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by lkbm 4078 days ago
Probably because they've sped up communication between the browser they provide and their website.

The logic behind it is benevolent and reasonable, but the short-term effect is that Chrome users get an incentive to use GWS/Gmail/Drive rather than Yahoo/Dropbox, and GWS/GMail/Yahoo users get an incentive to use Chrome rather than Firefox/Safari/IE.

If Chrome intentionally started rendering Yahoo slower, that would be blatantly anti-competitive. This is, in effect, just about the same thing, only with practical reasons behind it (much like their were practical reasons behind integrating IE into Windows).

1 comments

> If Chrome intentionally started rendering Yahoo slower, that would be blatantly anti-competitive. This is, in effect, just about the same thing, only with practical reasons behind it (much like their were practical reasons behind integrating IE into Windows).

This seems to be a poor analogy.

One of the main draws of capitalism is to encourage companies to compete by offering quality products. One of the main drawbacks is that companies are also able to compete by sabotaging the ability of other companies to offer quality products.

The second is the reason for anti-competitive laws. Sabotaging Yahoo falls into this category. Offering a better product that what's already on the market - especially without impeding the quality of the old product - falls squarely into the first.

It is easily arguable that Google is preventing Yahoo from achieving the same result by abusing its control of the Web client. Lines are blurrier than you paint them in your text.
Yahoo could implement QUIC on their servers if they wanted too - there's at least a prototype server in the Chromium source tree
But even if they did - how would they convince Chrome to use their new QUIC endpoint if - as is apparently the case - QUIC is only enabled for a select, hardcoded list of servers?
How so? Not helping competition is very different from actively working against them.