- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
I’m happy to see this being noticed more and more. Google wants to destroy the open web, so it’s a lot at stake.
Google basically says “Trust us”. What a joke.
This is classic Google/corporate strategy - make it “digestable” to the most vocal public and address the concerns on the surface, then slowly erode, lock in and enshittify. Look at what’s happened to Gtalk/Hangouts for instance - everyone using other XMPP clients eventually switched to Gtalk since it was an open protocol and they could also continue using their existing clients, but after some time Google locked them in, then completely killed XMPP, then completely killed Hangouts.
It may subjectively look like Google is trying to address concerns around Web Integrity and sure, initial iterations may all be harmless and won’t break anything, but I’m 100% willing to bet that as people put their pitchforks down and Web Integrity all but fades away from public memory, they’ll start to lock you in with more and more DRM-like features, more and more websites will start to adopt it, until one day, you suddenly look back and realize you’ve been had, and how shitty the web has become - but by that point, it’s too late to change anything.
We need to nip this in the bud, before it even takes off. It goes grossly against the open web envisioned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, regardless of its “good” intentions.