Comment by simiones
6 days ago
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.
Yes, Chrome is the de facto standard for the open web. And everyone agrees this is too much power for a single company to have.
But most people seem to think that just removing Chrome from Google would fix this issue. People seem to forget that Chrome isn't the only tool Google can use to steer the web standard in a particular way.
The Google crawler is probably an even more effective tool in shaping the web standard. "To be indexed by Google your page needs to comply with these requirements" puts A LOT of pressure in everyone working in the web.
This is why I think creating and enforcing a web standard is the only practical solution to this problem.
> The UNIX standard was made in part because the government > wanted an operating system standard, right?
Wrong? Or at least where's the citation to back this up?
"UNIX Standard" presumably means POSIX which was a work of the IEEE, not a government body. If some government had something to do with making it happen, I'm not aware of that. At the time (1988) UNIX wasn't used much outside of academia and niche industries.
2 replies →