A little more on the Google DRM
A little more on the Google DRM
A group of Google engineers has proposed a new Web API that threatens to uproot the work of apps and browsers if they interfere with its ad business. Will the open Web survive?
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I'll preface this by saying I know I'm in the minority with this.
But all this will serve to do for me is stop me from using any websites or indeed browsers that utilise this. It will essentially just be lost traffic for them. However small of a drop in the pond that may be.
I think you underestimate the impact of this? Just a few situations I can think of:
- Google will certainly utilize this on YouTube and Gmail and pretty much anything offering free services where they are supported by ads.
- I'm assuming Cloudflare will make it easy for websites to enable it too, and we all know how many websites use Cloudflare.
- Imagine not being able to get any tickets to concerts because they block your browser to prevent people from using certain plug-ins that helps skip queues or something.
- You wont be able to read any news site, because I'm pretty sure all of them will use this to prevent people from bypassing paywalls.
- Pretty much any real estate, job listing, advertising site will implement this because they hate scrapers, and all sites that fear getting scraped for their data to be scraped into AI (like reddit, forums, qa-sites)
- ..
Considering Chrome has such a large market share, sites will adopt it and people switch to Chrome because "it just works in Chrome". So Chrome will gain even more market share and other browsers (that previously resisted) are forced to follow and implement it in order not to lose any market share.
I think that you miss the most powerful point: Google will penalize in the searches all the websites that will not implement the new function, so every single business will implement it straight away!
Aren't there any laws that could prevent such new features that will clearly increase an already existing quasi monopole?
Sure do but unless Google gets really hurt (like 40% of their income) they'll take the slap on their wrist change it a bit and continue on.
Firefox makes most of it's income (to pay staff and whatnot) is coming straight from Google. Why? So (IMHO) Google can go up to curt and say "Well we aren't a monopole. Firefox is there and we even pay them".
Google could just stop paying them at any time, they've got that biggest slice of the browser cake after all.
i don’t see Cloudflare collaborating on this one. They believe really strongly in the open web. That’s the whole reason they do what they do for free for so many sites.
I'm not so sure, they already have a similar integration called Privacy Attestation Tokens with Apple devices. See also https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
I do hope you're right
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Same here (well, I already use Firefox for the last decade or so). But as usual, people will choose whatever other people choose or whatever is the default and be fine with it.