Comment by TZubiri
1 year ago
"Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit..."
That's some fatalistic wording. How about:
Company that publishes a free product and business model relies on ads, stops distributing app that piggybacks on their free product while circumventing ads.
Also true. But it’s a charitable way of putting a fundamentally broken contract on the open web since it was invented: you are in control of your browser. If you want reading mode, large text, anti-fingerprinting, disable autoplaying video, heck even banning popups, the browser is your tool and does what you tell it to. If Google or any other company comes between you and your browser then one part of the open web is discarded. I think extensions are gonna get nerfed even more in the future, for whatever reason large commercial interests have.
Right. I think people were alert to these possibilities long before the actual stuff happened with Manifest V3.
And it shouldn't take waiting until specific examples happen to understand the incentives and the possibilities that could ripen at some future date.
And just to throw in my little side hobby horse on this conversation, it's what I find personally frustrating about conversations with people who think that Brave counts as an alternative.
Being attached at the hip to the Chromium project is a ground level commitment to a long-term vulnerability, and it means that similar circumstances could "ripen" at some future date as the family of Chromium browsers become dependent on an increasingly vast foundation of code and web standards. To me, the combination of that capability and the incentive should be enough to be treated as a complete argument which disqualifies Chromium derived browsers from counting as alternatives.
Sure. You are free to modify your browser.
But chrome is free to choose not to distribute that plugin. If you want you can download it elsewhere.
Yes that is how the law views it. That’s not necessarily a good thing. I agree that I should have rights because I’m a person. As the crazy radical I am, I don’t agree that companies ”are free to X”, because they shouldn’t have freedoms, only entitlements that can be regulated to serve the purpose of the citizens.
It was never free. The revenue streams are just hidden. It has always collected and sold huge amounts of data about every user.
And regardless, using their ownership of the browser to shut down competitors is the very definition of "anti-competitive" "monopolistic" behavior.
Right, and that's why ad and spying funded products should be illegal. They don't just distort but destroy markets. It's an extremely unfair business practice.
That people claim it's impossible for a browser to survive without Google's funding demonstrates how broken the market is by ad money: of course people would pay for something like a web browser if it were illegal to make money by selling your users. The web is obviously valuable to people.
>Right, and that's why ad and spying funded products should be illegal. They don't just distort but destroy markets. It's an extremely unfair business practice.
Call your senator and propose a bill, otherwise we'll keep doing what's legal.
To me it’s just another decision rooted in greed, to take away more Agency from the User Agent.