> The problem is that people look at the Apple / Google duopoly and say "look we have competition! How can you compare this to Microsoft in the 90s!?"

Strong agreement. There's also a flacid, weak, shitty, useless anti-trust system, which was stripped of power by Borkism in the Reagan era. My generation has almost never seen effective anti-trust. Not once has a case been made against exploitative, anti-competitive practices that really has resonated in America, in decades, and it's not for lack of shitty, no good villians. It's because of Borkism[1][2], because of redefinition of what anti-trust meant under Reagan.

> The sheer amount of anticompetitive behavior both these companies have done over the years is insane when you put in prospective what Microsoft went to court over.

That Microsoft faced so much shit for such a relatively small act is amazing. What Apple does is absurd to me, that there's seemingly no legal challenge to their dominion-without-question of 30% of the web. I've looked at quite a number of anti-trust complaints against Google, and frankly, I owe it to myself/all to go re-review.

Google like Apple has suits against them for the 30% cut they charge at their store, which is both valid & respectable but also- on Android- easily avoidable & the open-source OS itself (& it's releases) actively supports alternative delivery platforms such as F-Droid and sideloading: Google actively supports competition. But we're seeing a lot of apps drop in-app sales, and I think that's a telling & real response: 30% is absurd. There's a number of suits against ads, and search. To be honest, none of these have left a distinct impression, have really clicked for me. I am fully able to believe there may be some serious fuckery here-abouts. There's a suit about Google Assistant systems being unable to also support alternative systems like Alexa: as a fan of general-purpose computing & competitive competition, I think this is absolutely a place that there should be straightforward & clear mandates for all companys, Google included, to be compelled to allow interopation: restricting people making devices to have to pick one and only one partner is basically a reasonable battle against Qualcomm-ism[3], against coersion, is a move to enable basic device-maker and consumer choice.

Against all of this backdrop though, one critical thing I think most of the world really has no sense of is that Google is somewhat alive under a weird patronage model. Their cash cows feel serve as patrons to the artists, and the artists are there just to make the ecosystem healthy & alive. The cash registers ring because of a semi-open market, because the web is a pretty damned good place to connect, host shit, do shit; better than AOL, better than Microsoft Windows, better than apps.

Trying to stack the deck laterally, to make the web be Google's web, or Android be Google's Android: they are extremely liable to kill the cash cow. These need to be healthy, independent, functional systems, that are getting better & remaining at the very forefront of competition against all others. This health is absolutely the pinnacle concern, is existentially important. Android or the web could readily collapse if things go poorly, if corruption takes root, if whiffs of real genuine misdealings gets into the air. And frankly, the problem solves itself internally. Google historically & famously has been an engineering lead organization. They have a long history of employing very good, public figures who care about the web, who know about the web, who have wanted to make the web better, who seem motivated by strong intrinsic desires. These people sit on standards boards, they help align Chrome. These people don't take shit from traditional corporate lackies trying to make some fast bucks by dodgy inter-dealings.

Again, given Google's strong first & second party relationships (search and ads), no matter what happens with browsers, webtech (& to a lesser degree Android), Google will have an incomparable vast & mighty perch to understand & analyze & model the web from, and not unfairly, not by cheating, not by underhandedness. The objective is to keep the shared, common, competitive platform alive, shared, & competitive. By doing good engineering. By making development better & easier & giving them better superpowers. By not hazarding gross breakage that would sabotage public belief/faith. This isn't a super complex system. It's nicely isolated parts, which each do their own thing: make better systems, use free-market search & ads to be top of the game (to make $ & to keep funding/patronizing the essential ecosystem).

> Many of us saw projects like Firefox grow in the 2000s, giving hope that open source and standards would win out in the end. But we dwindled, lulled by the sweet promises of Chrome and their open core.

True true. Will has been lost. Chromium is remarkably accessible, there are remarkably good hooks still in place to go build our own sync systems or what not. Few have chased up, have tried to really amplify & enhance Chromium into an open browser. That's unfortunate.

In general I'd say the real frontier for advancement is on https://wicg.io . This has been a very compelling case for how the web really needed to advance all along. An extremely low barrier to entry to start proposing ideas, where other standards folks & standards-adjacent folk can chime in & help steer, help sheppard young web ideas into desireable, promising standards that stand a fair chance of being adopted.

I definitely wish there were more alternatives out there, more efforts. I have hope we'll see some new arisals show up. But at the same time, I don't see Chrome as bad or scary or problematic. There's very few cases people have made against it that seem, well, real. Emotion & fear & doubt run rampant. Even when the team makes decisions I truly detest (e.g. squandering awesome HTTP Push potential then abandoning the capability) I generally understand & can see where folks are coming from. We're not accelerating to where I'd wish to go, but it's incredibly rare that I see Chrome/Chromium as going in actively bad directions, building "bad" web platform. Very few have made a case that I can really see or grasp, that's worth agreeing or disagreeing with about Chrome or Android, about how Google invests & shapes these forwards. I continue to see this more as a patronage system, as investment in the necessary & worthy ecosystem, that supports the existence of a separate, more corporate entity. And I don't see the anti-competitive practices taking root in this web or android space, generally.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork

[2] https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628094