Well, I for one don't want to pay $15/mo for my browser: I'm happy for it to be the complement of some company's product.

Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.

As the saying goes, if the product is free, YOU are the product.

I think the saying is oversimplified (or else, chrome isn’t a product but a byproduct). It makes a company to make the complement of their product cheap or free so that people can use their product more effectively. Google Search and Ads rely on people having a browser. Similarly, Apple’s Phones and laptops are benefited by including a good first party browser. Imo, a lot of technologies are better as free byproducts of monetized technology than as being some company’s products: there are endless lists of great technologies that never found a market or disappeared post-acquisition.

My ISP is selling my data as well. Netflix is snooping on what i watch for their ads. Chrome is free. Bigger fish to fry than my web browser snooping on me like your bank selling all credit card transactions your car snooping on your driving and your mobile carrier selling your location.

I don't pay for Netflix and a rival good (like ISP infra) is completely different from some compiled computer code (like a browser).

Your phone provider does sell your information.

The majority of Netflix users over the next few years will be advertising based users. That just doesn't bring in enough profit because people are not willing to pay enough subscription to cover what those things actually cost.

Your hypothesis has a bit of a gaping hole where "real world user behaviour" sits.

> Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.

You do know most of those companies do both charge you and sell your data? Almost the only companies that don't sell your data are big tech advertising companies.

"When you don't pay you are the product" doesn't mean "If you pay you aren't the product", you still are the product the company is just double dipping.

Right. The ISPs and cellphone providers and TV manufacturers are all in on the data collection game.

I'm so confused when I read takes like that. The only way advertising can be sustainable under capitalism is if every $1 spent on advertising generates >= $1 of profit for advertisers, keeping in mind that ad networks take a share of revenue, say 30%.

This means that you as a consumer have to spend at least $1 (likely more - profit not revenue) for every $0.70 of value you receive in "free" services. Being supportive of ad-supported services is therefore financially irrational.

They only need to make money in aggregate, they might make $0 out of you, but $2 out of someone else.

This is where tech arrogance comes in. We very much like to believe we’re the zero.

Judging by how much hyper-consumerist behavior I see in myself and my coworkers, we’re not. Everyone is constantly buying shit they don’t need and then justifying it.

Reminder than when you use seemingly impeccable logic and arrive at the wrong conclusion, it's the logic that is wrong somewhere because of a missed assumption.

No, people are not going to pay much for browsers and websites, that's why ad supported products and services exist. Otherwise someone would make better software and charge for it. The only way this works is government intervention, which is what's happening here.

No, people mostly won't pay because ad-supported free alternatives exist.

Yes that is my point.

If you want to prevent such alternatives from existing, you'd need fairly authoritarian measures.

Far from authoritarian, dealing with business models that seem fine on an individual level but that are detrimental to society as a whole is precisely the type of problem that governments are supposed to solve.

I don’t disagree. But that’s literally the definition of authoritarian. Doing things because you have the authority to, because $REASONS.

It’s all flowers and sunshine when you agree with what they are doing but it’s incredibly easy to abuse the power. And suddenly, like compounding interest, you have dictatorship.

>But that’s literally the definition of authoritarian.

It very much is not.

We’ve successfully kneecapped many industries that we figured out where gander onto society. For example, tobacco. No ads, you can’t smoke anywhere. The result? Way less smoking! And we’re all in agreement that’s a good thing.

Ads are private sector propaganda. They’re manipulative material attempting to exploit the weakness of the human mind to get YOU to spend money you don’t actually want to spend. Yes, YOU.

We know things that exploit the weaknesses of the human mind, like nicotine, have the potential for extraordinary evil when left to the hands of the private sector. We haven’t all come to this consensus on advertisement, but we will.

No more authoritarian than minimum wage.

People surviving is a core government responsibility. Business models or companies surviving, less so.

Browsers shouldn’t be a product because any modern operating system that doesn’t come with a web browser is defective.

A browser is an operating system feature.

I mean, you can get alternative file manager programs. Pay for them, even. But most people will never bother.

> A browser is an operating system feature.

Microsoft fought and (largely speaking) lost an entire case about that assertion [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Yeah. I think that was the wrong decision. The problem was introducing features between IE and IIS and using that to extend their end user OS monopoly into a server OS monopoly. MS should have been blocked from the server OS market instead (or maybe some some of consent decree, I’m sceptical it would have been appropriately enforced though).

That's more or less also what Google does with Chrome in order to force folks to use it and only it. I know that well because I have Chromium installed for this reason alone.

Its nothing like what Microsoft did with IE. There are a few features in Chrome which are mostly optional for the vast majority of web apps. And some of those features like WebUSB make things possible in web apps that wouldn't be possible otherwise. So the "problem" is that Chrome is moving too fast.

IE had the opposite problem. Microsoft was moving too slow and was genuinely holding the web back. And obviously, that was intentional because Microsoft's business model at that time was entirely tied to locking users into Windows.

Its never been easier to write cross browser web apps. Some companies choose not to because they don't care enough to test in other browsers. And even then, there are a lot of apps that just happen to work in all the major browsers by chance. It wasn't nearly as easy to build a cross browser app for the IE6 dominated web.

> I think that was the wrong decision.

Could be. But this decision is why we even have other browsers.

I don’t think so.

The decision came too late to save Netscape. Microsoft then stopped competing, and were slow to react when Firefox emerged.

Meanwhile, Apple were always going to create their own browser — as part of their own OS — eventually. Opera kept on keeping on. Konquerer was never going to live or die depending on what happened on Windows.

Massive companies give away operating systems, but there seems to still be a market for them, so I don't think this statement is universally true.