Since Apple implemented a browser choice screen for iPhones earlier this month to comply with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brave Software, Mozilla, and Vivaldi have seen a surge in the number of people installing their web browsers.
It’s an early sign that Europe’s competition rules may actually … get this … enhance competition – an outcome that skeptics deemed unlikely.
2021: “The rendering engine doesn’t matter that much because everyone ends up seeing the same internet”
2022: “How much can google really do with a monopoly on the back end?”
2023: “They still don’t control the underlying structure of the internet.”
2024: “well shit.”
I was foolishly hoping that there’d be some sort of regulation where Chromium ended up being democratised. Fools hope, pipe dream, whatever. It obviously won’t happen because I don’t think the powers that be quite realise how dangerous it is; it’s too technical for them to grasp.