What is possibly anti-competitive is their proposed alternative. And frankly I'm not sold on the supposed privacy of such an alternative either (which, in order to be functionally different from 3rd party cookies, will have to store personal identifying information in a location that users cannot access, edit and/or control).
Note also that (to my knowledge) browsers are not currently obligated to protect their users' privacy (though perhaps they should be, it makes more sense than punishing websites for sending cookies). This leaves google at least 2 completely legitimate options:
1. Keep 3rd party cookies.
2. Kill 3rd party cookies.
Sure the first will cost them their privacy conscious users and the second might hurt their ad business, but rejecting that choice on the sole grounds that it would hurt the bottom line of a different venture is textbook anti-trust. They'll probably list other reasons for not taking that second option, though I've not found them terribly convincing so far.
The problem is that when it comes to determining what's anti-competitive, yours is not the opinion that matters. According to the article, multiple US states, a US House submicommitee believe it is anticompetitive and now a UK regulator is also investigating whether it is. This is not a hypothetical like you think. It is what the people in power actually are on record about.
Your option 2 does not exist. Just full stop.
So we're left with the idea that every other browser in the world can improve privacy, but not the one that most people use. Do you seriously not see how fucked up that is? Why do you want to build up this garbage narrative about how it's not the fault of the authorities?
You're asserting that "killing 3rd party cookies is not anti-competitive". You presented no proof about this, it is just an opinion. Your entire point about what the valid options are is based on this assertion.
On the other hand, several US states and a US house committee apparently think otherwise, and the UK regulators think it at least merits investigation.
And yes, when evaluating whether there is regulatory risk from "killing 3rd party cookies", obviously the group from the previous paragraph is going to matter more than yours.
I am not "accusing you of the thing you're against". I'm not even sure what "you're against" or what the accusation is supposed to be.
The reality is, Google needs to be broken up. Every fine they get makes that clear.
The most generous thing I could say is that it feels different. However, Apple has a stronger hold on iOS than Google has on the web. On the web, at least you could switch to another browser to view the same content. Switching off iPhone requires a whole new ecosystem and hardware.
I hope people who argue for a certain treatment of Google in this case are at least consistent in the Apple case.
2. Apple's new privacy changes require that apps solicit user permission before doing any tracking. However, once the user has granted that, app developers are allowed to either use Apple's solution or their own.
Apple's AppTrackingTransparency Framework harms a market that Apple is not a part of. That specific action doesn't have any monopoly connotations in my mind because it solely benefited the product that was changed. There are no knock on effects where now Apple Maps is worth more.
Also, in this case, the consumers that are harmed by Google's alleged monopoly are people who are buying ads, not people using Chrome. I don't do anything with ads, but the impression I got from other people is that it's much easier for a consumer to switch phones than it is for an advertiser to just not advertise with Google.
I do think Apple has monopoly issues, I just don't think ATT is part of it. That was a legitimate response to consumer demand for privacy.
The only solution that would actually work is better regulation of the advertising space, but all advertisers (Google included) actively fight this. For example, ban governments from purchasing personal information without a warrant. Ban the sale of any/all personal information between companies - any personal information transferred should be gratis with at most nominal costs for the cost of the transfer itself. But then you might have to actually start paying for some services rather than everything being totally ad supported. Not to mention that governments, despite all their outcries about “privacy” and “evil corporations” love the status quo because of how easy it makes to invade your privacy without a warrant.
Not necessarily, its engine is now what powers Edge. Microsoft might support it.
They do?
Apple gives away a pretty decent browser with their OS.
Microsoft gives away a version of Chrome with their OS (and for MacOS).
Most Linux versions ship with variants of Chromium.
The Chrome source which is a fork of WebKit which is in turn a fork of KHTML... is Open Source.
Chrome can't really be sold.
What exactly could "Chrome" the company do to make money?
Otherwise lots of existing employees may not want to be part of this split company. If that is a large loss of talent (think veterans with lots of experience) that could hurt the quality (security, stability) and velocity of the project resulting in much less interest from those companies to pay the Chrome company for their services. What I'd suspect at that point is that Google might just fork it and develop it internally for internal use only (it's going to be hard to trust a third party browser to access internal confidential/critical resources when said third party has trouble maintaining high quality engineering talent). We're talking about state actors here that could have much easier time attacking a smaller Chrome company to introduce data exfiltration code.
Right. Now try to use that top right "user" icon on your chrome window to log in as a user that is not from a google account.
Nobody is going to pay. But if google serve an ad for a logged out (or firefox) user, they get paid 0.05c if they serve the same ad to someone logged in (via that button or otherwise) they get paid 1.7usd.
the button is just to make you be always logged in.
You are paying all the time and don't even realize.
Chrome can not be sold for many reasons, being open source is not one of them, nothing prevents the selling of open source software, one just has to include the source or make the source available
Finding someone willing to buy chrome would be a harder problem
It may be nearly impossible to prove to you, but what makes it impossible, or even particularly difficult, to achieve if the company is interested in doing it?
Plus, there's no rule that says a browser has to get most of its revenue from selling Google Search placement. That just happens to be the case for the single independent browser that exists right now, one which isn't exactly renowned for great business leadership. I think if the Chrome team had a reason to explore self sustaining revenue models there's a good chance they would come up with some solid innovations.
It's certainly possible for a browser to survive that way, but Konqueror doesn't seem to be terribly successful.
Both Linux kernel and web browsers are arguably too huge now to be even maintained entirely by a single organization, let alone to be developed from scratch by one.
Linux being under GPL kinda forces cooperation between businesses for their business needs, if they are going to tweak Linux. With browsers are you under impression that you can just fork Chromium maintained by someone else and then just add your business value for you alone to reap.
How to get from here to there, I don't know.
> How to get from here to there, I don't know.
You literally are there!
Sure, it's easy to criticize Mozilla for having "wrong priorities", being "pragmatic about EME", Firefox OS, losing market share, etc.
But simply saying a new board would fix things seems a bit naive.
by doing *exactly* what Google sued microsoft for trying to do with IE in the 90s. Isn't it funny?
On one end by almost literally being an extension of Google. On the other end by constantly laying off engineers. A big problem people are just handwaving away is that browsers are incredibly complex nowadays and how do you fund development of a browser engine? If you think the "Linux" model would work, well browsers already have that - it's called Mozilla and there is never any good news about them.
Brave is also funded by Google - Brave doesn't develop a browser, they develop a skin around a browser engine that Google pays millions to develop and has decided to open source.
There is also another aspect to it - one can imagine that the time of an OS which would run web apps as first class citizens (in the correctly engineered sandboxes/etc.) just hasn't come yet. In the meantime the browsers are just ugly stop-gap 0.x version of such an OS (there is a reason they are "browsers" as their roots (incl. deep architectural roots) are in browsing of static content, and everything else is bolt-ons - the integration of JavaScript engine for example back then could be best described exactly as a "bolt-on").
Not really the best examples.
If Google was killing third party cookies in Chrome while also removing other tracking features, regulators wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But back in the real world, they are absolutely correct to see through Google's BS.
What's actually anti-competitive is the idea that Google will kill them off and replace it with a solution which they control, forcing advertisers to deal with them and their ad products directly in order to do anything.
Whether that's actually what's happening is another question entirely.
We could go back to having advertisements be relevant to the content audience instead of the specific viewer and end stalkerware for good.
Crazy talk, I know...
If Google didn't own something like 60% of the browser market, it would just be a privacy enhancement.
Did they try building tanks both above and below ground, connecting them with two pipes so there's a circle, and constantly pumping it along that circle so it is not stored anywhere but merely in transit through both areas?
> If a big company charges more than the competition, they say they're illegally abusing their monopoly.
> If a big company charges the same as the competition, they say it's illegal collusion.
> If a big company charges less than the competition, they say it's illegal price-dumping.
The majority of normal people probably don't care as much about "privacy" as some of the vocal folks here do.
I'm not making a value judgement on that, it's simply how it is.
People want to use services like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or Google search/Gmail/Google Maps that have the functionality they enjoy.
If those companies can show them targeted ads vs random useless ads, the majority of people seem to be fine with that tradeoff.
I want it to be the year of the Linus desktop for a long while but I've made peace with the fact that's not the majority view. Most people are happy with a proprietary desktop that just works.
But if a high profile news story comes out about some privacy issue they are outraged about it.
This shows a education / knowledge gap, I dont know how to close it, or if it can even be closed but to say "no one cares about privacy" I believe is false
People hate the GDPR pop ups. Most are badly designed (probably on purpose) and make it easy to accept all and difficult to customize/reject all. Most people are just going to click accept because it makes the box disappear faster.
Let‘s say we have the new Apple opt-in rules for Facebook. There‘s a pop-up some day asking users: „do you want facebook to be able to track you?“ many people will say no. But only because it‘s really easy/frictionless and the app presumably functions as normal.
So primarily users want to do want users want to do. They don‘t care about tracking/ads as long as avoiding them isn‘t completely simple.
The EU was on the right track about requiring tracking to be opt in while also having an option to say no without being blocked from the service.
I think you're correct, but then that makes it a no-brainer for Google. Let us opt-out, the other 99% will continue to be part of the data harvest (and they like it!). Google can say they give user's a choice.
Can you imagine? Before that, databases of metadata couldn't be copyrighted without getting consent for the owners of said information.
Perhaps we should our digital ethics going back to basics - corporations shouldn't have a "right" to own data that doesn't belong to them.
Also, this reminds me of a story I heard years ago, that a California oil change location needed to store oil above ground due to EPA regulations, but needed it stored underground to satisfy the fire department regulations. So they were constantly getting fined from one or the other, and had to just include those fines as a cost of doing business.