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by brighteyes 4078 days ago
As the top-level poster to this chain said,

> it is interesting how a company was able to quietly move a large user base from open protocols to a proprietary protocol.

Some of us may believe Google is doing so for good reasons, some of us might not be sure - but that is all beside the point.

The point is that this is a massive show of power. And it has been applied quietly - no one (outside of Google) knew about this massive change in activity until this blogpost.

In any hands, that amount of power should be worrying.
2 comments
magicalist 4078 days ago
> And it has been applied quietly - no one (outside of Google) knew about this massive change in activity until this blogpost

Only if you weren't paying attention. They've been discussing testing it on Google's servers like they did SPDY for a long time now. The first announcement I can find that they were switching some Google traffic over to it was almost two years ago[1], and if you're on blink-dev or chromium-dev (or proto-quic, if you're serious about it) you'd have gotten periodic updates on the topic. Youtube videos about it[2] (with discussion on HN[3]), etc etc.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQZ-0mXFmk8

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7227255

link
manigandham 4078 days ago
But this could be said about any massive (tech) company with billions of users and a pervasive presence in the mainstream.

I don't think this is a cause for concern but rather a victory for progress and efficiency that a company can finally do such large scale testing and experimentation to move us all to a better standard.

link
brighteyes 4078 days ago
Well, what is an example of a company with similar power?

No one else has a web browser with market share anywhere near.

And no other browser vendor has any major websites. Microsoft has Bing and MSN etc. sites, but those are fairly small compared to google.com, google docs, google maps, etc. etc.

Facebook would be a company with a website that has massive reach. But Facebook doesn't control a browser. If it did have a major browser, it would be as concerning as Google is.

It's the combination of major browser + major websites that allowed Google to divert a massive part of internet usage from a standard protocol to a non-standard one. No one else can do that today.

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