there is no regulatory body that is able or willing to step in
We've already seen far greater market share from a browser. That browser lost it's market share when it stopped serving consumers. It lost it so thoroughly that decades and billions later it still can't recoup it.
Why would you want the government to hurt Firefox and the other competitors who would be happy to compete with Google on this front?
You may as well question the purpose of the FDA regulating slaughterhouses since vegetarians have been found a way to avoid doing business with them. That's a nonsense position. A vegetarian should demand that the FDA regulate the meat industry, and a firefox user should demand regulation for corporations they've avoided.
Why is it abuse? No one is being forced to use chromium. Are you abusing your market position when you buy the cheapest toothbrush in a manner that's harmful to other toothbrush companies?
Google can easily force the other browsers to lose the Web Request API, because maintaining it when they're the only ones using it is a net loss of productivity, which will probably be needed elsewhere.
How do you measure this? Does the public include content creators who rely on ads for their livelihood?
The (bad actors within the) advertising industry are the enemy of people whose livelihoods depend on Internet advertising because they're the ones making ads either bandwidth-hogging, epilepsy-inducing, website-avoidingly annoying, privacy-invasive, or an actual virus/malware vector.
This is, directly, what has caused the popularity of ad blockers to skyrocket. Tech-savvy folks protecting their family from these dangers by installing ad-blocking software so they don't get regular family-tech-support calls about the various issues potentially arising from "bad" advertising.
Follow-up questions:
How many user ad clicks / views does it take for the revenue to be critical to one's livelihood?
Could you consider donations through any of the various options like Patreon?
Chrome has a responsibility not just to the end user but also to the website. The cost of the getting the web page's info was viewing the ads. Why should the browser help the user to commit virtual theft?
Simply blanket dismissing ads as "tenuous position" is nonsense. Lots of people make a living via web ads. Google makes billions on ads. It's a real source of real money. Alternatives could, and should!, be considered. But simply cutting off a revenue stream while arguing that the ability to cut off that revenue stream should be protected by regulators is weak at best.
Chrome is the user agent. It acts purely on behalf of the user. Browsers aren't trojans built to exploit my eyeballs. This "virtual theft" talk is as silly as claiming that spam filters should be illegal - your server sent me some markup, and I'm free to preprocess it in any way I want.
> Simply blanket dismissing ads as "tenuous position" is nonsense.
Not really. Advertising has always been about manipulating people into doing things they otherwise wouldn't do - if all ads were purely informative it'd hardly be a multibillion dollar industry.
Yes, yes, yes, and more yes. That's the cause that needs treating. Apologies if I wasn't clear, that's definitely where I think the regulation should be looking towards.
Regulate what's within your jurisdiction. That's all any government can do in any circumstance. If regulation results in more friendly advertising that's less likely to have users reaching for the blockers, then those advertisers are going to be more successful, and so even those in unregulated countries will need to conform in order to compete.
That's assuming that the number of users that have already reached for the blockers are of a significant enough percentage to make a difference to website ad revenue.
Start somewhere or stay nowhere.
Correct me if I'm misrepresenting your position, but I vaguely recall a discussion some time ago in which you compared adblocking to theft. If I'm remembering that correctly, you and I have no common ground upon which to have a civil discussion.
So you disagree with google deplatforming alex jones?
Additionally, I thought his removal from YouTube was as a result of pressure from the Government on hate speech and fake news etc. All the stuff Facebook is also attempting to crack down on.
It's not possible for people to be well educated in everything and, as hard as it is to swallow for us techy types, a fair percentage of people don't have the time or inclination to even realise the potential down sides of using the Internet. They're too busy with whatever their own areas of expertise are.
Maintaining this shit is hard for a pro. The amateurs don't deserve to get shafted.
On the other hand, Google is getting bigger, expanding and hiring more people as the list of their failed projects increase. The chances of them screwing up their core products seems to be increasing, from my point of view. If they manage to do that, that would negate an inevitable future collision with anti-trust regulators. As for the EU and the GDPR I’m sure we are seeing the earliest warning shots and it’s going to be a big mess for them.
On basis of what exactly? What is google doing wrong?
I am curious to hear. Don't downvote me.
Maybe you would concede that some reasonable people think they have in the past?
Like FTC investigators (albeit overruled by their bosses): http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
Or Eric Schmidt: https://www.businessinsider.com/is-google-a-monopoly-were-in...
Winning argument was
> It takes me all of 10 seconds to type duckduckgo.com, and maybe 30 to switch default search engines for the browser. [1][2]
But an equivalent, i can just download FF in 10 seconds is not acceptable in this context. why? Infact, Google browser is way less dominant that the search engine.
> I suspect a reply to your comment isn't going to change your stance on whether Google is dancing around in the anti-trust/monopoly area.
Why is that? Sounds a bit patronising.
It wasn't meant to be patronizing. People's views on anti-trust law vary enough that I don't expect a debate to settle things.
We can only hope.
Google (and the Silicon Valley behemoths): Currently know a lot of personal information about the citizenry
The US Government: Wants to know this information
Neither are necessarily deserving of or entitled to this information, so we shouldn't be cheering for either side.
Antitrust is less the issue than personal information / privacy / data tracking regulation. Antitrust enforcement is treating the symptoms, not the cause.
It's been confirmed they've had lots of forms of access many times in the past. Seems naive to believe anything would be different today.
I think any data the NSA has would be stringently guarded and only used for high-profile / high-impact cases. If the NSA was constantly feeding data to other agencies about trivialities, then it would raise red flags about where "all this incriminating evidence" came from.
Cases involving StingRay interceptions have been dropped so as to protect the details of such interceptions.
There's also the relationship between the agency and the Government to consider. The CIA don't seem to get along very well with various members of the US Government, and with "good" members such as Ron Wyden, if the NSA was feeding ill-gotten data to the US Govt, then someone like him would probably raise some kind of stink.
This doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether the NSA has this data, it's more about the potential mitigation of the likelihood of the data being actually used against someone.
Much like we don't know where the line is on the potential for Huawei kit to be a threat to national security.
Something. Not nothing.
Edited to add: There's also the very likely situation where Government policy / regulation is put in place to cover all parties, and the NSA ignores this anyway because they're above the law. Everyone else must play by the rules, the US Govt looks to be doing the right thing.
(this isn't a bitter statement, merely that I think this is how things actually work, whether for the US or any other country; realpolitik)
Didn't Snowden attest in an interview to NSA officers using webcam intercepts to get their rocks off?
And why does trump picking him make him automatically a disaster?
I feel like this is being completely dismissive of any kind of progress that could be made because orange man is bad.
Because President Trump doesn't have a great record in picking nor retaining people.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-...
Exactly, we are the product they are selling
Great.