Comment by jansan

6 days ago

I sincerely doubt that forcing Google to spin off Chrome is the only or best solution for this.

What other solution do you have in mind? Legislation about architecture decisions taken in software products seems preferable?

In principle there is nothing wrong for example with a shared account for multiple products from the same company, many even prefer it. The problem only appears when this gets concentrated into too much power and can be leveraged in ways that distort the market and hurt consumers.

  • > Legislation about architecture decisions taken in software products seems preferable?

    To me this option seems more practical. And we already have some precedence for this kind of solution.

    For aviation we have entities like EASA issuing standards like ED-109 and for healthcare we have the HL7 organization issuing the HL7 standard. Another example in the healthcare industry is the DICOM standard created by the NEMA organization. This is not a new idea.

    I'm not arguing this approach is without problems. But we are already doing this for some pretty important topics, and I don't see why we couldn't use the same strategy for an "open web standard" that all browsers have to implement.

    • The UNIX standard was made in part because the government wanted an operating system standard, right?

      Seems reasonable they’d push for a browser standard as well…. Even though we kind of have one.

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