[ocdtrekkie]

Wait, let me get this straight... you moved from Cloudflare, because you were worried about the scale of their control of the Internet... and you chose to migrate to... Google, the company that definitively actually controls the Internet, via monopoly-scale shares of search, email, web browsing, and has authored nearly every new Internet protocol specification in the last ten years to subtly make their ads harder to escape?

[akpa1]

No, I said the first point was unrelated to my decision to move my domain.

[foolswisdom]

Cloudflare is known for controlling infra, while those Google examples are end user applications. Just saying.

[throwaway810]

GCP? Google Domains? Google Workspaces? Gmail? QUIC?

[ocdtrekkie]

The protocols Google is redefining to be user hostile are a layer below even infrastructure. The very nature of HTTP and DNS are being rewritten to serve Google's business interests.

[mardifoufs]

Hostile to what? Enterprise middleware that wants to snoop on their users (sure, fair) so they demand entire standards to allow for said snooping? Enterprise users are a small minority of end users.

I guess DNS over https can be antiuser (even for normal consumers) in the sense that it makes it harder to block ads at the dns level but quic?

[ocdtrekkie]

DoH is now being used by malware to covertly communicate with C&C servers, blending in with all the other encrypted traffic routed through Google DNS. QUIC is quite similar in that the goal is to mandate encryption and obscure traffic and content from security devices. The only supposed benefit to consumers is for websites which need to load an excessive amount of ad content and scripts, again, doubling down on their core competencies at the expense of everyone else. HTTP/1 is more than serviceable for any website that isn't, at minimum, shoving ten times more ad content than actual content.

Honestly, I think that's a core misconception Google has managed to sell people on: That enterprise middleware is somehow bad and malicious, as opposed to the ad company that distributes malware as a primary revenue stream which tells you that the middleware that catches it is bad.

If network traffic is on my home network, I have a right to inspect it. If network traffic is on my work's network, my work certainly has a right to inspect it. To be blunt, with some regulatory supervision assumed, if you're using an ISP's network, they absolutely have the right to manage their network. Why in the actual heck did anyone buy Google's narrative that somehow enabling them to convert the Internet into an end-to-end encrypted ad delivery and spyware platform was a good idea?

The marketing acumen to pull that off, now that's legendary.

[mschuster91]

> If network traffic is on my home network, I have a right to inspect it. If network traffic is on my work's network, my work certainly has a right to inspect it. To be blunt, with some regulatory supervision assumed, if you're using an ISP's network, they absolutely have the right to manage their network. Why in the actual heck did anyone buy Google's narrative that somehow enabling them to convert the Internet into an end-to-end encrypted ad delivery and spyware platform was a good idea?

Because there are quite the number of countries that run massive nation-scale censorship and surveillance campaigns. Google going all-in on encryption of everything, LetsEncrypt being founded - all of that is a direct response to the actions of the US government wiretapping everything including Google's internal datacenter communications and countries like China, Russia and Iran running massive disruption campaigns.

And that doesn't even touch private entities messing with the Internet traffic of their customers - most notably ISPs not just delivering wrong answers on non-existent domains on their own DNS servers to serve ads instead of NXDOMAINs, but going as far as to hijack and rewrite all DNS traffic for that purpose. Or that sniff on DNS requests to sell that data to advertisers (or to the NSA).

And to make it worse, the various "middleboxes" along the Internet placed there by employers forced to comply with dumbass laws, by ISPs doing above-mentioned DPI and manipulation, or by governments of all kind have led to an ossification of Internet protocols because even trivial stuff could lead to issues (remember DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0?).

Yes, it is a good thing that Google leads the way in making encryption ubiquitous. Fuck governments, fuck ISPs, fuck everyone who thinks they have a right to intercept, snoop on, track or analyze my communication.

PS: If an employer (or you) wish to inspect traffic, there are many solutions - the most obvious being a private CA root cert to be installed on the client.

[ocdtrekkie]

Your basic premise here is that the encryption is good because it provides the privacy to do, essentially, ethical crime. That's all well and good, when indeed, we have governments passing bad laws, but the problem is that it both doesn't actually protect your ethical crime effectively, because Google's only doing it so that they can be the sole arbiter of your data, which they happily distribute to governments en masse on request, and enables a massive swath of unethical crime, aka, the large volume of scams and malware that Google directly profits off the distribution of, while being shielded from any liability for.

The whole evil ISPs tampering with your data thing is just "reading too many Jon Brodkin articles on Ars". I used to have an ISP that tampered with web delivery to deliver a piracy notice, and it nearly didn't get noticed at all, because it neither went to the account owner (me), nor the person who did the crime (not me), but went to a different guest at the house (also not me), who thankfully told me about it, leading me to inquire with their office to get an actual copy of their complaint so I could respond with "wasn't me, told that dude not to do stuff on my Wi-Fi". Which is to say, the effect of an ISP doing this is... generally less harmful than Google using protocols to deliver malicious content, and hilariously ineffective even when they employ it.

What scares me a lot more is not just the actively malicious work shipped through Google's various platforms to target society's most vulnerable (usually seniors), but the sheer amount of money that has been dumped around every journalism outlet, activist org, and lobbyist to sell the narrative you just posted, all to protect a trillionaire corporation that watches your every move, and happily provides that information to all of the organizations you're worried about for free while convincing you it's doing you a favor.

In short, screw governments, but screw Google making it hard for me to filter out the traffic that lets them figure out whose visiting abortion clinics, which they are absolutely handing over to the authorities who ask about it.