Item — HN Reader

Nothing is absolute. Even in absence of Google Chrome, you still have all cloud services and ISPs abiding by the laws of the country they operate in.

The point is how much control one has over the end to end distribution. My own website could potentially receive a DMCA take-down, but I can just take down the offending content and continue with my life. In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.

2 comments

I work on a cross-platform App used by millions of of people and one day during event that runs on our App google blacklisted out domain as phishing (for all of chromes) because we had too many dots url in the url and too many requests coming into the service to quickly.

So even IF you DO get past the ban-hammer, there is always another ban-hammer just round the corner if you app gets too much traction.

Google is great until you get caught in the web of censorship. Apple is great on the surface but a hot-mess of bugs under the hood.

Devs at chrome seem more compentant then the devs who work who on webkit. Both just serve to reinforce parent companies positions. The APIs that the parent companies use, most of the time, the rest of the APIs, its anyones guess when they will break release to release.

> you still have all cloud services and ISPs abiding by the laws of the country they operate in.

Those typically have due process and transparency. Google has neither.

> In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.

I'm not sure how common it is for chrome to mark whole websites, but they do like to warn on executable downloads that are flagged by crappy artificial stupidity anti-virus vendors who have no incentive to reduce false positives. And by warn I mean that Chrome (and other browsers that let Google gatekeep the web, which is most of them including FF) refuses to download the file and makes it obfucated enough to override that decision that many users think they can't download the file.

Example: http://dege.freeweb.hu/

Google has been moving in the direction of exercising ever greater control over the web. These little Chrome features aimed at "protecting users" are just parts of it. They control discovery (Google Search), the infrastructure (Google Cloud), the client (Google Chrome), and a very common support channel (Gmail).

The fact that those are theoretically not absolute (some people use Bing, hosting can be on AWS, and Firefox still exists) is beside the point.

In practice, almost any business is damaged to the point of being unsustainable if Google cuts them off.