Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon The US Department of Justice has accused a major tech company of an illegal web monopoly and tried to force them to split off their web browser. Sound familiar? Oh, right, it was the United States vs Microsoft, aka Netscape vs Internet, in 1998. This time around, it's the United States vs Google. Judge Amit Mehta of the US …
Google is banned in my company. No google product or app or service is allowed on our network. ALL chrome based browsers are prohibited. Why? Simple really, we do work for the MOD.
There is a separate 'open' network for visitors. It is air-gapped from our main network. The crap on the visitor network has to be seen to be believed.
GOOGLE IS EVIL
That's interesting, 'cos I've never seen 'no Chromium' mandated. Even when talking about the fully airgapped high protected network, where a browser can't get out anyway.
If anything it usually goes 'thou shalt use Edge, forsaking all others', which is based on... Chromium.
Chrome seems to have weekly MOD security update advisories so no-one can be bothered with the maintenance overhead of having it. Firefox derivatives and Opera don't usually get even a look at being used.
Anon for obvious reasons. I'll go further and point out that some of the tools we use within MoD don't work on Edge - so we have to use Chrome. It's right there by default next to Edge.
And many a self help note basically says "if it doesn't work in Edge, try Chrome".
But that's the least of things that concern me. The other day I came across a page where it said "we are committed to using the best Microsoft tools for the job" - not "best tools for the job", but best Microsoft tools. To bring up a dated metaphor, not only did they let the door slam shut when entering the MS walled garden, it looks like they've bricked it up and planted some creepers to hide the fact that there was ever a way out.
another anon :o)
I too have work within the MoD garden, and we too, have an exclusive MS set up, apart from when things don't go as planned
then we use / need Chrome ffs :o)
It's all madness
there's always sufficient things out there, and they will all get the job done
but now we have to pussy foot around the fact that we can only use XYZ software on ABC browser
except when it doesn't :o(
One of the other remediation options is for Google to provide access to its search index for 10 years. This is arguably a bigger part of the problem. Changing Chrome's market share is more a matter of convincing people to not use Chrome. Convincing people to not use Google's search index is a matter of convincing them to use Bing's search index or... Yandex? It's far less feasible for a competitor to build an index and make it competitive than to make a browser competitive.
In my opinion, all of the search indexes should be treated as utilities.
Yes AV and Y were even worse, that doesnt actually refute my statement.
G and PageRank are fundamentally broken, the concept of voting for a page via links is broken. For example a new science story about a human illness even if its from a world leader or nobel prize winner will have very few pages pointing too it, while flat earth pages do have many links, and this demonstraates my point.
The only way to fix this problem is too have humans manually update the value of pages and G doesnt believe in doing this because human time costs money and this is why google search results are filleds tih garbage and I havent even mentioned that Google's AI if there is any in its page ranking, is plain dumb and doesnt work.
"Google made $237.86 billion from its Chrome-driven advertising"
I followed the link. It said Alphabet made $237.86 billion advertising sales. I see no evidence that such revenue is directly derived from the Chrome browser. It's driven by Goolge's search page, and all the advertising brokers they own that show adverts all over the web. I can't see that their earnings would be much reduced if all that happened was Chrome was cut off.
Ad blocking enabled by default in Chrome would really impact; but no new owner is going to do that because they would almost certainly have their fingers in the ad pie and so it would hit their revenues, too. And, as you point out, Chrome is already largely open source (Chrome is Chromium plus autoupdate, crash reporting, DRM and codecs) and such a huge cost that Google shares the burden with Microsoft and others. How does factoring out those few proprietary features of Chrome hurt Google? Would Google be banned from contributing to Chromium? The whole idea left you going "What?! Why?!"
Anyway, we can all agree it's not going to happen.
Some of that revenue definitely does come through Chrome, but the article is wrong by ascribing all or even most of it to Chrome's dominance. By having Chrome and making sure ad blockers don't work as often as they can, Google does increase their revenue. It also makes it easier to redirect people to pages with Google ads on them when possible and there are a few levers they use to do that. It only works because the ads and the browser are run by the same people. Another person who was running Chrome wouldn't get that revenue, and nor would Google lose much of it if they had to transfer Chrome to someone else.
It isn't about the revenue derived directly from Chrome, but the ability to leverage its near monopoly (outside of Apple devices) into doing stuff like pushing new plugin standards that hamstring proper ad blocking and other "bad stuff" blocking like Javascript, tracking, etc.
If Chrome was owned by a third party that did not benefit directly from showing more ads to Chrome users, it is unlikely that the Manifest v3 changes would have been made the way they were. If you were properly responsive to the users you'd give them what they want, which is BETTER ad blocking not worse.
What's worse is that Google has been pushing HTTP standards in privacy raping directions like adding standards allowing browsers to access wifi networks, bluetooth, USB, cameras/microphones, and so forth. There is absolutely ZERO reason that stuff should be in the standard. Maybe you can argue camera/microphones for stuff like Zoom type support via the web, but what would be the harm in requiring a browser plugin to provide that support? That way only people who actually need to let their browser access their camera would make it possible, so the rest don't have to worry about a malicious web pages accessing it.
They're also only a "Apple must allow full third party browsers" ruling away from being able to "encourage" websites to only function for Chrome/Chromium browsers, like the bad old days of "best viewed by IE6". That's what some more stupid web designers have been bellyaching for, because they'd like to be lazy and only have to test on Chrome or used the stuff Google has crammed into the standard that make things worse that Apple and Firefox have refused to implement. Unfortunately Firefox's share is far too small, so if you could download full Chrome on an iPhone it would be easy for websites to require that knowing that every single person who wants/needs to access their site would be forced to download Chrome. Google would "encourage" that behavior by giving a bonus on ad payments to sites that put the "best used by" label on there.
If they are ignored the majority of the time that still leaves room for over $100 billion of advertising that isn't ignored. That's what the advertisers are paying for. They have always known certain people are better at ignoring ads than others but they still consider their overall advertising spend to be worth it for the people who are influenced.
I will say most people who will claim that advertising is ineffective with them aren't being honest with themselves. If asked I would tell you I'm more difficult to sway than the average person, but I can also remember ads from when I was a kid in the 70s. I was just mentioning to my family last week about how their used to be ads for denture cream all the time when I was a kid but you never see that anymore. Maybe the fluoride in the water (which people who were old in the 1970s and 1980s didn't get in their early years) has some positive effect after all! For Gen Xers living in the US, I bet reading "poligrip" and "super poli-grip" rings a loud bell with your youth lol
It's the data that goes though the browser that makes them the serious add revenue.
By using goog services you agree to their terms. Those terms include that they can monitor ALL your activity. Your geo location, every word you type in the browser, every page you visit, view time per page. All that goes into picking products to shove in your face to sell things. The search engine is not there FOR YOU, it is there to Market TO you, with the data harvested From you.
I hope nobody thought Chrome and Goog search engine were free - they are not, and you are not the customer, We are the product, the customers are the companies that advertise though google.
"we have to wait until 2026 to even try it, it seems..."
Not exactly download -> install -> run, but it seems doable:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Documentation/BuildInstructionsLadybird.md
The sole reason chrome is a problem is because of the privacy issues.
The privacy issues relate to feeding the advertising arm with data.
Cut away the advert company so they have to use 3rd parties like everyone else (if we can make money by showing 3rd party ads, so can google).
Magically all that bonus telemetry in chrome won't be needed anymore because it won't be in googles direct interest.
no more advertising and all this shite just goes away
And a good chunk of the internet with it. The only news sites would be behind paywalls, and I guess Bing would be the only search engine left, as it is the only one owned by a company that does not derive most of its revenue through ads.
dina: And a good chunk of the internet with it.
cow:
So what if it does, the world wont end if influencers fade into history. It actually will help everyone, less pollution, less fake medicine, less environmental waste from stupid fake products, its only up.
Thing is, there are pretty few bits that are proprietary in there: installer and auto-updater (minor), text-to-speech voices (nice, but relatively minor in a browser), Widevine (open sourcing defeats its purpose), ...? Even things like the client part of sync with a Google account are in Chromium already.
Imagine for a moment Microsoft owning Chrome. The horror of Christmas past. The path to the end of the opensource Chromium.
That's not fiction. Microsoft is the only company with enough money and a search engine, that can be used to fund the billions per year needed to develop Chrome.
I've lived through the 90s and 00s and seen the impact of Internet Explorer, actively preventing the success of any operating system other than Windows.
No, thanks. I strongly prefer the most popular web engine to be opensource and Microsoft isn't the one to do it, as they never did.
"used to fund the billions per year needed to develop Chrome"
I think that's your problem right there. How the hell does it take billions per year to develop a browser?
If we assume European style Monday to Friday with five weeks and various public holidays off, then it amounts to four and a half million per day if the funding is just one billion. Google says a programmer with a degree can expect around $75K/year. So that billion would be thirteen thousand well qualified programmers, rather than the students and interns and outsourced foreigners that will actually be doing most of the work. Or in programmer terms, that's about two hundred million lattes (or five hundred million teas for us Brits - or if you make it yourself, a mere 35,114,323,200 bags of Tetley, which is somewhat more than my annual intake).
That "billions per year" figure simply doesn't make sense.
That's not this American's (which is a continent) attitude. Money (or the greed of it by MS and Goog) is the root of the problem. Semi authorized (tricked) data theft for profit. I don't see Ransomware gangs and Goog and MS as that different. Ransom want's payments all at once, Goog/MS blead if from you over time. Same type of people run the businesses.
You don't need that many people, but remember to budget in:
1. Extra payments for every worker, because salary is not the only cost to the employer.
2. Translators to all the supported languages.
3. Testers for every supported operating system, and yes they have them.
4. Separate development teams for every operating system, because they have those too even if they don't necessarily need to build OS-specific versions of every part.
5. People to manage the build system, IT, HR, finance, for all the programmers/translators/testers.
6. People to either write or get licenses for all the extra software you need to have a modern browser, like fonts for every language. There are many more components involved.
7. Security teams to try to find vulnerabilities and to fix any that someone reports quickly because a browser is a frequent target.
And the optional ones that modern browsers all have:
8. Researchers developing new networking, security, and web standards. You'll need some people to implement them when others do, which is made a little easier by working with them to create them.
9. People who add additional features that you don't care about but other people do. I'm guessing that a lot of people have never used, for instance, Firefox's new offline translation function, but I do and I'm glad they built it.
10. Management, which you will need at least some of, even if it's only taking the most administration-capable programmers off task at times so they can make sure multiple people aren't writing the same thing or the testers are testing the thing that needs a lot of testing.
11. Probably a lot more types of people I didn't think to list or should be split into their own categories.
Not everyone who develops something is a programmer.
Given the sort of money being talked about and what it translates to (even at Google wages), I think there's more than enough budget for the ancillary stuff. Translators, for example, won't be needed for 1600h per year. Neither the people to sort out the licences. Some of those tasks can be doubled up, like licence compliance can come under the remit of other legalese things. Likewise the people that add the additional features and/or support alternative platforms - how is this not a part of the main programming job? It isn't going to be every day working on the CSS parser or whatever, it'll be a list of features to work on spread out amongst the available staff. Arguably HR and finance and some levels of management will be the parent company's concern and not something specific to the browser.
So, I contend, that figure still doesn't make sense.
"Likewise the people that add the additional features and/or support alternative platforms - how is this not a part of the main programming job?"
Most of them are programmers, though not all, but they're not the main programmers because the main programmers have their hands full with more recognizably browser tasks. They need to write a JavaScript engine that both supports new things added to standards and has a faster compiler. You need someone else to test that it hasn't broken other JS stuff, because the people building the JIT compiler are kind of busy to do all the amount of testing that requires. Fixing compatibility so the Linux versions work with different distros is going to be done by different programmers. Testing to see when that's required will probably be done by some other people entirely, because you can have one testing team that will test compatibility of lots of stuff even if different programmers might work on fixing problems that team finds. New features are also being developed by programmers, but again, the people working on the core browser are still doing that, so the new features will have extra people working on it specifically.
There is a pattern where people try to estimate how many people are needed to do a job by simplifying the task into its most basic form, only considering the job they know, and often making an optimistic assumption at that point. For instance, I remember an argument with someone who described Paypal's business needs as the programmers to develop some web forms, completely ignoring all the financial services licensing and operations they would also need. I don't mean that every penny Google spends on Chrome is necessary or well-spent, but it is easy to assume that a modern browser is a lot smaller than it is. Part of that is due to our previous experience with browsers that were just browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and everything else no longer are and it's likely not going back. For example, we may feel that access to cameras from a browser is not necessary; browsers managed without that for most of the time when there were browsers. However, it does let you have a videoconference system from almost any machine without having to install a local binary to do it. Maybe we don't care or would actively prefer that. Too bad for us then, because many others have come to like that and won't accept the degradation to their workflow just so we can have a browser that better matches our impression of what a browser should be. To give them what they expect, not only does our browser have to include camera access on every supported platform with different APIs, but we need a WASM-style fast computing interface because JS interpretation is too slow, enough JS libraries that it can call video functions and outsource to WASM those things that need it, and to support some other features that users want, some graphics layer so the GPU can be used on that video. You wouldn't need as many people if you didn't need those features, but the way we've gone so far, you do.
Chrome isn't just a browser, its a technology. That's both its strength and a weakness. The strength is that inside a Chromebook type environment -- inside Chrome -- its just about all you need to do routine tasks reliably and efficiently. The drawback is that this is a walled garden, you're essentially locked inside a vast surveillance and advertising ecosystem.
For many of us being locked inside a Chrome jail isn't a big deal because all we want is for stuff to work (and Google, like Amazon, has figured out that users prefer fewer but more effective advertisements). For the rest of us, especially those who don't like baring our soul to advertisers and anyone else who can pay the toll (advertisers of products are just the relatively benign tip of the iceberg) we probably need to keep this stuff at arm's length and then some.
It doesn't help that web technology is so messed up that quite often things only work with certain versions of browsers (but they always work with Chrome).
Internet Explorer became the first Browser Monopoly because of the utter incompetence of Netscape (and to a lesser extent Spyglass)
Firefox became majority market share browser for a while (on non-corporate computers) because of the utter incompetence of Microsoft.
Chrome became the overwhelming market share browser because of the utter incompetence of Mozilla and Microsoft. With Apples weird proprietary browser in a supporting role.
Starting to see the pattern?
Given the recent severe / crash bugs I've started seeing in Chrome the last year or two I suspect we are now entering the utter (technical) incompetent phase for Chrome. If you have tried to create a Chrome build system and build from source you would know what an early stage code-collapse looks like. There are build systems for the compete avionics software stack for modern civil aviation jets that are less complex than the current Chrome build.
Its that bad.
I wonder who is next up. It wont be anything from MS that's for sure.
So since the first beta on Win32 shipped in 2008 literally every laptop / PC I have used (more than a three dozen) needed a manual install of Chrome. I had to go and downloads the installer and then run the installer. Same with Firefox / Waterfox and with Opera.
I have never fired up a freshly built / OS installed laptop / PC that had Chrome pre-installed or bundled. Now IE / Edge and Safari that was a very different matter. Every fresh install of Win Whatever over the last 30 years comes with IE/Bing being both preinstalled and uninstallable. Which as we all know has done wonders for MS browser market share over the last decade.
There again I'm a professional developer so dont buy bottom feeder vendor "cheapo" machines that might be full of bloatware. Like the Office 365 teaser for example....
The only devices I have that came with Chrome pre-installed were, you guessed it, Android phones and tablets and Chromebooks. And the first thing I do with a MacOS/ iOS device / machine is install Chrome. Because, well, life too short to deal with Safari if you need to test any web related code and Firefox on MacOS/iOS was always too flakey.
In case you are wondering I currently have instances of Chrome, Waterfox and Opera open at the moment. Each one does particular tasks better than the others. So mix and match. Only time I've used IE/Edge in the last two decades is to download the Opera/Firefox/Chrome installers.
For a few years, a large number of common applications were paid to bundle Chrome in their installer, and installed it by default.
So a lot of people needed a PDF viewer or similar, and their default browser got changed to Chrome despite them never wanting that. A fair few of them may not have even realised, and most of the users that did had no idea how to reverse it.
It was a trick used by a lot of unwanted software.
As a matter of interest which major ISV's shipped a Chrome installer as part of their install package? As a PDF reader even . I thought Adobe's channel marketing people had that all wrapped up for decades. Although knowing the Adobe people the last decade or so, not the sharpest knife in the drawer
Now I've seen hardware vendors pre-install / add installers for their own proprietary shovelware or for bloatware "deals" done by the marketing dept but the only browser I've seen pre-installed / ready to install on consumer / business PC hardware has been IE/Edge. For the last 30 years. Or Safari in MacOS land.
But in the low end hardware of the consumer market there is no knowing just what is added to the bloatware pile. I've seen some real turds in the mix over the years. Which is why the first thing I do with a newly acquired consumer machines is wipe it. Back to the stock OS install. Although in recent years I've taken to doing a wipe install of Linux first. Just to make sure everything really is gone. Win Whatever leaves a lot of low level crap in nooks and crannies from the previous installs even after a "clean" reinstall. That's The Microsoft Way.
"As a PDF reader even . I thought Adobe's channel marketing people had that all wrapped up for decades."
They mostly did, which is probably why that was used as an example. One of the companies bundling Chrome was Adobe. See, for example, this complaint about Flash, also a popular thing to install in a fortunately bygone era. Adobe was far from the only one. I remember it attached to all sorts of things. Some of them were small companies, for instance an audio editor I used and had to keep unchecking the box. Others were larger companies but didn't have the dignity to refuse the offer. Some of them didn't have a box to uncheck and you had to manually uninstall Chrome after installing their thing.
Well as 99% of the Flash market was as web content hardly surprising that a browser might be bundled. And given the "standards" train wreck that was IE and the fact that MS had their own competing product (Silverlight - which failed miserable) the browser was not going to be IE.
The other > 1% of the market was multi-media content / professional animation workflow content so they were not going to use IE either.
So yeah, any bundled browser was going to be Chrome due to Firefoxs ongoing "technical issues" at the time. Not just with the Flash player plugin.
Going any more viable examples of Chromes "intrusive bundling" ?
oooh, I spy someone who "reads" the "daily mail" and thinks putting things in "scare quotes" means you don't need a logical argument.
Your answer is basically "Of course they bundled Chrome with things, they were doing you a favour. The browser you wanted to use was shit!!!"
Why would you want more examples? Clearly, I had them, because I also mentioned Adobe Reader which you didn't bother to rebut and mentioned two other pieces of software: audio editor (no response) and unspecified one that preinstalled Chrome with no option. That one was a media player that, although I didn't use it, I knew people who wanted it because they asked me to remove Chrome after installing it. So those are three more examples. Since you focused on Flash and decided, without reason, that Chrome installation was justified, I'm sure you can find a reason why an audio editor that didn't use a browser was clearly only used by people who truly wanted Chrome but just hadn't bothered to install it themselves.
That is certainly true but it was also a lot better than the other browsers that were around then. A lot of their spread into the market came from weary techies frustrated with relatives' and employers' demands that they Make The Internet Work who sought it out as one of the first things to install on a new PC without the need for Google's subterfuge.
Then the advertising rot set in.
This is not your grandfather's Chrome.
In view of the colossal number of installers that I experienced in the noughties that insisted on trying to install Chrome by default (and YES, Adobe Acrobat Reader WAS one of them), no, I don't think Google's own adverts for the browser on their own search page had more than a very small impact.
I slipped up once and ended up with Chrome installed, so I tried it for a while. Frankly, it thought it was utterly shit (even compared to IE), and very soon uninstalled it. I have never even considered trying it again, and in view of the ever increasing intrusiveness involved with it, I never will.
Quoting Cory Doctorow: Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being “a monopolist” and acting “as one to maintain its monopoly.” The judge concluded that key to Google’s monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this. Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and query data. The technical term for this is “apocalyptically stupid.” Releasing Google’s click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.
Largely theoretical answers like “differential privacy” are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google’s click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data: The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it’s unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms’ search engines. [Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) Nov, 2024].
My take: Users and their PI are the product. The court is ruling on how the PI market should "Democratize" (is that the right word?) the data. There is a huge opportunity now to use AI to collate and index individual users by their individual thoughts and statements, and leverage that in "new and innovative" ways. Even Google might not have the balls to go all the way there, and require a little arm twisting to let somebody else do it. If the courts were working for the user we would be seeing PI Privacy Laws and user opt-in to sharing PI. That's not happening. On the other hand, I think Google forced to share its PI is almost certainly going to happen.
Note that the EU's DMA 6(11) regulations already force Google to let third-parties access query and click data:
The gatekeeper shall provide to any third-party undertaking providing online search engines, at its request, with access on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to ranking, query, click and view data in relation to free and paid search generated by end users on its online search engines. Any such query, click and view data that constitutes personal data shall be anonymised.
Not sure what Google considers is fair and reasonable, or whether anybody has even tried buying it. Not sure what they consider anonymised.
The last paragraph proposes a cure for Google's monopolization: "There's already an open source version of Chrome, Chromium. Why not open source Chrome to stop the DOJ and other legal opponents in their tracks?" This is incomplete to the point of being misleading to anyone not already familiar with Chromium.
First, as already alluded to in comments by Brewster's Angle Grinder and C. Carr, Chrome is based on Chromium (or, to be more blunt about it, Chrome is Chromium will closed-source functions that are added by Google), not the other way around. Chromium itself, although an open-source project, is largely funded by Google and coded by people who are employees of Google. Presumably Google wants it to be open source to get some benefits for Google, like testing by an open source community and contributions of code improvements and of new functionality by members of that community. Google then adds things that are proprietary to Google, like ties to Google's user data harvesting and to Google's selling to advertisers of relevant information about users, as well as closed source browser tools like those for dealing with DRM and proprietary codecs.
Since Chrome incorporates things that are proprietary to Google and key to its dominance of its primary market, internet advertising, it's difficult to even dream that Google would open source Chrome.
The shame is, that even though it's open-source, Chromium is still a Google-terminal.
There are projects to de-Google Chromium, and it's not a simple job (e.g., ungoogled-chromium). I wonder if Apache would even be allowed to do that?
Perhaps. Or maybe the real problem is that Chrome, through its dominance, is able to impose those frequent updates and persuade a load of dumb web developers to use them in sites, thereby excluding browsers that "only" implement the perfectly satisfactory specification of 6 or 12 months ago.
Media encoding standards aside, the vast majority of web-sites are not doing anything that could not be achieved quite reasonably with the HTML5 spec from (shuffle, shuffle) January 2008. So if there really are huge numbers of web-sites that don't work in other browsers (and actually, I can't say that I've encountered any) I think we're entitled to label them as "broken" and tell their designers to "get a clue" and "fix their shit".
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