Comment by titzer
5 days ago
The conflict of interest between owning search, being a provider of user identity/login, and effectively owning the entire internet ads marketplace, and being a provider of the "user agent" (remember when people thought of that way!?) is immense.
This should have happened years ago.
TBF, I worked in Chrome almost 7 years and I didn't see anything outright nefarious. I don't know how user-hostile decisions (like breaking ad blockers and serving advertisers better) get made, but they do get made, or defaulted into. Trust me, the leadership of Chrome knows exactly how to justify its $300 million+ budget to the rest of Google, revenue numbers and all.
But there's no vendor lock-in from providing the user agent. It only costs a few minutes to switch to a different browser. The problem is other browsers suck, through no fault of Chrome (other than setting the bar high).
I'm guessing that budget is well over half a billion today. Got data?
"Conflict of interest" has a precise ethical/legal definition. It doesn't mean "somebody is doing something I don't like".
From the Oxford dictionary:
conflict of interest, n:
a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible.
"the conflict of interest between elected officials and corporate lobbyists"
Sure that's a colloquial sense, but we're talking about a legal sense here.
The legal/ethical sense is where one party has an actual obligation to multiple other parties whose interests are incompatible. For instance, a lawyer who represents both sides of a dispute has a conflict in interest; they cannot faithfully satisfy their obligations to all their clients.
In your example you cited a few services,
* provide a search engine
* provide login
* run ads business
* provide a web browser
But you haven't explained what the legal/ethical obligations are, and where the conflict arises, e.g., how one company cannot possibly fulfill all of those obligations.
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