I feel it's worse than this. Imagine being the brightest mind in college, have a ton of experience, just to invent new algorithms to get people to click on more ads.

Multiple billionaires have answerd the question, "when is it enough?" With the reply: "when I own everything."

Mozilla really did that with Firefox and Thunderbird to help kill IE and Outlook Express. Chrome came quite a bit later, but was instrumental in bringing about a performance reckoning, and a push for universal standards, sort of creating that movement. Really shocking now when you think of Google doing that.

Thanks! Here's the message without all the BBC quotes to make it easier to copy for app users:

Dear FTC,

Google has proposed a new Web Environment Integrity standard, outlined here: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/…

This standard would allow Google applications to block users who are not using Google products like Chrome or Android, and encourages other web developers to do the same, with the goal of eliminating ad blockers and competing web browsers.

Google has already begun implementing this in their browser here: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/6f47a22906b28994…

Basic facts:

Google is a developer of popular websites such as google.com and youtube.com (currently the two most popular websites in the world according to SimilarWeb) Google is the developer of the most popular browser in the world, Chrome, with around 65% of market share. Most other popular browsers are based on Chromium, also developed primarily by Google. Google is the developer of the most popular mobile operating system in the world, Android, with around 70% of market share.

Currently, Google’s websites can be viewed on any web-standards-compliant browser on a device made by any manufacturer. This WEI proposal would allow Google websites to reject users that are not running a Google-approved browser on a Google-approved device. For example, Google could require that Youtube or Google Search can only be viewed using an official Android app or the Chrome browser, thereby noncompetitively locking consumers into using Google products while providing no benefit to those consumers.

Google is also primarily an ad company, with the majority of its revenue coming from ads. Google’s business model is challenged by browsers that do not show ads the way Google intends. This proposal would encourage any web developer using Google’s ad services to reject users that are not running a verified Google-approved version of Chrome, to ensure ads are viewed the way the advertiser wishes. This is not a hypothetical hidden agenda, it is explicitly stated in the proposal:

“Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.”

The proposed solution here is to allow web developers to reject any user that cannot prove they have viewed Google-served ads with their own human eyes.

It is essential to combat this proposal now, while it is still in an early stage. Once this is rolled out into Chrome and deployed around the world, it will be extremely difficult to rollback. It may be impossible to prevent this proposal if Google is allowed to continue owning the entire stack of website, browser, operating system, and hardware.

Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.

because the us govt doesn't give a shit about monopolies.

EU might get up in their shit though.

It is. Anyone who cares is powerless to change it. Anyone with the power to change it doesn't care. That goes for a lot of things.

I really cant put it into words how much I hate google right now... Capitalism at its finest

It's basically all the bad things that tech writers have already warned about, except shit just got real. Google is actually shipping WEI in Chrome and large important sites and services are no longer working except in Chrome and with Goggle's blessing.

The author makes a very good comparison with Android, where you need a locked-down device and Google Services installed to be able to use Netflix, or your bank's services.

The rest of the article dives into what WEI claims to achieve vs what it's actually doing, and who it really benefits. Good read if you're still unclear about that.

I was multitasking while watching but I'm pretty sure this is the idea.

Googles "web DRM" makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to lie to a website about your browser, operating system, and whether or not you're human (or a bot). Websites can then use this info to deny access if they decide not to trust any of the info given.

This could easily be used to suppress the use of open source software which is probably why so many FOSS projects and foundations oppose it.

DRM in your web browser to forcibly require you to be running an "approved" browser (ie.: Chrome) in an "approved" configuration (ie.: no ad blockers) to load certain websites, and probably all major websites.

Technically, this is web ~~3 or 3.5~~ 4 or 4.5

This has happened before.

Abandon Chrome and Chromium en masse and this will go away. But normies suck.

I am not an expert, but it's likely signed and cryptographically secured. Change a single byte in the be Browser executable and your browser goes on the naughty list. This is total lockdown of the browser, and in principle you can extend certification of both software and hardware all the way down through the OS into the hardware.

Attestation depends on a few things:

1. The website has to choose to trust a given attestation provider. If Open Source Browser Attestation Provider X is known for freely handing out attestations then websites will just ignore them
2. The browser's self-attestation. This is tricky part to implement. I haven't looked at the WEI spec to see how this works, but ultimately it depends on code running on your machine identifying when it's been modified. In theory, you can modify the browser however you want, but it's likely that this code will be thoroughly obfuscated and regularly changing to make it hard to reverse engineer. In addition, there are CPU level systems like Intel SGX that provide secure enclaves to run code and a remote entity can verify that the code that ran in SGX was the same code that the remote entity intended to run.

If you're on iOS or Android, there's already strong OS level protections that a browser attestation can plugin to (like SafetyNet.)

~~Web~~Chain of trust, the site only trusts certain attesters (yes this would be really bad for Linux).

EDIT: Used the wrong "of trust"