Comment by afh1
6 days ago
There is no monopoly.
There are a lot of other browsers.
A lot of people use them.
Most people use one of them.
They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.
But no.
There is a monopoly.
It is bad for you.
Only we the State can save you from it.
A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.
No, most user don't choose. Android doesn't provide a menaingful way to choose to the users, it pushes you to choose Google. That's a big difference. It would be a choice if, when you start android for the first time, it asks you which browser you want to use, in a list where all browsers are shown equal; not "hey you'll use chrome and you can change later any time you want". Ideally, it would provide an explnanation of each browser. That would be a better way to propose a choice.
Would it make users smarter about their choice ? Probably not. But at least, they could smell there is an actual choice.
Monopolies tends to maintain users in ignorance. This way, although they can look elsewhere, they won't feel the urge to do so.
Users must be helped to make their own choice, not guided to make the monopoly's choice. And that must be done before the choice is made.
As long as there will be monoplies, this tension will exist and people like me will continue to explain that the State is the best way to push the balance in favor of those who don't get the importance of the choice.
The problem is not that there is a dominant player. The problem is the dominant player uses ignorance and subtle strategies to make sure users saty with it.
> There is no monopoly. There are a lot of other browsers. A lot of people use them.
There is market dominance: Chrome has 65%, Safari has 18% but that’s because of iOS, and the few others have the rest. It’s false to say there are "a lot" of other browsers when nobody can enter the space anymore.
> They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.
Most people don’t choose their browser, they just take whatever comes preinstalled. Even then, Google pushes you to use their browser every time you use their services: I know a lot of non-tech people who use Chrome on iOS not because they chose to, but because they got a pop-in on Google that told them to do so.
> It is bad for you.
The current situation is indeed bad for the consumer, even if it’s not a monopoly per se.
Edge comes pre-installed on Windows and it sucks so no one uses it.
In fact, windows keeps on making it the default for many file extensions and still no one uses it