Category: Menacing Monopoly

Props to Bloomberg for running this article — it’s timely and needed.

Most major browsers are now built on the Chromium software code base that Google maintains. Opera, an indie browser that’s been used by techies for years, swapped its code base for Chromium in 2013. Even Microsoft is making the switch this year. That creates a snowball effect, where fewer web developers build for niche browsers, leading those browsers to switch over to Chromium to avoid getting left behind.

This leaves Chrome’s competitors relying on Google employees who do most of the work to keep Chromium software code up to date. Chromium is open source, so anyone can suggest changes to it, but the majority of programmers who approve contributions are Google employees, and any major disagreements get settled by a small circle of senior Google employees.

The authorities move slowly or not at all, so this problem will get worse before it gets better. Do your part to resist hegemony on the Web by using Firefox or a Firefox-derived browser instead of Google Chrome or a Chrome clone.

A must-read from CNBC:

Google tracks a lot of what you buy, even if you purchased it elsewhere, like in a store or from Amazon.

Last week, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a New York Times op-edthat said “privacy cannot be a luxury good.” But behind the scenes, Google is still collecting a lot of personal information from the services you use, such as Gmail, and some of it can’t be easily deleted.

A page called “Purchases ” shows an accurate list of many — though not all — of the things I’ve bought dating back to at least 2012. I made these purchases using online services or apps such as Amazon, DoorDash or Seamless, or in stores such as Macy’s, but never directly through Google.

But because the digital receipts went to my Gmail account, Google has a list of info about my buying habits.

Read the whole thing.

The Monster of Mountain View stomps on competition again.

For the last two years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome [actually, Chromium; Chrome isn’t open source], won’t allow DRM in an open source project.

The browser I’m building, called Metastream, is an Electron-based (Chromium derived), MIT-licensed browser hosted on GitHub. Its main feature is the ability to playback videos on the web, synchronized with other peers. Each client runs its own instance of the Metastream browser and transmits playback information to keep them in sync—no audio or video content is sent.

Without a license for Widevine, Samuel Maddock cannot finish his browser.

But of course, Google doesn’t care.

If someone is creating a browser that wants to playback media, they’ll soon discover the requirement of DRM for larger web media services such as Netflix and Hulu. There are a few DRM providers for the web including Widevine, PlayReady, and FairPlay.

As far as I’m aware, Widevine is the only available DRM for a Chromium-based browser, especially so for Electron. Chromium accounts for roughly 70% market share of all web browsers, soon to include Microsoft’s upcoming Edge browser rewrite. Waiting 4 months for a minimal response from a vendor with such a large percentage of the market is unacceptable.

When this site was created, Google Chrome didn’t exist.

Today, Google Chrome is the most dominant browser. It is the new Internet Explorer. And in fact, even the once mighty-Microsoft has acknowledged this, because it is redeveloping Edge to use Chrome’s underlying parts, including the Blink rendering engine. Other browser makers have already done this; Opera is also a Chromium-derivative. Only Mozilla has held out, although its version of Firefox for iOS uses WebKit, an an ancestor of Blink, because Apple won’t allow Mozilla to use its own rendering engine (Gecko).

When you’re practically a monopoly, you can pretty much do whatever you want (including brutally stifling the competition) and there are no consequences.

Google is too big and too powerful. It’s a giant, faceless corporation that needs to be broken up.

Ridiculous:

The official KDE Connect Android app was briefly removed from the Google Play Store for “violating” app permission policies.

Google yanked the phone-side companion app, which works with desktop tools like GSconnect, from its Android app store on March 19. It said the app did not adhere to its new rules on apps that can access to SMS messages.

But that was nonsense. KDE developer Albert Vaca Cintora explains:

KDE Connect has been removed from Google Play for violating their new policy on apps that access SMS. The policy has an explicit exception for companion apps (like KDE Connect), but it was removed anyway and *there’s no way to talk to Google*.

Google only provides one-way forms to contact them. I’ve filled the forms regarding this policy change (including one they sent to existing apps before the policy was effective) but never got an explanation to why KDE Connect doesn’t qualify as a companion app.

Google is the best living personification of the faceless corporation that we know of.

Albert stripped the SMS integration out of KDE Connect to get it back on Google Play. After an outcry from free software enthusiasts, Google quietly reversed course and allowed KDE Connect back on Google Play, replete with SMS integration.

It serves them right.

European authorities on Wednesday fined Google 1.5 billion euros for antitrust violations in the online advertising market, continuing its efforts to rein in the world’s biggest technology companies.

The fine, worth about $1.7 billion, is the third against Google by the European Union since 2017, reinforcing the region’s position as the world’s most aggressive watchdog of an industry with an increasingly powerful role in society and the global economy. The regulators said Google had violated antitrust rules by imposing unfair terms on companies that used its search bar on their websites in Europe.

The EU’s Margrethe Vestager said it well when she declared:

“Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anticompetitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites.”

It’s nice to hear somebody in a position of public responsibility saying this and then back it up with action.

What’s sad, though, is that the United States keeps letting Google skate when it can see the same thing that European Union regulators can see. The difference is that the EU cares about combating monopolistic behavior while the U.S. authorities don’t.

We can only hope Stadia is as big of a failure as Google Plus was.

At the Game Developers Conference, Google announced its biggest play yet in the gaming space: a streaming game service named Google Stadia, designed to run on everything from PCs and Android phones to Google’s own Chromecast devices.

As of press time, the service’s release window is simply “2019.” No pricing information was announced at the event.

Google Stadia will run a selection of existing PC games on Google’s centralized servers, taking in controller inputs and sending back video and audio using Google’s network of low-latency data centers. The company revealed a new Google-produced controller, along with a game-streaming interface that revolves around a “play now” button. Press this on any Web browser and gameplay will begin “in as quick as five seconds… with no download, no patch, no update, and no install.”

Ars Technica commenters are skeptical about Stadia.

“Can’t wait for this to be killed off in a press release in 6 years! I really need more reliability from Google in supporting their platforms,” wrote one.

“Annnd will quickly forget about it in 1-2 years. Buyer beware,” said another.

“My past experience with Google products suddenly disappearing really discourages me from trying this, let alone sink money into it,” agreed a third.

A must-read post from Mozilla’s Chris Beard.

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

This may sound melodramatic, but it’s not. The “browser engines” — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla — are “inside baseball” pieces of software that actually determine a great deal of what each of us can do online. They determine core capabilities such as which content we as consumers can see, how secure we are when we watch content, and how much control we have over what websites and services can do to us. Microsoft’s decision gives Google more ability to single-handedly decide what possibilities are available to each one of us.

From a business point of view Microsoft’s decision may well make sense. Google is so close to almost complete control of the infrastructure of our online lives that it may not be profitable to continue to fight this. The interests of Microsoft’s shareholders may well be served by giving up on the freedom and choice that the internet once offered us. Google is a fierce competitor with highly talented employees and a monopolistic hold on unique assets. Google’s dominance across search, advertising, smartphones, and data capture creates a vastly tilted playing field that works against the rest of us.

This is a worrying development indeed.

What would have made more sense is for Microsoft to embrace Gecko, and contribute to Firefox’s rendering engine. It would have allowed the software giant to reconcile with the successor (Mozilla) of its former opponent (Netscape) in the “browser wars”, and given a boost to the Firefox project.

Instead, Microsoft is moving to shore up Google’s dominance in the browser space.

It is worth noting here that Mozilla is financially dependent on Google — Google currently pays Mozilla to make its search engine the default in Firefox. (Defaults matter because most people don’t change them.) So even Mozilla hasn’t been able to chart a totally independent course from the Monster of Mountain View.

A Microsoft-Mozilla alliance makes so much sense: Firefox could help steer people to Bing, and Microsoft could help Gecko’s future development. It’s a shame it’s not happening.

And the authorities in Toronto, Ontario, Canada should heed his words.

A unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet is proposing to turn a rundown part of Toronto’s waterfront into what may be the most wired community in history — to “fundamentally refine what urban life can be.”

Sidewalk Labs has partnered with a government agency known as Waterfront Toronto with plans to erect mid-rise apartments, offices, shops and a school on a 12-acre (4.9-hectare) site — a first step toward what it hopes will eventually be a 800-acre (325-hectare) development.

High-level interest is clear: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alphabet’s then-Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt appeared together to announce the plan last October.

But some Canadians are rethinking the privacy implications of giving one of the most data-hungry companies on the planet the means to wire up everything from street lights to pavement. And some want the public to get a cut of the revenue from products developed using Canada’s largest city as an urban laboratory.

“The Waterfront Toronto executives and board are too dumb to realize they are getting played,” said former BlackBerry chief executive Jim Balsillie, a smartphone pioneer considered a national hero who also said the federal government is pushing the board to approve it.

“Google knew what they wanted. And the politicians wanted a PR splash and the Waterfront board didn’t know what they are doing. And the citizens of Toronto and Canada are going to pay the price,” Balsillie said.

Emphasis is ours.

“Smart” homes, “smart” cars, now “smart” neighborhoods… it was only a matter of time. Adding data collection functionality to buildings, appliances, and even entire communities is not smart, it’s reckless and a recipe for trouble. Imagine the ability to gain control over an entire neighborhood by compromising the software that runs it.

There is nothing “smart” about these technologies.

Three cheers for Jim Balsillie. It’s nice to see such bluntness from a person of his stature.

This project should not proceed. Toronto would be wise to pull the plug and say thanks, but no thanks, to this scheme to exploit the common good for the benefit of Alphabet/Google’s unceasing, unending war on privacy.

When someone leaves Google behind, it’s always fun to hear how they did it. Here’s one commenter’s recipe of Google alternatives, provided in response to a blog post by Matthew Green:

Why not stop using Google altogether instead? It’s not just Chrome, it’s all of this Google spying. It was a lot of work, tbh, but I’ve left Google completely:

• Google Search -> Duckduckgo, Startpage, Searx
• Gmail ->Tutanota
• Google Maps → Openstreetmap
• Youtube -> Bitchute, peerTube, LBRY, Newpipe(android)
• Google Calendar -> Lightning Calendar, Nextcloud
• Google+/Facebook → Minds, Diaspora, Mastodon
• Google Photos -> Cryptee
• Chrome → Brave, Tor, Firefox
• Play Store → F-Droid, Aurora
• Google Drive → Nextcloud, Syncthing
• Android OS/ iOS → LineageOS, PureOS (soon)

Lots of great suggestions here.