Google owns every pane of ingress to the internet. They own the defaults, and that's what matters to 99.9% of normies. They own the web standards and the whole kit and kaboodle. Nevermind app store monopolies, as that's a whole different subject.

If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand. Google doesn't like the concept of a "URL bar". It's a search bar. My closet competitors can pay for placement against my trademarked name and there's not a damned thing I can do to stop it.

One company should not own all of that surface area. That's practically the whole internet outside of social networks and buying off Amazon.

Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)

Fixes? Here are a few:

1. Take Chrome away. That's the lynchpin of this racket.

2. Make Google (and Apple) support non-scare wall app installs from the web as a default. No hidden settings menus. (The EU would be great and enforcing this.) Don't let them own login or payments either.

3. Best yet: break the company into pieces. If it was good enough for MaBell, it'll be good enough for Google. It'll be worth more as parts anyway - so much of that value is locked away trying to be the sum of parts. YouTube alone is bigger than Disney and Netflix.

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent [-]

My previous post lists other ways users can ingress to the internet. Chrome is not the only app that connects to the internet.

>If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand

Google will still rank your page even without ads. Normal search results are shown after ads. Other platforms as I mentioned before have search ads. This is not a unique thing.

>Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)

Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there." Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.

>Take Chrome away.

If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.

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dns_snek 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why are you carrying water for Google of all corporations? Praising them for investing into the browser and claiming that we should be thankful for their work is nothing short of appalling. That rhetoric is carrying water for the fundamental belief that monopolies are good as long as their stranglehold produces some positive side effects that we can appreciate.

Chrome isn't the only browser that exists, no, but it damn well isn't for the lack of trying. They've been trying to smother every alternative and now that they've largely succeeded, they're trying to push hostile changes like Web Environment Integrity and Manifest V3 that take even more power away from their users.

Other companies have search, other companies have ads, other companies have apps, other companies host video, one other company has a mobile platform and a browser, but they don't have all of those combined, and the one company that has most of those (Apple) is just as anti-competitive and just as problematic as Google. What makes them anti-competitive is how they leverage their dominance in ALL of those areas to smother any fair alternative in their crib.

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charcircuit 2 days ago | parent [-]

>Why are you carrying water for Google of all corporations?

Because if I don't do it, who will?

>that monopolies are good as long as their stranglehold produces some positive side effects

Chrome is not a monopoly as it compete against the apps I previously provided.

>they're trying to push hostile changes like Web Environment Integrity and Manifest V3 that take even more power away from their users.

The changes are not hostile. Their goal is to improve the web.

>and the one company that has most of those (Apple)

Apple has all of them.

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dns_snek 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Because if I don't do it, who will?

Hopefully nobody? Defending anti-competitive practices of corporations is generally a really odd thing to do.

> Chrome is not a monopoly as it compete against the apps I previously provided.

Google the company, not Chrome.

> The changes are not hostile. Their goal is to improve the web.

Please don't insult me with corporate PR. Their goal is to take control away from their users in order to empower their customers - advertisers.

To deny that is plainly dishonest, they've been engaging in the same practices on every property they own - Android as the most direct comparison.

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charcircuit 2 days ago | parent [-]

>Their goal is to take control away from their users in order to empower their customers - advertisers.

Did you read the proposals to understand the actual goals of them? Taking away control from users or empowering advertisers was never a goal. The goal of the attestation API was for improving the security of the web platform. This is important to do in order to keep the web platform relevant compared to competing app platforms. MV3 was an update to extentions that improved performance, security, and privacy of web extentions. Ad blocking is still possible with MV3, so if their goal was too kill it they did a terrible job. Also if their goal was to kill ad blockers, why did the chromium team work with adblocking extentions to iterate and improve the API to better suit their needs? If they didn't like ad blockers they wouldn't be working with them.

	▲	dns_snek 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Did you read the proposals to understand the actual goals of them? Yes, and better yet, I understood their technical implications. > Taking away control from users or empowering advertisers was never a goal. It was never a stated goal, but it becomes self-evident if you actually understand their technical details. Both of those effectively install locks on our digital doors and while they're unlocked for now, they can and will be locked at the first opportunity as the protests die down. MV3 didn't block ad blockers for now, but it added technical limitations to the number of dynamic filters that ad blockers can use - a simple switch that Google can flip and hobble their functionality with some bullshit "safety and security" excuse at the first opportune moment. The best part is, they might not even have to do that because if I worked for an ad network right now, I'd be knees deep developing a new system that simply overwhelms the technical limitations imposed on MV3 ad blockers, specifically the 30,000 rules limit. We heard the same sleazy explanations when SafetyNet was being rolled out on Android, it's all for our safety and security, and now those mechanisms are being used to lock us out of our own devices. Not as a matter of official Google policy of course, it just so happens as a side effect of their benevolent goals. Here's a simple canary, if these mechanisms were actually provided for our own safety and security then Google wouldn't use attestation APIs to block usage of Google Pay on GrapheneOS which has been battle tested to be significantly more secure than stock Android.

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echelon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> My previous post lists other ways users can ingress to the internet. Chrome is not the only app that connects to the internet.

I'm glad the normies will read your post and find other routes of ingress.

Defaults and distribution matter. Google has your parents and grandparents on lock.

> Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there."

They've spent more in stock buybacks. No better way of saying they don't know how to spend the money.

It doesn't matter how much the trillion dollar company spent. They're an ecological menace. We need a forest fire to clear away the underbrush and ossification, to create new opportunities for startups and innovation capital. Google is like an invasive species. Like lionfish. They're ruining tech for everyone else, taking far too much meat off the bone across every channel.

> Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.

I wouldn't know because I use Firefox, but on the subject of apps - these are taxed by Google too.

> If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.

That's literally the point. Something with less surface area moves in and competes.

Companies should face evolutionary pressure constantly. Business should be brutal and painful and hard. Google is so big they'll never feel any pain. That's been bad for the web, for competition, for diverse innovation. Everything just accrues to Google.

Not to mention these tech conglomerate oligopolies get to put an upper bounds cap on startups and the IPO market. They get to dump on new companies and buy them on the cheap when they give up. It's easy to threaten to subsidize competition for any new company when you're making hundreds of billions a quarter.

	▲	terminalshort 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If defaults are so unfair how did Chrome ever become the dominant browser in the first place? Build a better browser and people will use it, just like they did with Chrome. Probably won't happen today, not because of Google being the default, but because browsers are a mature product and it just isn't nearly as easy to make something noticeably better.
	▲	charcircuit 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>I'm glad the normies will read your post and find other routes of ingress. Some of the apps I listed have billions of users. The normies know about them. >They've spent more in stock buybacks This is moving the goal posts. They still have done a tremendous amount of work creating and maintaining platforms that millions of people are building upon. Companies can always do more, but you can't say that they are doing nothing at all. >these are taxed by Google too. Ad revenue, which makes up the bulk of revenue, is not taxed.