@michaelchampion@indieweb.social

Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri

That's been my experience in the tech industy -- In the 70's we bemoaned the dominance of IBM and ATT and dreamed of a world free of their self-preserving obstruction. In the '80s-90s they had been displaced and now Microsoft was the evil dominant power holding back progress. Then in the 2000's (ahem, I sold my soul and was assimilated into Microsoft) but Google became the oppressive central power on whom we blame everything

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri

In a better world, there is a collaboration between open bodies like W3C/IETF/etc and governments to identify problems in technical platforms, build consensus solutions, and legally constrain the powerful from imposing their own solutions. From my long collaboration with @cdub as a colleague and coop-etitor I think that's more or less what he's trying to do at Google and W3C. Making that harder for him and other ethical Googlers does not help

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub So: Centralization happens when decentralized networks aren't useable without a small number well-known entry points, amplified by Metcalfe's law and economies of scale. I have no clue how to fix that, other than balance of power politics among competing centralizers, accountability to governments, and judicious regulation.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri "I also don't think Wu's point is "and therefore, do nothing about it."" Right, and it's not my point either. I'm saying that it's pointless to cast this as a narrative with G as the supervillain. And sure, G makes a good villain in an entertaining storyline. But just like James Bond defeated each supervillain only to have to face a new one in the next movie in the franchise, we can't focus on defeating Google, but on fixing the incentives that create supervillains

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri "Even just 5% of that income redistributed would be *huge* for Web vitality and innovation" Sure, that income WELL SPENT would be useful. But nothing in my experience with governments or non-profit organizations gives me any hope that dumping a billion dollars on either a government entity or something like W3C would lead to anything but a boondoggle.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri

Wu argues (quoting from https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html)

'History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew.'

nytimes.com

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 28mo ago

@bkardell@toot.cafe Can't figure out how to end it though ... "sic transit mundus" like the gloomy end of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz or "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been" (話說天下大勢．分久必合，合久必分) like the beginning of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms 😉

en.wikipedia.org

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub Well, the first casualty of ending browser search engine defaults would surely be Mozilla, and then probably a non-Chromium Safari. Is enhancing the Chromium monopoly an acceptable price to pay to fix the damage default search engine cause? I don't know. But it's not like the rest of the ecosystem will go on -- for better and worse -- if you "fix" the pollution-spewing engine driving the browser business model.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri 4.I don't know where that leaves us. AMP is a good case study / thought experiment. Sure, no elected governing body would have accepted it. Trouble is, it solved an actual user problem that the web architecture created and never found a consensus fix for. As far as I can tell, Google didn't so much exploit their power to force AMP on the world as create a palatable solution for users that leveraged and enhanced their own power as well.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 32mo ago

@bkardell@toot.cafe From bitter experience with a smoke detector way up near a 15 foot ceiling ... It gets power from somewhere, if not direct wired, then a battery, no? So there is probably a backup battery that will eventually die. Or a built-in non-replaceable battery with a supposed 10 year lifespan that you may be nearing.

But my other cause of random beeps / getting out the ladder is dust that accumulates near the sensor. Try vacuuming the smoke detector maybe.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe A retirement hobby is natural and historical stewardship (I live in one of the oldest towns in Washington state, on an island whose relative isolation protected it from some of the "progress" of the last century). I've learned that citizens are MUCH more willing to volunteer for work parties that benefit a public or non-profit entity than those on private land that make a trail or old building available on a limited basis to the public

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe Google apparently funds > 90% of the cost of Chromium, but they also appear to get more than 90% of the benefit (judging by search market share anyway). Perception of unfairness works both ways: "We should invest an engineer-year in work that gives a competitor 90% of the benefit" is not a great story to tell one's Big Company bosses 🤷

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe The elephant in the room is that Google is the only player with a business model that clearly supports funding all this. I've learned from this thread they contribute 95-ish percent of the Chromium commits, fund much of Igalia's work that makes them #2, subsidize the "rival" browser engines to get default search engine status ...

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe The Deinotherium giganteum in the room is that the web platform itself may be a mature, commoditized technology that few are excited about anymore. And nobody but Google has much of an economic incentive to invest in doing more than incremental maintenance on.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe So for what very little my opinion is worth ... I'd say to keep doing the kinds of things Shruthi talks about at BlinkOn to reduce the friction of outside contributions to Chromium, accept that Google gets most of the benefit so should endure most of the cost of Chromium, and benefit from the optics / culture of being a beacon of collaboration and respectful coop-etition in the increasingly toxic environment the web (inadvertently) created. |

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe Would the vitality of the web platform benefit if Google moved away from freely contributing to Chromium, thus motivating other players to invest more in competing browser engines? I can see the logic of kicking the free riders off the Chromium gravy train. But will the displaced free riders do the Right Thing for the web platform, or invest more in their own walled gardens, or guesses about the Next Big Thing?

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

Replying to

@RickByers@toot.cafe I struggle to imagine Satya saying "oh well, they caught on to our game, let's find a spare $billion/year or so and maintain a Chromium fork that is feature-compatible (and bug-for-bug compatible :-( ) with Chrome." I can more easily imagine "let's see if our LLM's can be trained to reverse-engineer Chrome deltas so that Edgeium stays good enough so customers don't switch to Chrome and we lose the Bing traffic Edge generates".

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

@RickByers@toot.cafe Thanks for the chart. All I can say is that trend toward zero was the opposite of the plan as I understood it when I retired in 2020. Seeing so many people on the Edge standards team moving on during the pandemic-driven tech bubble made me wonder if MS had flipped from a "contribute to the platform via code more than standards" strategy to a "free ride on Google" strategy. But I have zero supporting evidence.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 36mo ago

@RickByers@toot.cafe @stubbornella@front-end.social
" love how things are going in rendering / CSSWG."
Yup. If the rest of the web platform was done like CSSWG, it would be a much better place.Real engagement by users, rapid iteration of specs/implementations, rigorous testing with real world implementations before calling something standardized ...

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@robin @cdub @danbri I was encouraged to see several people elected to the W3C Board who WANT W3C to become organizationally capable of solving real structural problems ... so I have a tiny bit of hope this will change. But it will require subtle diplomacy more than dynamite to work around the obstacles.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 28mo ago

Replying to

@bkardell@toot.cafe But you're inspiring me to write a post-apocalyptic novel inspired by W3C ... An isolated community has figured out how to survive the droughts/storms/radiation/whatever under the guidance of a benevolent dictator who leads by building consensus and wisely mediating disagreements ....

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 28mo ago

Replying to

@bkardell@toot.cafe But once he/she/they pass on, the community adopts Meek STV voting to try to maintain some semblance of that governance model without their BDFL ...

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 28mo ago

@bkardell@toot.cafe Which leads to fragmentation, conflict, dysfunction; the various factions (farmers, dump miners, smiths, merchants) all try to maximize their interests rather than the community's ...

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 31mo ago

@timbray@cosocial.ca I don't share your enthusiasm for Tim's open letter ... back in the early days we thought web technology would improve society ... not that we must first improve society so that web technologies can work as designed.

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Michael Champion @michaelchampion@indieweb.social

· 32mo ago

@carnage4life@mas.to

"The defining characteristic of the culture under Steve Ballmer was complacency and a sense of hubris."

Yep, there was a pervasive sense that "we tell the customers what to want, we don't ask them what they want", and "[x] is destined to succeed sooner or later, because we make it." Not to mention the focus on beating competitors rather than pleasing customers.

I hope SteveB is humbled to ponder that retiring was the best strategic move he ever made ...

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