Level playing field?<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/firefox-install-google-chrome-home-page/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/firefox-install-google-chro...</a><p>> Without Chrome, we’d be at the mercy of Internet Explorer or other web browsers when users want to get to Google.<p>How so? Is Matt (or Google) afraid that other web browsers would block Google properties?<p>I never saw Chrome as the way for Google to ascertain that the general public can have unfettered access to Google properties, I saw - and see - Chrome as a way to extend the Google eco-system onto the end users device, and to gain access to URLs that otherwise would remain hidden from Google to reduce the 'dark web' as seen through Google as well as a way to track users on pages that don't have Google Analytics installed. When technically speaking it really shouldn't matter what browser the users uses, as long as it is standards compliant it should simply work.<p>Killing off reader didn't do much to level the playingfield either, RSS is so much more open than everything that tries to replace it.<p>On the whole, Matt is on the ball that Google would be a better company ('less evil') if they were willing and able to play on a level playingfield but I don't see Google as a company willing to do either. They could if they really wanted to, but they are definitely not doing that.<p>Between the corporate newspeak about how every change that violates consumer privacy even more that gets hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread and Googles abuse of their muscle when it comes to such things as copyright violation on an unprecedented scale Google, if anything, seems to be totally allergic to level playing fields.<p>Anyway, props to Matt for making public his call on Google to be nicer (especially during his leave), let's see what will happen because of this.
As Google has come to dominate the browser market, they've slowly made Chrome more and more integrated and reliant their own propriety services. They've done away with the concept of a homepage and exclusively control what the new tab page looks like. There's no way for users to set a competitor's site as the new tab page.<p><a href="https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2918032?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2918032?hl=en</a><p>> <i>"If your default search provider isn't Google you may see a different layout on the New Tab page."</i><p>They advertise their own products on search results, pushing organic results down even further.<p>They pulled a bait and switch with Android, turning it into GoogleOS.<p>Google throws its weight around just as much as Microsoft ever did, they just smile while they do it.
I run my own XMPP server (prosody), yet use google apps for my domain; due to an annoying chain of dependencies, this means I can't use Google Photos.<p>To allow <i>other</i> google users reach you at your non-google server, Talk+Hangouts have to be disabled in the google apps admin console -> Google+ doesn't work without Hangouts enabled -> Google Photos doesn't work without Google+ enabled.<p>The fact this happens seems to mean that google does <i>not</i> want to play on a level field; but wants to build a walled garden.
<i>> [A specific company I won't call out explicitly] sucked contacts out of Gmail but refused to export contacts back out.</i><p>I'm guessing everybody read [A specific company] as "Facebook", but I know for sure of at least one other company, and possibly two, that it could refer to :-) In fact, now that I think about it, I can think of several candidates.<p>But let's talk about reciprocity. Who owns your contacts? You, or <i>Google</i>? If you want to export contacts out of Google's services, why should Google stop you just because the other service does not reciprocate? Sure, Google makes it easier than most, but isn't that also what their users wanted? If the user truly wants the other service to also export contacts as easily, that's between the user and that other service.<p>Now consider that Gmail is in the top 3 biggest email providers next to Yahoo and Hotmail/Live/Outlook/Whatever-it's-called now. Very likely it is now the biggest, and so they have <i>the</i> biggest set of contacts data in the world. If any 3rd party service wants access to those contacts, Google wields a disproportionate amount of power over them, and as this post shows, is willing to apply it by "requiring reciprocity".<p>"Level Playing Field" indeed.
> The desire for a level playing field also partly explains why Chrome and Android are so important. Without Chrome, we’d be at the mercy of Internet Explorer or other web browsers when users want to get to Google<p>Except that Chrome download notices appear at the bottom of Google's homepage for non chrome users, or at least have in the past.<p>I see where Matt is coming from here but when you are dealing with Google as a competitor, rivals are going to try everything to get back market share. If Google is going to use its competitive advantage in search to push its other products why shouldn't anyone else?
Google's attitude towards Windows Phone shows nicely how much they strive for leveling the playing field. Or we could look at Google Maps on mobile IE -- in WP 8, it is horrible, in GDR1 it works very well, all that's changed is the user agent.
> <i>We’ve expressed the principle of “Don’t be evil” from the early days of Google.</i><p>The glory days of ancient past. How can anyone seriously defer to this moto in the context of modern day Google is beyond me.
Well put, Matt. I take it it fell on deaf ears, given that Google users stopped communicating with me over XMPP before that and it has never worked again?
Can anyone tell me how many things in this list are about a "level playing field" or "do no evil". If Apple or MS did even half of the things in this list, people would be screaming about it from rooftops a couple of decades later, but as Assange noted, Google seems to get a free pass.<p>Most of the Google search page area is now occupied by ads, or ads disguised as content<p><a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad-heavy-166226" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/google-results-too-ad-heavy-1662...</a><p>Profiting off adware ads for downloads<p><a href="http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/08/15/firefox_dodgy_download.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/08/15/firefox_dodgy_download.jpg</a><p>Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.<p><a href="http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe-not/" rel="nofollow">http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe-not/</a><p><a href="http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/" rel="nofollow">http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...</a><p><a href="http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-is-deceptive.html/?a=viewall" rel="nofollow">http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...</a><p>Tracking the emails in the free Google Apps for Education and even paid Google Apps for Business to build ad profiles, making misleading statements to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to having to make statements to federal court, having to tell the truth about it and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.<p><a href="http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...</a><p>Paid inclusion for shopping search results<p><a href="http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embraces-paid-inclusion-13138" rel="nofollow">http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...</a><p>Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp<p><a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-google-local-listings/111539/" rel="nofollow">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-...</a><p>Conspiring to kill SkyHook(and succeeding) with its 500lb outsized influence like Microsoft used to, in order to gather wifi & user location data.<p><a href="http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-Samsung" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...</a><p>Getting fined by FTC for violating Gmail users privacy by exposing their friends lists in Google Buzz in order to compete with Twitter<p><a href="http://www.netcompetition.org/antitrust/why-ftcs-22-5m-google-privacy-fine-is-faux-accountability" rel="nofollow">http://www.netcompetition.org/antitrust/why-ftcs-22-5m-googl...</a><p>Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.<p><a href="http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/" rel="nofollow">http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/</a><p><a href="http://www.datadrivenbusiness.com/google-quietly-testing-offline-store-visits-tracking" rel="nofollow">http://www.datadrivenbusiness.com/google-quietly-testing-off...</a><p>Google employee accesses personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?<p><a href="http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...</a><p>Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default.<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-on-google-rules-for-android/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-...</a><p>Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta access. Bonus points for enforcing this by the duplicitous moniker 'Open Handset Alliance' doublespeak<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threatened-acer-forced-it-to-dump-rival-os/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threate...</a><p>Making people literally cry with the forced Google+ integration into Youtube and making confusing UX to make people share more than they want to, in order to compete with Facebook.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs</a> (warning, NSFW language)<p>Extracting petty revenge on CNET for googling(!) information on its CEO<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/</a><p>Convicted in the courts for colluding with other tech firms in illegal non-poaching agreements<p><a href="http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/" rel="nofollow">http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-...</a>
So if others are evil , it's okay to be evil because that's a level playing field? Maybe change it "Don't be Evil*" ?<p>Hangouts/XMPP , RSS, the big brother aspect of GA - No matter how you justify them they're never going to be good.
It is important to read this in the context of republishing an internal memory.<p>It it interesting to see how to disagree with the company's direction and drive home a point.<p>Publishing openly is subtly communicating to the top brass at Google.<p>It is clear Matt finish a not excited about the direction Google is going re: standards. Thankfully, Microsoft is going the other direction.
I suspect publishing this post now is aimed as much at an internal Google audience as at external players.<p>Bearing that in mind, I think "a level playing field" is an excellent goal for Google to aspire to.<p>To say what Matt can't: if Google plays on a level playing field it makes them a much more attractive partner and supplier.
If they want to level the playing field they should properly support oauth and openid. That means letting me log into Google services with an external provider.
>"Without Android, phone makers could shut Google out of mobile phones completely. Chrome and Android help ensure that users can get to Google without interference; they protect our users from other companies’ potentially unlevel playing fields."<p>Isn't this just saying that Google won't block its own services on Android? There's no guarantee that Google won't block some other search engine. FWIW, I think the App Store / Google Play stores are the biggest obstacles to openness. They are literally determining what users can and cannot be run on their respective platforms.
To me, the biggest problem I have in my interactions with Google (and it's growing over time) is that I never feel like their customer. I don't pay them anything (now that they've sold Motorola, they don't make phones, and they don't seem to charge for the OS on the phone), they don't have products I can buy. They just... put stuff out for me to use, and make money off ads. So there's this rather disquieting mismatch between what I as a user want from them and what they do, because their money doesn't come from me, it comes from people who buy ads. And they need to put SOME effort into user satisfaction, because they need users to have someone to look at the ads that they sell, but there's still a mismatch between user wants and Google offerings. Google Reader is probably the canonical example -- yeah, it wasn't a widely used service, but the users it did have were devoted, and might even have paid to keep using it. But it didn't matter, as Google Reader didn't line up with how Google wanted to sell ads now. So it got the axe. And it's in those moments of powerlessness -- where you have no say over what Google does, because you're not its customer, you're just its user -- that Google loses its appeal. It's not evil, it may even be a level playing field. But that sort of user powerlessness makes me uncomfortable using Google stuff going forward.
Google used to care about an open and interoperable web. Not any more. Most of their web apps suck in browsers that aren't Chrome and with no good reason considering most other browsers are completely capable. Google continues to advertise Chrome on www.google.com while not opening that same lucrative advertisent spot to anyone else. Level playing field my ass.<p>When he actually does something to level the field, I'll tune in. Until then it seems like Matt is ittle more than a PR drone these days.
I would imaging reciprosity and level playing field would require Google's robots.txt to be an open free-for-all. I mean, since we're talking about embracing the open web. I Googled "is Google crawlable" and similar and that doesn't seem to be a thing. I checked the robots.txt and that seems to disallow a lot of stuff. Search, news, groups, images, etc. [1]<p>Google does a great job of taking the open web, repackaging it, slapping it up behind a (crawling) wall, extracting maximum cash from the result. It will always be able to suck in your content "think of the users!" but that'll generally be a 1-way street. Yes there are API's, but that's still a different relationship to "we crawl whatever we want, we put any content we want in our search results, because users".<p>Unrelated: Chrome (which I use and love) also had the added benefit of reducing the amount of money they'd be paying to Firefox for the search deal. Not a terrible outcome. It might even have paid for itself right there, but that's utter speculation.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.google.com/robots.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/robots.txt</a> - seems to be far more disallow than allow
The comments (amazingly) have some insights - including someone who used his chat history to analyse his changing vocabulary and more - quite a fascinating idea for those who will live digital lives for decades.<p>But what seems to be missing is simpler - googles core function is search and until that is a level playing field we are all at the mercy of Google. I am not a reactionary "nationalise everything" but the biggest uses of global data surely surely must be public goods and treated as such?
Everyone willingly liberates the non core parts of it's business. Google should apply these principles to search, support and ad-sense rev share data
>If another search engine crawls the open web and returns better search results, people will switch to that new search engine immediately<p>I don't think people would ditch Google so easily or quickly.
While i like the approach described by that post, many things are hardly something that is applied by them or others in RL, money is what drives decisions.
After all is said and done, Google is still the fairest company and the Google ecosystem is the most open. Seriously, can you imagine a world with out Google? Can you imagine a world were we're at the mercy of Apple & Microsoft? I just can't stomach that with Apple & Microsoft you have to pay to program your own device! You can dislike and criticize Google all you want this doesn't change the facts.