People wondering what Chrome has to do with a search monopoly:
The obvious benefit is that they can default the user’s search provider to Google.
But the more nefarious benefit is that, by controlling both the client and server, they can unilaterally decide the future of web standards. They don’t have to advocate for proposals, gain consensus, and limit themselves to well-supported standards the way other companies do. They can just do it, gain the first-mover advantage, and force others to follow suit.
If they don’t like HTTP/2, they can invent their own protocol and implement it for their search servers and Chrome. Suddenly, using Chrome with Google Search is way faster than using Chrome with Bing or using Firefox with Google Search. Even if Microsoft and Mozilla don’t like the protocol, they now have to adopt it or fall behind.
This has happened. QUIC was deployed in 2012. Firefox gained support in 2021.
They’re doing the same thing with Privacy Sandbox, and you can also look at browser feature compatibility tables to see how eager Google is to force their own interpretation of every not-yet-finalized web standard as the canonical interpretation.
Seeing db0’s stance on AI has been depressing.
“Back in my day”, the sense among piracy advocates seemed to be that cultural artifacts are so important to society and human dignity that they shouldn’t be held hostage by gatekeepers who are only interested in profit and see exposure to a wide audience as a monetization failure. It was a respect tor the value of a creative work, a duty to preserve that signal and not let it be consumed by the noise of commerce.
Today, it seems that the pirate scene views cultural artifacts as disposable and fungible, raw materials with no essence or signal in their own right. It’s more about speedrunning towards some inevitable nihilistic chaos, tearing everything down to spite the old gatekeepers and joining forces with the new gatekeepers so long as they seem to be on the side of destruction and “free shit”. There’s no allegiance to society, just a brutal individualistic free-for-all.
It’s the antithesis of what I believed the internet was going to do to the old copyright regime. And I’m not sure there’s a home for people who still think like me.