've nonetheless found ourselves in a market where users and developers have very little choice and this currently benefits Google quite a bit.
Good engineering discipline I think would ask major browsers to break themselves purposefully by randomly disabling any features that are browser specific or outside of some "core" standard saying you must only use these opportunistically but that's not a law you can write.
The point of open standards is that anyone can implement them in a clean room, from scratch.
At this point, HTML is slowly drifting away from an open standard, to a standard where only one single implementation is practical.
I agree. In the Internet Explorer days, there were also browsers that were custom UI built on top of IE Trident. The Chromium-based browsers of today actually offer little innovations beyond what browsers building on top of Trident have accomplished in the IE days.
It seems like that also means competing browsers should work on most websites? How bad is it, really? Some cutting-edge demos and games don't work?
I'm under the impression that a lot of idiosyncratic website bugs are due to browser extensions that somehow mess with web pages.
I should be able to log into a website (say Google Docs) and have the browser be blissfully unaware of the semantics of being "logged in". It should do all the cookies and local storage necessary for this, but under no circumstances should this be part of the browser UI itself.
The side panel for "google search results" is worse in some ways, better in some. It's an optional feature, so that's better. But it does not allow you to disable the functionality. If people love it, sure, I don't mind Chrome adding support, but I should not have to have a non-removable "side panel" button in the main browser chrome.
The rest of the complaints here don't really bother me. Third-party cookie blocking by default would be great, but you can enable it now and I've been doing that for ages anyway, even though it sometimes breaks things.
(in case this article made you wonder what is happening with it)
The final result is the only thing that matters.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexavalent_chromium
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/files/jetlaw-chrome-antit...
That part I fully support, and it's Google's "die by the sword" answer to Apple's stubbornness. Google's AdSense abuses are a horse of a different color though, and absolutely deserving of antitrust remediation. The impact of AdSense has been so harmful that I genuinely fail to imagine a "solution" to the scale of it's harm. Alongside the Apple case, it's a posterchild for "Things the DOJ Should Have Done Years Ago" in this industry.
But more specifically, it is things like Google forcing site owners to enter anti-competitive agreements (see https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...). As part of the agreements Google required, site owners had to preserve the best ad space on pages for Google’s ads instead of ads from rival networks, they were not allowed to insert ads from rival ad networks on the pages that Google search results link to, and they had to get permission from Google before changing how rival ads were displayed on pages where both existed (allegedly).
Note that even if site owners found these clauses problematic, in a practical sense they have no choice but to just say “yes”. They need ad revenues to survive in today’s economic environment. And for them, the risk of not having ad revenue is existential while Google doesn’t have anything to lose by being aggressive. It’s an uneven situation where there isn’t really choice for anyone except Google.
The long-and-short of it is that Google wields undue monopoly power by mediating their competitors in online advertising, and abuses that control to manipulate ad rankings and kneecap paying advertisers. They do this in several ways, like changing the font/frame/location of the advertisement and fixing it's ranking relative to Google's own products. This is the main argument against them, though there are tons of little inconsistencies that many highlight as salient.
Tesla is a little bit of the same thing with their superchargers. Tesla has done the amazing thing of building them in lots of areas with enough superchargers that they are usable. But the thing that Tesla did that the entire rest of the dcfc industry can't do is just - fix them when they break. It's just stunning that more than a dozen companies can't do this this (EA is the one that really wasted billions, there are known reasons). Tesla is in line to be the predominant EV gas station for the future. Maybe they had some early mover strategy, but as someone who had both a Tesla and a ccs car, there's little comparison. Now that Tesla opened their sc to ccs cars (first with an adapter, later by incorporating that plug in the car directly if wanted), they are likely to control that market. This is incredibly powerful and will set them up to be really successful. Similar things with the Tesla vehicles having fantastic drive trains. Musk is ruining their reputation with his X related comments - but earlier he started ruining Tesla vehicles by removing turn signal stalks, removing drive train stalk, removing physical sensors (for things like curb and rain) and replacing them with poorly working "ai" things.
But to get to their predominant positions, I really think Tesla and Google got there by making better mouse traps, which of course also helped their other businesses incredibly.
This is way too long but I also wish there was a 100% capable de-googled chrome browser.
It's still in their docs, too: https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20231103/#implementation-exp... "are implementations publicly deployed?"
On the flip side, standards committees can be painfully slow.
Can anyone explain why DOM access from WebAssembly hasn’t even been specced out yet (let alone even implemented) despite years and years (approaching a decade) of discussions around this? Like, seriously, what is going on with this?
Except that’s exactly how the web is supposed to work and the reason Google was able to build a giant search business in the first place. This is absolutely them shitting in the punch bowl. We made plenty of progress without fragmentation.
https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#new-featu... shows the process followed. Creating an explainer comes first, which is to be presented immediately to an incubation venue like WICG. Prototype behind a feature flag. Then widening review further, getting request for positions. It's recommended to start an origin trial which will run for a quarter or more. If everything is going fine, then one can start the intent to ship process.
Looking at https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev paints such a picture of slow, controlled evolution. It's absurd to me this kind of flak blasted in the air trying to shoot down something that is generally so measured & controlled & steady in releasing. No one else has anything half this controlled. Who else does Intent to Experiment or Intent to Prototype? Few software has such a model where it's so clear what's coming, what's happening, where change & evolution is done in a controlled, slow, deliberate fashion, where prototypes are worked on & tested in the field for a significant amount of time before coming back to shipping. Few other softwares have such an extreme responsibility in going to working bodies, in soliciting requests for positions, where all manners of discovery are done.
> See, e.g. most of the hardware and PWA/related APIs.
Unclear what specific specs you are trying to throw under the bus here. PWAs took a long time to cook, in my view; hardly did they seem rashly done. A lot of people are really offended the web has MIDI & Gyrometer & other support, to the degree that they wouldn't let others enjoy this.
> paints
Exactly. You can show and paint all you want. And then there's reality.
> Unclear what specific specs you are trying to throw under the bus here.
Almost all the hardware specs (most of which are "not on any standards track", shipped in Chrome), things like Backround Fetch and Background Sync (same).
There are also others that Google shipped even before there was consensus and there were glaring issues in the spec (like Constructible Stylesheets)
> A lot of people are really offended the web has MIDI & Gyrometer & other support, to the degree that they wouldn't let others enjoy this.
To call this a misrepresentation of reality is a gross understatement
* Prompts to install Chrome and make it your default browser. (Safari and Edge do the same; this is a tactic that’s been common since the browser wars between Netscape and IE.)
* The built-in password manager and synchronization using a Google account.
* Ads on Google Search for Chrome.
* Built-in DRM and the companies like Spotify that require it.
* Some Google services like Google Meet and Google Earth were implemented for Chrome first.
* Advertisers can place ads using AdWords on Google Search and this is first-party, rather than third-party advertising, which matters when third-party cookies are blocked.
* Google Ads provides Google with insight into the popularity of other websites. (As does running the most popular search engine, I will add.)
* Chrome’s long-delayed blocking of third-party cookies is finally happening, but first-party cookies are unaffected.
* Moving Google services from other domains to google.com subdomains means that they can share cookies without being affected by third-party cookie restrictions.
That’s quite a long list of competitive advantages! And there are more! It’s good to be a big tech company that most people use. They aren’t dark patterns, though? None of this seems surprising?
I still think Chrome blocking third-party cookies will be a good thing. I guess that’s the paradox, what’s better for privacy isn’t good for competition.
There's also the Chrome "feature" where logging into a Google property automatically logs you into a Chrome "profile" whether you like it or not. I don't want a Chrome "profile", I didn't give Google permission to create one, but I'm still apparently logged into one. Gee, thanks...
Where is it that people get nagged to install Safari? When visiting Apple's web site?
Since Safari is my primary browser, I don't get prompted to install it, so I'm genuinely curious.
Maybe on the iCloud website? Which I never visit on Apple devices anyway because there are apps for everything…
I’m not logged into iCloud on there, but the site itself and the login form neither complain about my not visiting it in Safari.
Chuckled at this one - "yes now they support all platforms but they were on Chrome first! Malice!"
YouTube is similarly made to be slower and less useable on Firefox, but if you change your us to chrome it suddenly gets better
Calling this list a list of "competitive advantages" seems about as accurate as calling them "dark patterns".
The only competitive advantages I see in your list is the fact that they get to use both advertisement data and search data, so they can better manipulate you into buying things.
The rest is either stuff that is on every browser, isn't an advantage, or isn't specific to Chrome.
Chrome's domination has been nothing but positive for the consumer because it's in Google's best interest to keep it as user-friendly as possible to keep its customer loyalty. When the browser is user-friendly, Google makes money. Let's compare it to Safari on iPhone and iPad where Apple is deliberately crippling it so the open web doesn't take a cent away from their App Store model.
If we didn't have Chrome, then what you'll get is a world where Apple cripples the open web and Microsoft on the other end only caring about their corporate-world interests. Google is the only company that is keeping the web open and consumer focused.
> When the browser is user-friendly, Google makes money.
Nope, not at all. Google makes money when users view ads. As long as they have competition, they can't go hog wild with it but changes like those in manifest V3[1] show that ad blocking is their natural enemy - regardless of what users want.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-l...
In general, they've (Google) been controlling web standards for about a decade, if not longer.
It's almost impossible to create your own browser from scratch, which is why so many competing browsers are based on Chromium.
It's getting similar to the Windows monopoly all over again, where web developers write to Chrome instead of open standards. The difference is that the existence of Mozilla and Safari as alternate implementations, and other browsers being Chromium based, make it harder to see the consolidation around a proprietary technology stack.
Careful there: A lot of competing browsers are based on Chromium.
