this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I'm happy to talk about antitrust and breaking up conglomerates. But that needs to be a big conversation across many industries not just "Google bad, grrr".
If you're referencing WEI, btw, it is one of the topics people have been most misled about. Can link you to my Mastodon thread where I break down all the misunderstanding if you'd like
There's no overarching anti-trust conversation to be had because there's currently no anti-trust cases, if there ever will be. The comments under each individual instance of it being required is the "big conversation". As a content aggregation site (mainly news) the only place it could realistically occur is under some wishful thinking self-post nobody would care about.
I also saw people pine for trust busting just the other day under some Amazon article, there's simply nowhere else to post about it at the moment.
I meant to say that I'm much more inclined to have conversations with people about the need for stricter antitrust laws and enforcement than I am about a single subsidiary of a multinational corp. protecting their revenue stream
It's all about ads/ad money/data, it's heavily bleeding into a single issue. It's not like some giant manufacturing company doing shady things with their cars and air conditioners, all the subsidiaries are interlinked. You could say WEI is just a Chrome thing, Google is just their search engine, AdWords is just an ad service etc, but they're all part of the data to ads to sales pipeline.
And as long as users expect free content there will be a continued need to monetize their usage. That's not inherently bad.
Also, WEI is about so so so much more than ad blockers and DRM. Like, so much more. And the spec has nothing to do with Chrome/Google. They are just the first implementers of both sides of equation (browser feature + attester) and only works on Android right now because attestation comes from the OS. They did it for Google Play Services. Nothing else.
So basically they're using their monopoly to force through changes in internet standards? Sounds like the EU will be paying a visit soon.
My dude, do you even understand the technical details of WEI or are you regurgitating what the Internet has told you? Have you read the spec? They are not forcing anything. Nobody has to opt in. It's not even available outside of Android and right now it's only being used for Google's own products (Google Play Services specifically)
Please don't talk like you know what the deal is when you do obviously don't
This is exactly what they did with .webp
Ah yes, I remember that time when the Internet stopped allowing gifs, jpgs, and pngs. Now Firefox crashes whenever it tries to load an image other than a webp because Google made them /s