If Blink becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome. Especially when combined with the fact the big G can't keep directly funding Firefox to create a fake competition anymore under the new rules from the digital markets act.
Google should've been hit with an antitrust case on Chrome years ago and their recent shenanigans with the topics api only make that more relevant, where now Google is playing gatekeeper to an already technically dubious system meant to put the spying on users directly into the browser (all because they couldn't solve the fact that the topics api still makes fingerprinting rather easy). Eliminating the "competition" that Google has artificially made needs to be done though because otherwise it's just not obviously visible.
> If V8 becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome
V8 isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense, at all. Google gives away the source code to most of Chrome that allows other people to make browsers with it, and they do. Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly. Microsoft could choose to make a browser engine, but they don't, and it's not because V8 is a monopoly.
> Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly
Being on the standards board for "what browsers need to do", having the standards board under your thumb, and continually adding in requirements that only the highest spenders can afford to implement securely, that does indicate a monopoly.
Apple can afford to implement anything they want. But they clearly have a very strong business interest in not letting web apps gain all the features that native apps may have.
Also, there is no legal requirement to implement every single API that the standards body specifies. The point of having standards is to make sure that _if_ a browser maker decides to provide some functionality, then they can implement the standardised API rather than inventing their own.
This is a good thing in spite of the fact that it doesn't solve other problems related to market dominance.
I think this isn't the case. There were alternatives to Internet Explorer, yet Microsoft was hit with antitrust measures for defaulting to IE.
I believe that something being sufficiently popular does make it a monopoly in the antitrust sense - there's language around "market dominance" in there [0].
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using a monopoly as power in another market is. Microsoft got hit because they used their monopoly in desktop operating systems to freeze out competition in the browser market and jam IE down people's throats. The browser market being a different market than the desktop operating system market.
Correct. Antitrust is about monopolization. You can have a monopoly without monopolization, and you can do monopolization without having a monopoly.
For example, suppose there was a small maker of farm implements, Dirty Hoes, and that one of the stores that sold Dirty Hoes hoes was Sneed's Seed and Feed (formerly Chuck's).
Sneed's also sells hoes made by another small company in a small town in Suffolk County New York, Hoes of Babylon.
Dirty Hoes tells Sneed's that unless Sneed's stops selling Hoes of Babylon hoes Dirty Hoes will stop selling to Sneed's.
That could be an antitrust problem of Dirty Hoes, even though they aren't anywhere near having a monopoly, because it could be seen as attempted monopolization.
> Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using a monopoly as power in another market is.
Mm.
With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?
At least in principle. I couldn't describe the specifics of such laws even if a lawyer helped me out.
> With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?
There has to be a link. How does one influence the other?
I don't think "making sure that non-crappy web browsers exist" is enough.
There doesn’t have to be a link… there has to be a competitive market. Giving away something that someone else sells can be anti-competitive, in certain situations. For example, if the goal of Google with V8 is to create a JS engine monopoly so that they could then start charging for it — that would be anti-competitive.
If there were calls for V8 to be considered a monopoly, you’d first have to prove that there are viable competitors available and they were being harmed. And particularly — was that harm impacting consumers. Anti trust only gets involved when consumers are being harmed (usually though higher prices or lack of choice).
SpiderMonkey exists and is pretty viable for many use-cases. But, the open source nature of V8 makes it hard to argue that it was really a monopoly. If Google did anything anti-competitive in V8, other developers are free to fork it, revert the change, and distribute that version.
For that I would ask — rhetorically because I don't know the answer — what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed.
And why they went further and made the core open source: every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
> And why they went further and made the core open source
Worth noting that Blink is a fork of Webkit, which is a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL-licensed. The engine was always open-source, there was no Google business decision to make the engine open source.
> what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed
Firefox wasn't so great back then. Google survives by the Web being great. A free, premiere browser experience means people use the Web.
> every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
Google overflows with money, so P&L enforcement likely isn't so evident, and they might've just had some engineers saying they wanted to do it that way, and the person with approval power was probably also an engineer.
> Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.
This seems entirely subjective. I prefer using Lichess to Chess.com, but I would in no way think that Chess.com, with its sponsoring of full-time players, makes the game worse. Advertising-related money goes somewhere and pays for things.
Yeah I reworded it - I meant Blink. And no, I'd argue that just because it's open source doesn't change that it's an antitrust-worthy browser. The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are.
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In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up (kind of, Firefox had to give up on anything involving PWAs to do it and they take a large sum of money from the big G for putting their search engine as the default).
Similarly, just look at how many web RFCs amount to "this was implemented by Chrome and technically a Chrome fork is a second implementation, so it can be OK stamped", which has squeezed the market for third parties to be able to develop their own browser just by making the amount of "required" features so large nobody could meaningfully implement them.[0]
And then there's the utterly dismal state of the Android platform, where Google just uses their control over OEMs and the ROM to outright prevent anyone from easily replacing the System WebView (the browser Android uses to render stuff "in-apps", basically if you've ever used an app that seemingly opens external links without launching chrome, that's the System WebView) with a non-chrome engine (basically, Google lets OEMs specify a hash on what the System WebView should be - almost all mainstream OEMs lock it to the Google implementation -or Chrome Canary which is just the same fucking browser-, leaving the only option to circumvent it to be rooting, which has its own issues and limitations).
There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own. The Vanadium dev also stopped anyone from using his work in the future by setting his System WebView implementation to GPLv2-only to prevent folks from forking it), since nobody wants to bother.
Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition.
> The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are.
Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users.
[1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.
> In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up
No - MS could too. They choose not to. Others could too, but it's not worth it. Either way, this is not a monopoly in the sense relevant to this discussion, as anyone can start a browser business and write from scratch, or use Chromium or Firefox as an enormous existing base on which to write a browser.
> There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own
If they lack the manpower to do something, but Chrome gives them with zero strings attached the core of itself, that's a good thing, not a bad one. Chromium enables browsers to be built that couldn't otherwise be.
> Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition.
Still though - competition over what? JS implementations? HTML rendering implementations? You're stating facts - in the most negative way possible - but without saying what you'd like to happen. If Chromium were never open sourced, would that be better?
> Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome.
What do you think google should do to avoid getting punished? What kind of action would you like to see from Google regarding the near monopoly of Chrome and Blink?
Break off Chrome into its own company that can serve it's own interests in making a good browser that serves the user (remember it's called the user agent because the browser must ultimately serve the user above all else) rather than serving Googles ad interests would be the right kind of action.
Right now, Chrome is compromised in terms of meaningful user privacy and user security because Googles bottom line largely relies on them not making those features as good as they can, while pretending they do. They can't just block 3rd party cookies to reduce tracking, it has to come with their Topics API so that Google can keep its ad monopoly (and that API consolidates Googles powers even more, especially considering the current implementation has Google playing literal gatekeeper over who can and can't use it instead of solving the privacy issue that the Topics API has).
For another example; WebManifest v3 was intended as a security update to the mess of v2... but it also conveniently takes a wrecking ball to adblockers (a major issue for Google the ad company) and guess what Google (the browser developer) is basically completely non-responsive about. They could respond to this and work out an actual solution, but the only thing they do is keep pushing back the permanent end date for V2 to avoid the bad PR.
Finally, as for avoiding punishment; Google could do all of the above and make an agreement (with legal consequences upon violation) that the Chrome team/subsidiary is wholly independent from the rest of Google when it comes to making executive decisions on where to take a browser. That way, they wouldn't have to break it off and can still take in the profits/fund the development of Chrome without it being compromised into serving Google.
> Break off Chrome into its own company that can serve it's own interests in making a good browser that serves the user
That’s nice in theory, but historically, browser only companies haven’t been very successful in the market. No one wants to pay for a browser and monetizing one is a full of a big pool of dark patterns.
The most successful browser engines have always been those that we tied to another source of income, namely, the OS or search. Doesn’t Firefox still get the bulk of its funding from Google?
Even as a separate company, Chrome would be beholden to some external entity (likely Google search) for money, and that still carries with it the same risks as now, just formalized with contracts.
In a world where everybody uses Chromium, which is paid by surveillance capitalism.
I really don't know, but I could imagine a world where some people would pay for their browser (many would use the "community edition", probably), and where search engines would pay to be the default.
Google would probably still contribute to Chromium, they would just not directly have control over its governance. Maybe overall the web tech would move slower, but I don't think that would necessarily be bad.
In my world, people use whatever spying piece of crap browser a random app installed as a default for them. I really don't think anybody except a few enthusiasts would pay for a browser.
How would Chrome company make money? Nobody is going to buy the browser. They'd be selling content relevant ad space on the app or just implementing whatever google pays them to implement.
That probably not for us to decide. One way could probably be splitting the company so it's not at the same time a major content publisher, the main ad platform and a monopolistic browser vendor.
Google should've been hit with an antitrust case on Chrome years ago and their recent shenanigans with the topics api only make that more relevant, where now Google is playing gatekeeper to an already technically dubious system meant to put the spying on users directly into the browser (all because they couldn't solve the fact that the topics api still makes fingerprinting rather easy). Eliminating the "competition" that Google has artificially made needs to be done though because otherwise it's just not obviously visible.