> Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it.
Sure, but are they going to do a hard left and ignore Google commits, or if Google implements some new CSS features, are they going to pull those in because it's easy and the work is done then they haven't diverged as much, even if they might not have implemented them exactly that way if the incentives weren't aligned quite the same way?
> There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly.
It doesn't really matter whether it is a monopoly, it matters whether governments see it as unfair. Antitrust laws didn't spring forth from the founders, they were passed by legislature, and then used shortly after to curtail what society perceived to be abuse of power. It also was not done in one go, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, and then it was updated through both the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.There's nothing to say that laws couldn't be passed to change how antitrust applies slightly (especially in Europe, where they seem to have for appetite for this recently than the US). That might sound a little preposterous, but we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world, which is traditionally when laws like this have been passed in the past.
While I doubt if an antitrust case was brought against Google it would be because of Chrome, reducing any example people can point to when justifying making a case is probably worthwhile when operating at Google's scale.
> Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life).
PNG is a standard, that standard is not changing to any appreciable degree, and if there was a major push to extend PNG and many readers couldn't read PNG's correctly because they used proprietary extensions, we would definitely be having discussions about whether there's enough viable alternatives on the market, do they have enough market share.
Keep in mind, this is just a revised instance of Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they've learned to be more circumspect and more careful about the "extinguish" step to avoid too much unwanted attention, so it's more nuanced.
Sure, but are they going to do a hard left and ignore Google commits, or if Google implements some new CSS features, are they going to pull those in because it's easy and the work is done then they haven't diverged as much, even if they might not have implemented them exactly that way if the incentives weren't aligned quite the same way?
> There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly.
It doesn't really matter whether it is a monopoly, it matters whether governments see it as unfair. Antitrust laws didn't spring forth from the founders, they were passed by legislature, and then used shortly after to curtail what society perceived to be abuse of power. It also was not done in one go, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, and then it was updated through both the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.There's nothing to say that laws couldn't be passed to change how antitrust applies slightly (especially in Europe, where they seem to have for appetite for this recently than the US). That might sound a little preposterous, but we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world, which is traditionally when laws like this have been passed in the past.
While I doubt if an antitrust case was brought against Google it would be because of Chrome, reducing any example people can point to when justifying making a case is probably worthwhile when operating at Google's scale.
> Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life).
PNG is a standard, that standard is not changing to any appreciable degree, and if there was a major push to extend PNG and many readers couldn't read PNG's correctly because they used proprietary extensions, we would definitely be having discussions about whether there's enough viable alternatives on the market, do they have enough market share.
Keep in mind, this is just a revised instance of Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they've learned to be more circumspect and more careful about the "extinguish" step to avoid too much unwanted attention, so it's more nuanced.