Yes, Chrome is the de facto standard for the open web. And everyone agrees this is too much power for a single company to have.

But most people seem to think that just removing Chrome from Google would fix this issue. People seem to forget that Chrome isn't the only tool Google can use to steer the web standard in a particular way.

The Google crawler is probably an even more effective tool in shaping the web standard. "To be indexed by Google your page needs to comply with these requirements" puts A LOT of pressure in everyone working in the web.

This is why I think creating and enforcing a web standard is the only practical solution to this problem.

> The UNIX standard was made in part because the government > wanted an operating system standard, right?

Wrong? Or at least where's the citation to back this up?

"UNIX Standard" presumably means POSIX which was a work of the IEEE, not a government body. If some government had something to do with making it happen, I'm not aware of that. At the time (1988) UNIX wasn't used much outside of academia and niche industries.

There was a point in time where the US government was considering mandating POSIX compatibility in everything. It's why Windows NT shipped with a comically barebones POSIX subsystem and why A/UX (an Apple port of Unix to the Macintosh, years before they bought NeXT) existed.

I just read about it in chapter 2 of “Advanced programming in the UNIX environment”

It didn’t sound like the US government made it, just pushed for it and probably contributed to the initial versions