Eric Meyer: Hello, I am Eric Meyer. I'm a developer advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: I am Brian Kardell. I am also a developer advocate at Igalia. And today we have a special guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Alex Moore: Good day. My name's Alex Moore and I run the not-for-profit advocacy group called Open Web Advocacy.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, and we thought we would have Alex on because we've been talking about web ecosystem health for a lot of years. We have a whole playlist on this that you can listen to. We started in 2019 and basically all of the funding for the web comes from Google Vault search deals and something will come along and interrupt it. And then what OWA is involved in tackling several problems like that. Do you want to kind of introduce some of the things that you've been involved with and tackling for?
Alex Moore: Sure. So really OWA is primarily about ensuring that the web remains open and accessible and a competitive platform for innovation in general. And our primary focus has been giving users and developers the ability to access, create and distribute web applications that can operate on an equal footing with native apps across all the various platforms. And just to give a bit of background, if we talk about the web on desktop, we can consider a huge success. Like if you think about desktop, over 70% of all usage on desktop is either within a browser tab or it's an application powered by browser technology. Whereas if you look at the mobile web, the latest statistic we have from the UK is that users only spend 16% of the time in a browser. And if you limit that to what you consider app-like experiences, it's going to be significantly less than that. And the reason OWA came along is that we needed to address this issue and really the failure of the mobile web has many causes, but the predominant one is anti-competitive behavior from Apple, particularly around their browser engine ban, which is then led on to an underinvestment in Safari and a lack of competitive pressure on iOS. And then because there's no threat of losing users, that leads to an underinvestment, which leads to a huge amount of bugs and stability issues that make web apps less viable and critical missing features like instal prompts and proper notification support. And then you've got Google on the other hand, who's then paying Apple 20 billion per year for the search engine default, not only for searches in Safari, but also inside Chrome on iOS. So they're paying for both, which is really bizarre, but then also might explain why the reason Google hasn't historically fought very hard to get their real browser onto iOS because they already got what they wanted, which is search engine dominance. And behind all of that, for our ecosystem to work properly, we really need heavy competition between browsers, especially competition that motivates them to spend big on platform. And that's where we came along is what we're trying to do is get fair and effective competition between all browser platforms. Because in the case where you have competing browsers where they can customize the functionality that's delivered to users and developers, that competition is still important. In fact, probably I suspect that the privacy changes that Google's been like with Privacy Sandbox and stuff like that is a reaction to the progress made in browsers like Safari. And to the other Chromium-based browsers, because if Google doesn't compete, even though they're using the same engine, if they don't compete with those features, then they're likely to lose market share to the other browsers. Where you're talking about browser engine competition, really the competition is for what you consider new features and functionality. The competition only matters on the leading edge.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I don't disagree with any of the things. I want us to have an open competitive web and everything. I just think that the trouble is that we are in this deeply interconnected thing of multiple, multiple, multiple antitrust lawsuits from Apple and Google and Meta and Amazon, and we have to figure out how to unwind this, and I worry about what could happen if we pull on the wrong string and we lose our sweater. So the topic that we have, the thing that brought us here is actually it's a Google suit and actually it's one of five suits that have been brought against Google since 2020. So there's been a lot against Google recently. Do you want to break down what this one was about?
Alex Moore: Sure. So the DOJ case, which is United States versus Google, it's a federal antitrust case that's been going on for about four years. It was started under the previous Trump administration and it's under Judge Amit Mehta. Now, the DOJ argued that Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by illegally monopolizing the search engine market. And the core thrust of the argument was that Google engaged in a series of behaviors and deals that prevent any other search engine from being able to effectively enter the market. Now what happened recently in August is the DOJ won the case against Google. And so now we're moving on to a new stage, which is the remedy stage where the DOJ has to put forward remedies, which they have, and then the judge is going to rule on those remedies.
Brian Kardell: And then after all that there will be appeals and appeals and appeals, and it will probably very likely wind up before the Supreme Court at some point.
Alex Moore: Probably, yeah. Last night the DOJ outlined the proposed remedies, but it's probably worth talking about what the remedies they asked for.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, absolutely. That's ...
Alex Moore: Just to give you, yeah, I'll just quickly skim over the remedies they asked for, and there's a lot of them, so I'll go through quickly, but it was prohibiting and canceling the Apple-Google Search deal, eliminating placement deals for Chrome on Android, requiring Google to divest Chrome and block reentry into the browser market for 10 years, prohibiting Google from paying any browser for default placement for their search, banning Google from sharing revenue with any browsers, removing the bundling requirements like bundling Chrome in Android's Meta agreements. That's their agreements with mobile devices for both Google Search and Chrome. Implementing choice screens for Android, which cover both browsers and search engines. Then if the Android remedies fail, Google has to divest itself of Android, including the Google Play Store, and Google must not use any Google-owned asset to self-preference Google Search engine, search, text ads, or AI products. And there's an extensive list of what exactly that means. And Google must share its search index to qualified competitors at a reasonable cost, including any data from Google property such as YouTube, which uses Google's own search index. And Google is not allowed to invest in any search access point or AI product that is a potential entrance into the Google Search or search text ads as a potential competitor. And so that's pretty much the summary of all of the main proposed remedies.
Eric Meyer: So is the Department of Justice recommending that literally all of these things be done, or are they laying out a menu of options to say to the judge, you could pick some, one or some or all of these?
Alex Moore: Well, they're asking for all of these. Oh, now I just realized, sorry, I've got another 10 on my list. I'm sorry. Let me continue on because some of these are important.
Eric Meyer: Sure.
Alex Moore: So enforcing remedies that prevent Google from using its other products to self-preference search or text ads, allowing qualified competitors to simulate queries, provide competitors at no cost or ad starter, provide any qualified competitor to syndicate Google Search at marginal cost, allow any competitor at marginal cost syndicated search text ads, for one year provide all advertisers the individual ad level for preceding 18 months showing the metrics necessary to the advertiser to evaluate its ad performance, and prohibiting Google from pre-installing Google Search or Chrome on its own devices. I mean that's a big list of asks, and lots of these remedies we think are great. I mean, it's just a couple of them that we are concerned could have very bad unintended negative consequences for the web.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, sorry, I thought you were done with the list before.
Alex Moore: No, no.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, that's a lot. My instinctive reaction is, okay, they're prohibiting Google from paying for default search deals, but that doesn't prohibit anyone else.
Alex Moore: No, it doesn't.
Eric Meyer: So that would seem to create a vacuum into which I don't know who, but somebody could step in to say, 'We know Google used to pay you a lot of money. We maybe can't pay you that much money, but we can still pay you money to be the default search on Firefox or on Safari or whatever.' Does the Department of Justice, have they said to Congress, you should probably just outlaw these in general, or is it literally just, 'Google did these things. We're going to bring the hammer down on Google. We're not thinking about anything else right now'?
Alex Moore: They're asking the judge for these remedies. And the judge has sort of fairly broad powers to implement all of those listed, including both the behavioral remedies and the structural remedies. And the whole idea with this is that we don't have a competitive search market in general now, which could have a lot of effects. For example, pushing up the costs of advertising for people to sell their products, as well as lowering the quality of the search engine because if there's more competition of search, then you'd hope that it would also improve the quality of the search. Maybe you get less ads or more actual content. The two things we are most concerned about out of all the remedies ...
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I was going to ask.
Alex Moore: So one of them was the total ban of revenue sharing for setting Google as the default search engine. Now, if you think of what this would mean is that there's a number of browsers that have search engine deals with Google, in particular Mozilla. And if all of the search engine deals gets banned in a fell swoop, then that will leave Mozilla without its primary revenue source and a number of the smaller other browsers will be deeply affected. And the second one is obviously also very concerning. It's the forced sale of Chrome, which we think has a huge number of unintended consequences and would likely be a disaster if it goes ahead under the current proposal.
Eric Meyer: Why do you think that would be disastrous? Not that I disagree with you.
Alex Moore: Okay, so the DOJ's proposed Google sells Chrome, which raises a lot of important questions. So the first one would be who's going to buy it? And once the buyer buys it, what's their revenue source going to be? Because the proposed remedies also prohibit any search deal with Google, including partial agreements. And then so you've got to think, 'Well, what's the financial viability of Chrome under those conditions?' Now, one of the primary concerns we have is we're worried about the possibility of Chrome being acquired by an entity that doesn't value the open web or the web platform, or even worse is actively opposed to it. The other concern would be would the owner continue funneling the necessary investment into Chrome into maintaining and advancing the platform?
Brian Kardell: Chromium here you mean?
Alex Moore: Yeah, into the ... Well, Chrome and Chromium, yes, for both. I think it's both important.
Brian Kardell: I mean, I don't doubt that they would continue to invest in Chrome in the same way that Opera invests in Opera and Microsoft invests in Edge. And it's much, much cheaper to do that, and it is the part that the user touches, so there's good incentive to want it to be a good experience. It's the stuff as you say, underneath that is the underlying stuff that's really expensive to maintain. And there's a bit of this that I think that you're alluding to that you and I have discussed in the past as well, which is that not only is Google sort of the main source of all of this funding, but they also have for at least a decade, played the role of the R&D arm of the web platform. So whatever you think Mozilla pays currently for Firefox, whatever you think Apple pays, Google pays an order of magnitude more.
Eric Meyer: Do you have an estimate as to how much investment that would be on an annual basis for, let's say, that Omnicorp buys Chrome. If they were to keep up the same level of investment, what would they need to be putting in every year? Do we have a guess as to what that is?
Alex Moore: So Brian's probably got some guesses as well, but our guess is we think Google currently has about a thousand developers on the browser and about a thousand on the platform, and platform being the APIs and technology that's used to run websites and web apps.
Brian Kardell: That would include though not just people actually doing development. It would include managers, QA people, people doing CI infrastructure.
Alex Moore: Yeah. Although it wouldn't include a lot of the security teams got moved externally. So there's a significant number of security personnel which are involved in Chrome and Chromium security stuff, which would be external to that. So if you think about 2000 developers and an average cost of half a million each, once you include their wage, taxes, benefits, equity, building costs, their desk, et cetera, then you're talking about around a billion per year for just staffing, plus an extra few hundred outside of that organization. And then you have to talk about all of the equipment they need, all their server infrastructure, which would be quite significant. And the fact that they rely on a lot of other Google departments, which they don't currently have to run, so like legal teams, marketing, HR teams, the infrastructure teams, which they're not having to foot the bill for at the moment. And that's just cost. Once you sell that to a separate entity, you have this, let's call it somewhere between $1.5 and 3 billion cost per year. You have to think that the entity has just spent a significant amount of money buying Chrome and they have to recoup their investment. And they know in 10 years' time, Google's going to come back onto the block and be able to start shipping their own browser again. And you have to think, what's the incentive of that organization to continue to invest in platform? How is investing in platform going to help them recoup their $15, 20, 25 billion investment in purchasing Chrome? And the answer is that's not obvious. Whereas if they got in and they just gussed the whole platform team, then they could significantly reduce the ongoing costs while probably not having any short-term effect on their user base. And that's our really, the potential disaster scenario is. And there's other disaster scenarios as well. How are they going to recoup money from Chrome if they're not signing a search engine deal with Google? Is there enough money from the other search engines, so from Bing and DuckDuckGo and Ecosia? Because you've got to realize Google's not allowed to bid for those, for that default placement, which means there's going to be less pressure on the other parties to bid as high, which will reduce the potential revenue further.
Brian Kardell: So a couple of things. One, you also didn't include in there the people who work on standards, the DevRels, of which there are many and very high quality, all of the things that they do for the platform, like teaching people about the web platform and all of the web platform test infrastructure actually is Google infrastructure. So that also uses a lot of Google Cloud services. It's building these browsers all the time. It's running, storing all this data indefinitely. So yeah, it would be pretty huge and costly to do. And yeah, for me this is the concern, is that there isn't a business model. This is the thing I have been saying. That's the thing that we really need to tackle. We need to figure out how to make a business model. But what's interesting to me is when you break this down and you look at the different antitrust things that are brought here, it's not so much about some of these other things. It's about search dominance and ad tech and advertising. That seems like the very most basic direct thing that's in there, is the ability to share the index. I think that sounds to me like a really important one because the cost of developing an index like that is astronomical and sort of the bigger it gets, the better it gets. And so it's very difficult as the other engines have said to kind of compete with that. And as to whether or not these other engines could play the same role, I think why though? Why would they? Because one of the things that has worried me a lot, I'm very much on board with the antitrust actions. I worry that we do them poorly, we interrupt the wrong thing. I think that you just have to be very careful how you do them or else the monopoly reconstitutes itself in a better way or something. You waste a lot of dollars trying to make a shift and ultimately you don't. This is kind of like the one chance to do something. And there are historically good things that came from antitrust even for shareholders directly. So I'm all on board with that. I think you have to worry about how it plays out. One of the things that definitely I've seen some data on and some studies is that a lot of times antitrust actions have the result of mainly handing a lot of business to whoever was second place and not as much actual competition beyond that as we would like. And so in all of these things you see like Bing keeps coming up, that's like the next biggest, and Microsoft is a for-profit business. If I was Microsoft, and Firefox came to me and said, 'Hey, Google has given us this much money and they can't anymore, can you match what Google?' I mean I would say, 'No, you have them over a barrel.' Right? Yeah.
Alex Moore: It's not going to be the same amount, especially without the competitive pressure of Google have to compete for those dollars.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. So I worry that that part isn't ... I worry that it won't do the thing that you want it to do. So I do kind of agree with you that I think somehow you need to, I don't know, not just throw a grenade at it and go like, 'Now it's good.' Because the thing that to me is different about this than all the other antitrust except for maybe the one that involved Internet Explorer. The thing that's different to me about this one is that all of those other ones deal with something that is directly itself for profit, and this one is doing that. It wants to target ads. It's about ads and search. It's not about web engines, but will it do collateral damage by creating a thing where there is no business model allowed? Now, maybe it's possible that it's failure of imagination on our part. Maybe. I don't know. There is somebody out there who's like, 'Hey, I can do it. I can ... I don't know how, but-
Alex Moore: That's very unlikely because just think of the motivations between any group or any group of entities purchasing Chrome. I mean probably if you think of any organization, Microsoft would probably have the closest aligned goals with the open web considering how much they're spending on developing web apps on the Windows platform. But if you look at Microsoft's behavior in terms of anti-competitive conduct with Edge, it's not going to be a good look for the judge to allow a sale to Microsoft, especially after we only just got out of the noughties i.e., six days and all of those issues. And then if you look at all the other major companies, I mean, okay, obviously Apple wants to protect its native app ecosystem. You have Amazon, which is an aggregator for all the merchants, and there's a lot of antitrust issues surrounding them. It starts being hard to think of an organization which has the long-term best interests of the web at heart, which means that if this gets sold to some sort of private equity group, they're most likely just going to engage in very drastic cost-cutting measures, including reducing staff to the minimum, terminating teams working on web platform and just maintaining a skeleton crew for bug fixes and security updates.
Brian Kardell: Which is counter then to the goals that we're trying to achieve on all of these platforms.
Alex Moore: And cause immense harm to the US economy as well. Because if you think of the resulting stagnation, because Google does the majority of all R&D for the web, including all the stuff that ends up in Gecko and WebKit. And the resulting stagnation on that could last for decades, 'cause if we suddenly remove all of that funding, nobody's doing the work. It's not obvious anyone, then we'd see an uptick from other companies doing the work and all the businesses that then rely on a thriving and a continuously evolving web would be harmed. And then it also starts shifting power away from the web to the alternatives, which is the native app ecosystem-
Brian Kardell: Exactly-
Alex Moore: ... which are in the hands of tech giants.
Brian Kardell: Which also have their own antitrust issues.
Eric Meyer: It almost seems like the only entities that would qualify would be nation states or other large like the European Union would be able to spend the money and would hypothetically have non-profit motive reasons to continue to invest in the thing that they bought. But I have trouble envisioning the European Union saying, 'Sure, we'll buy Chrome for $50 billion and then we will put $3 billion a year into it.'
Alex Moore: Yeah, I agree. That's very unlikely. I mean, one of the ideas that was floated before was separating Chrome into a non-profit organization. And that could have avoided the major risks of Chrome being acquired by a tech giant or private equity. But that is not on the cards at the moment. And even if it was on the cards, there'd be a whole list of conditions that would need to meet to be viable, like a substantial financial war chest and a reliable and significant source of ongoing funding.
Brian Kardell: So the judge can do that in terms of giving them a substantial war chest. I mean, the judge can say, 'You need to provide what we calculate as funding for the next five years or for the next 10 years.' That's within the purview of the judge.
Alex Moore: But that's not what the DOJ is asking for at the moment. And so it's unlikely that the judge by himself will suddenly decide, 'Oh, I think it should be a non-profit,' unless the DOJ is requesting it gets split out as a nonprofit.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I mean a nonprofit is only part of the picture anyway. You still need a way to fund it. So like Eric was saying, maybe a nation state could buy it. It seems very unlikely that a US judge is going to say, 'You should sell it to a nation state.' If that even happened, then there would I'm sure be a completely different legal action that would kick in saying that immediately that they have to sell it again, because we have also the TikTok thing here, which is a whole nother thing. The trouble is that you need a funding model. And so currently the only one that we have is default search, but not really though, right? I mean, Google pays money for default search, but what it pays is actually 36% of the profit from searches that actually happen. So I don't believe that there is a thing suggesting that Google can't pay for search. It's just they can't play for default placement, right?
Alex Moore: No, the DOJ prohibits any form of revenue sharing whatsoever.
Eric Meyer: Is what they're asking for. One of the things they're asking for, excuse me.
Alex Moore: Yeah, one of the big list. So there are alternatives.
Brian Kardell: Well, they may not. I have judged.
Alex Moore: There is alternatives that could work. So for example, one that was raised by a group of academics, including Fiona Scott Morton, was that Google is allowed to make search deals, but those search deals have to be capped at 50%, which means you allow to sell 50% of your default to Google, and then the remaining 50% is open to the other competitors. And then that would still ...
Brian Kardell: But that's about default search.
Alex Moore: That's for default search, yes.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, but I'm saying you could just not sell default search because this is another thing that came up in the court itself, is that I think everybody kind of agrees that if we added a choice screen to everything, it wouldn't move the needle much. People are still going to choose Google. And so this came up is that, wouldn't it be ironic if you took $20 billion away from Apple, but all the traffic still went to Google? That's exactly the thing that I'm talking about that I'm like, 'No, I mean I feel like we have to ... ' That one is really obvious. I don't think that I'm remotely the only one who sees that, but it is exactly the kind of stepping on the rake kind of comic moment that could happen from these things. So like I was saying, you don't have to pay for default search. You could just let search engines pay anybody who sends stuff there, so like ...
Alex Moore: You'd have to have a motivation for them to pay for that traffic though. In the case where I don't pay, what is the effect on my incoming traffic? 'Cause the reason they pay for default search, they're paying the revenue sharing in return for being the default search engine because they know being the default means users are going to use Google. And I agree with you that, sorry, the search engine choice screens won't have as big an effect, but setting the defaults to 50% most certainly would have a big effect because one day 50% of your users wake up and their default is now Bing. A large percentage of those users will just continue to use Bing 'cause that's what's been shown time and time again when you impose defaults on people.
Brian Kardell: I mean when the defaults are good and when they're not disorienting. There are lots of things that we can point to with data that back up that point but with nuance. There's definitely nuance in that. Let's talk about the Internet Explorer one because I have recently even looked up a study that looked at that that shows that those choice screens that we spent all that time getting, that didn't really have that much of an effect. Most of the effect kind of would've happened anyway because Internet Explorer got really bad.
Alex Moore: So I think there's a couple of points there. Apparently they did have quite a significant effect. I think there was stuff from Mozilla which said that they received quite a large number of users from those choice screens. But I think the other aspect of them is if any of us, if you actually go look at the choice screens, they are terrible. They have the worst UI and we're talking both the Windows one and the Android one. The design for both of them, I mean, if we sat down in a room and looked at those designs, it's quite obvious that they weren't going to be effective. If you look at say, the Windows one, what would happen is it would do a pop-up inside an Internet Explorer window, which would quite often be overlaid by something else that would open later, which you could just close immediately. So it's a pop-up saying, 'Would you like to install another browser,' is basically all it was. And then you could click on then and then go down the step, basically take you to the website and you could install another browser.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. They made it so you have to download it and everything, which is a thing that's hard to get around. You can't pre-install these browsers, right? That's not a thing you can do.
Alex Moore: No, but the design that we have now on iOS in the EU is very different. It's not perfect because of limits in the legislation, but basically when you open Safari for the first time, you get an unskippable browser choice selection of browsers, and then whatever browser you select, you do a one tap and then that will go, download the browser and that will become your new default browser. And there's had lots of people pour over lots of different companies, and it's now at the point where it's actually quite an effective design. The Android one by comparison was terrible. It was designed by Google and had a big cancel button down the bottom, which we call the choose Chrome option. And if you think about a user, if they've got a choice screen pop up and there's just a skip, I don't want to deal with this, they're always going to choose that option, which will just favor the gatekeeper.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I think there's a lot of difficulty in a choice screen for these things. I'm not saying it can't be done. I think it's probably a really positive thing, but it's only part of the problem. It's not going to have a big initial shift. Firefox didn't get a sudden incredible influx of users. In fact, their users have continued to fall since 2009.
Alex Moore: Yeah. The choice screen is just one small aspect of competition. It's basically to remove the power of default and the advantage that the gatekeepers give themselves by being the default, which means they then have to fight to get users to choose their browser either by going to download it or selecting it on the choice screen. It's not going to change the landscape overnight. It's just going to apply additional pressure. So it has to be a small part of a much bigger comprehensive competition strategy.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. And this is an interesting thing because it's like the challenging thing about this, when you do these court actions, there are ways that the US can charge a group of companies with something more complex. And maybe that might have worked better in my mind because you could act more. But this is kind of an action that you're taking against Google that is really affecting a lot of other companies here. So Apple will lose $20 billion a year, which is we all go, 'Well, yeah, Apple.' But that's not small potatoes. And I've said this before, but I think if you lose $20 billion and in the way that corporations work today, you have a duty to shareholders, shareholders are going to be angry about that. And then it's anybody's guess to me what happens over a while with that. Maybe as you were saying, it's another one of those things that leads them to go, 'Yeah, maybe this web thing isn't the way. Maybe native is more the way. Maybe ... Why are we even bothering with two things that are competing with one another, one that we can't actually make money at.' Or maybe, sure, a lot of people speculate they'll make a search engine. Maybe.
Alex Moore: I think Apple has other reasons to continue to invest in their browser because by comparison, especially by say Google standards, they're not actually investing that much in their browser and their browser engine, but I think they'll be very reluctant to suddenly lose all of their market share on iOS and essentially hand over control over such an important gateway to users to other vendors. Once we have real browser engine competition on iOS, if they do stop investing, then over time you would see their market share atrophy. So even if they lose that $20 billion from Google, I can't see them significantly decreasing their investment in Safari.
Brian Kardell: So let me ask you a question. Let's rewind to, I want to say 2017, somewhere around there. And we go back in time and I say, 'You know that Microsoft Edge, Edge HTML, they've been working on, everybody's excited about. Microsoft's throwing all this money into it.' Microsoft was one of the OG champions of the web, right?
Alex Moore: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: If I asked you what are the likelihood you'd see of Microsoft just walking away from having an engine and conceding, well, it's Google and we'll just put a skin on top of it and do a little bit here and there, do you think that you would have prognosticated that would happen or no?
Alex Moore: No. Well, I can tell you I didn't at the time. I thought it would continue. I was quite surprised when they switched over. I mean, they ...
Brian Kardell: I worry you would be surprised again.
Alex Moore: Quite possibly. At the moment though, Safari's effect on the ecosystem matters when they're trying to compete with the rest of the ecosystem. While they're not competing, they're under no pressure to deliver features and functionality or significantly less pressure to deliver features and functionality for developers. So if in the case where they're not really competing outside of Apple's platforms. So if you think of Safari, they compete on MacOS, but they actually compete on MacOS because there's other browsers there. They don't compete on iOS because they don't let anyone ship their own browser and they don't compete on Android and they don't compete on Windows. So until we get to the situation where they're worried about losing users to other browser vendors because they're not matching in functionality, we're not going to get that intense competition that's actually going to deliver for developers.
Brian Kardell: How would you feel if it ended the same way for Safari, if Safari just became another Chromium? In the process we lose Firefox the same way. So it's just there's only one uber open source project.
Alex Moore: Browser engine competition is important. And one of the key reasons it's important is because let's say you have one browser engine pushes ahead in a particular area, be it performance or battery life to the point it's significantly better than the other browser engines. Then that gives a good reason for the other browser engine to rewrite that entire code base. So let's say WebKit came out tomorrow and they're twice as good as battery life as Chromium. Then maybe the Chromium engineers have to go, 'Oh, maybe we need to rewrite this stuff for it to be competitive.' In the case where they are all Chromium, then there might be a more of a, 'Well, it's good enough, we don't need to rewrite that bit. It's working.' And I think that's the real power of browser engine competition, is that pushing ahead in one particular area then pushes the other engines to then have to start competing in that area. In the case where you have, whether they're not competitive and if they're not competitive in performance or privacy or security or battery life or any of the aspects, then the competition's not as important because the competition isn't delivering for users and developers. And I think in one aspect, Apple has delivered for users, and that's obviously in the whole privacy area. I feel like because Apple has pushed ahead in that, then that's obviously affected the entire market. And then you see other browser vendors actually pushing ahead in privacy as well. So it's not just in the platform features. It's also in the browser features. Now there was one, I did want to talk about back onto our earlier topic, be worth chatting about what's actually inside Chromium because there's a lot of stuff in there that ...
Brian Kardell: Do you want to talk about Skia and things like that?
Alex Moore: Yeah, well, I've got a huge list. One of the concerns we have is if the DOJ sells off Chrome along with Chromium and they end up gutting the team. Chromium is enormous and there's a lot of projects within Chromium that people might not be aware of that actually support other areas of the web ecosystem. The biggest high profile one is the engine Blink. But there's other things like say V8, which is also widely used on servers everywhere now, and obviously Google is funding the majority of the investment to V8, but that's used for Node, node.js, it's used for Deno and it's used in quite a lot of high profile websites in the US. Then if we talk about graphics libraries there's Skia which is used by Mozilla and used in a bunch of native apps as well. It's probably not obvious to the DOJ that this could then affect all these other organizations as well. And even things like the entire web's networking infrastructure, if you start talking about HTTP2 and HTTP3 and all of the certificate transparency and certificate management originally all started under Google. WebRTC, which we're using right now to do this podcast, which you use in Zoom and Teams. Again, it's done via teams within Google. If you think about codecs, AV1 and VP8, VP9, and OPUS and all of that, they are teams within Google. Lots of the security stuff around sandboxing and fuzzers and that research for browsers happens within the Chromium team.
Brian Kardell: Even Chromium is itself what you need to build it is excessive.
Alex Moore: Yes.
Brian Kardell: I think another thing that, and I don't mean to cut your list short, but it's a long list.
Alex Moore: Yeah, yeah.
Brian Kardell: We can accept it's a long list. But I think one of the things that is going to be really interesting about this is if you did break it out, if you broke out Chromium, we need to develop new kinds of governance, new kinds of ways to prioritize the money that today are just, you do what the people at Google say to do. They have their own internal policies about why they prioritize the things that they do, but those are driven by certain priorities. And if somebody else were to control it, that's going to change. If we come up, especially with some kind of more than one organization funding it, that would get complicated.
Alex Moore: I feel like the main issue though, the two core issues has to be the amount of funding is one, and then the motivation to use that funding to invest in platform. And they're the two really difficult issues to solve. I feel like issues with governance and prioritization and those sort of issues could be worked through, but without the multi-billion dollar funding source then those sort of arguments and discussions become moot. I think Google themselves would like more people to contribute to Chromium.
Brian Kardell: Definitely.
Alex Moore: And there's an effort recently under the, I think it was under the Linux Foundation that they ...
Brian Kardell: It's not been formally announced yet, but it was talked about in BlinkOn.
Alex Moore: Okay. I know there was some other funding for ...
Brian Kardell: I mean there's minor things here and there. I believe that there was some security funding that went there. We have done things I believe with grants from NISO, National Institute of Standards Organizations through the Sloan Foundation and APS Physics funded us doing work in Chromium on MathML.
Alex Moore: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Brian Kardell: And then Pearson also, I believe contributed some money and some people actually, two people gave $150,000 toward that effort.
Alex Moore: The other important thing though is obviously we want more people to develop features and functionality for the web and to invest in Chromium and contribute more. But the grunt work, which is the security patches and making sure the bugs are fixed still need to be done. If those start getting gutted, then that will reduce the ability of other people to invest in new features. So if you look at what, the work Microsoft's doing at the moment where they've done stuff around multi windows, multi window support and WebView2 and the web install API, it's not as obvious if they had to then step in and fix core bugs, whether they would have the same capacity to actually get those engineers to work on new things instead. But I think in general, if we could push towards a future where there are more parties, that's really important. And I think that was one of the great things about Igalia, is that that does allow people without the engineering expertise to actually contribute by paying for a particular feature.
Brian Kardell: I would like to keep it into perspective though, because Google has already partners with big money, right? Samsung, Microsoft, Intel, Red Hat. I mean, I think there are a lot of companies that invest in Chromium, and to not put too fine a point on it somewhere around 1% is what the whole rest of the world does. So it's great. We do a lot of work through companies like Bloomberg has been especially great on a lot of things, funding all kinds of things in JavaScript that have really helped and funding all kinds of things in CSS that have really helped.
Alex Moore: Ah CSS Grid was Bloomberg?
Brian Kardell: Mm-hmm, CSS Grid was Bloomberg funded in two different engines.
Alex Moore: So that's an amazing success story. But yeah, as a percentage, you're saying it's still very, very low.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it's still very, very low. And that's why I believe that we need to have this, why I have believed for years that we should have this conversation because the solution is in a way right there in front of us. If we wanted, we could have fixed this problem by massively diversifying Chromium investment and figuring out a governance model that would work in a system that was not so dominantly Chrome. So if you were to rewind to maybe the second or third thing we did on web ecosystem health, we had Rick Byers from Google on with Rawson from Microsoft and Rawson said, 'Well, how do we improve the governance now that Microsoft is involved? We should have more seat at the table.' And Rick said, 'Well, we think that that comes with you putting increasing stake into the game and owning more of the thing,' right? So I think shortly after that, I think that Microsoft almost did the inverse, almost ...
Alex Moore: Reduced.
Brian Kardell: Walked away more for a while. They seem to have finally come back, but ...
Alex Moore: Yeah, I suppose the question is there is a bit of a tragedy of the commons when it comes to the web in that, well, somebody else is spending the money, so I don't need to.
Brian Kardell: Yes.
Alex Moore: The question is how do you get away from that? And I think that's from third party companies who heavily rely on the web not contributing back to the platform, and also some of the browser vendors as well who profit significantly off of the web, but then also don't heavily contribute back to platform. But given the situation we're in now, it's quite hard to see how we would migrate to a system where [inaudible 00:49:57]
Brian Kardell: Very, yeah.
Alex Moore: ... contributing.
Brian Kardell: I think we have to wrap up, but I would just add here that there is a great book by Tim Wu called The Master Switch, and he also has another book, I want to say it's called The Curse of Bigness. It's related, and also that one does get into some of the stuff with Google and Apple and big companies of today. Tim Wu is also kind of like the one who coined and popularized the term net neutrality. He's played a lot of different roles in all this, but there's a lot of history in his books, and they're fascinating to see what was done in all of these things that dealt with the control of information kind of, right? All these sort of empires that were about somehow big business and control of something really important. But the one thing that seems consistent in all of this is that generally speaking, when there's an antitrust action, there is a period where there's some kind of blowback toward the consumer where there's a loss in quality. The market, it has to figure out how it survives. And I suppose what we're worried about is maybe it doesn't, or maybe it greatly stagnates and slowly decays.
Alex Moore: Yeah. And I suppose that's why I'd like to reach out to anyone listening to this podcast, that if you work for a various company with any sort of influence, that we'd actually encourage them to reach out and engage with the DOJ to highlight these risks. And with the certain proposed remedies such as jeopardizing the smaller browsers or drastically reducing funding to the web. It's really unfortunate that it's largely thrown under the radar because many of the companies that rely on the web weren't directly involved in the case. And so if they didn't have search engine operations or search deals, they weren't engaged with the DOJ. But it's crucial now we're at this point that the companies then think about what the ramifications of this is going to be and consider what the impact is going to be on their business. And to their credit, the DOJ is listening to a lot of parties, including us, but it would be really good for them to hear from other voices and to hear what are the kind of impacts their actions could have on the wider US economy.
Brian Kardell: So how would they reach out to DOJ to share their thoughts and concerns?
Alex Moore: Well, obviously any company of a decent size will have a legal team and would have the appropriate contacts. But I suppose what we'd ask is raise these issues within your own organization and alert management to the risks to the business of what these remedies could cause. And then get your organization to get in contact with the DOJ to submit supporting information about what the long-term effects will have. And obviously if you are an organization that doesn't have those contacts, then you can always get in contact with us at contactus@openwebadvocacy.org, and we'll help point you in the right direction because this is a pivotal issue for the web. And if it goes the wrong way, it could drastically decrease funding for the next decade. And that will then flow onto all the other aspects that we're trying to fight for, browser competition, the competition between web apps and native apps, and even just general features and functionality for the web that everybody relies on.
Brian Kardell: But we all want to fix it.
Alex Moore: We all want to fix it, yes.
Brian Kardell: We all agree on that part. We all want to make the web more competitive. We want there to be diversity of engines and funding sources, and I think everybody agrees with that.
Alex Moore: And also protects that, the thing that makes the web great, which is that anybody can just create a website and get that direct person-to-person connection or business-to-person connection without having to rely on intermediaries or gatekeepers. And that's a really special property of the web, which just is not available anywhere else.
Brian Kardell: Okay. I think we're just about out of time. So thanks Alex for coming on and ...
Eric Meyer: Yeah, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Alex Moore: No, thank you both. Yeah, very interesting chat.
Eric Meyer
Brian Kardell
Alex Moore