Google is killing the open web

Summary

Google is managing to achieve what Microsoft couldn't: killing the open web. The efforts of tech giants to gain control of and enclose the commons for extractive purposes have been clear to anyone who has been following the history of the Internet for at least the last decade, and the adopted strategies are varied in technique as they are in success, from Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (EEE) to monopolization and lock-in. What I want to talk about in this article is the war Google has been waging on XML for over a decade, why it matters that they've finally encroached themselves enough to get what they want, and what we can do to fight this. A little bit of history Google entered the browser market at a time when web development was starting to see the light again after Microsoft's “win” of the First browser war through the abuse of its operating system's monopoly by shipping its Internet Explorer for free and thus cutting off «Netscape's air supply», as intended. What managed to break through Microsoft's short-lived victory was an alliance of browsers (my favorite Opera on its Presto engine, Mozilla's Firefox on its Gecko engine, and the newborn Safari from Apple, whose WebKit engine was forked from the KHTML engine that was being developed for the KDE Linux desktop environment) that decided to leverage their standards compliance to reinforce each other's position against the crippling effect of Microsoft's dominance —a dominance that Microsoft tried to protect resorting to the vilest tricks. Google entered the market heavily abusing its dominance in web search to push the adoption of its Chrome browser, a practice not unlike the one used by Microsoft to push the adoption of IE, and of equally questionable legality and moral standing, a thing which was frequently overlooked with several excuses, not least the fact that Chrome was built on an open source core, Chromium, that was mostly assembled from software and libraries developed by other companies (primarily, Mozil...