And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.
A lot of them never had to make a profit before.
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.
The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet
And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don’t care, we get what we deserve I guess.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t go through.
Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?
Always have been, and they’re in it for the long game. They’ve already acquired a stupid amount of control on the web and web standards with everything from Chromium to Youtube, not to mention it doesn’t help that they basically control the world’s most popular mobile OS. Google wants it all if we let them.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
