"United, we can have a stronger, common voice to: ... Pressure Google Chrome to allow for 3rd party extension stores."

And so the mice voted to bell the cat.

Note that Chrome Extension developers are not employees of Google, but rather disparate businesses, so it'll be difficult to both successfully put pressure on Google w.r.t. terms of business and not fall afoul of anti-trust laws.

Just make Chromium fork that supports 3rd party galleries, prove it is secure and desirable, than it may be upstreamed some day.

But regulations, inspections, codes and permits are all government-run systems. As a result, at least in principle in a democracy, citizens (including companies) can request to learn why those systems rejected them. Otherwise they can take them to court.

Neither Apple nor Google are governments. When laws and constitutions were crafted, those framers did not comprehend a future where private companies had effective control (and even monopoly) on what might amount to critical infrastructure, and if not critical, then infrastructure nonetheless.

Alternative! Software distributions - community maintained packages.

As Arch Linux user if I found a software I like and want to help with distribution I can create package and push it to AUR [1]. This works as recipe - list of make and run dependencies, configuration, installation. Package is not safe and should be reviewed on installation.

Popular package may be pulled to official repository [2], distributed in binary form. "community" repository maintained by Trusted Users [3], "core" and "extra" by Arch Linux Developers [4]. It is evergreen - rolling release. Some distributions provide Stable releases which should be even safer.

Distributions may remove package, block version, patch to its standards. I think if opt-out addons were distributed by Debian they would be patched to opt-in.

In other words - many 3rd party distributions, by users to users, pulled - not pushed, not required to accept all packages.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/

[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Trusted_Users

[4] https://www.archlinux.org/people/developers/

I think an open system with easy to add 3rd party stores would be better. The official stores could focus on super high trust applications from huge brands and let the market find a solution to the bottom end. However, the current system is about maintaining outsized control rather than providing a good product to consumers.

As soon as you give up the idea of preventing people from distributing malicious software, and they're not even doing a good job of it right now, you can let competition in a curation market solve the problem for you. I'd way rather have a system where I can get recommendations from someone that's an expert in an area. Ex: Like JonnyGURU is for power supply recommendations, but for software / extensions.

If you extend that concept to the mobile app stores, a system where someone from my city could run a store for local businesses would be significantly better for users and developers than what we have now. For developers it would be amazing to go to a local business, show some local ID, and get a signing certificate. For users it would be amazing to have a local store where established businesses with ties to the community all have a vested interest in it's quality / trustworthiness. That would be at the lowest end for tiny apps. For anything bigger, someone could build a brand / reputation around curation. For example, think of something like a specialized password manager extension store.

When it comes to Google I think there are two problems that prevent them from building a better system. First, they're arrogant and think users are too stupid to control their own devices. Second, their search has devolved to be an atrocious garbage pit of paid content that's optimized for SEO. It's a cyclic dependency where Google's failure makes it difficult for users to make good choices. Google interprets that as the users being dumb and makes the system even more complicated / less effective by adding more ML and automation.

That also probably plays a role in the reluctance to open up some of the current systems. The attempts at scaling with automation and ML are such failures (everywhere) the only way to make them look half reasonable is to ensure no one else can build a competing system.

> review and approval are done by poorly trained contractors

That's the "middle ground" scenario that isn't true for either side. Apple does directly hire employees to do this, so their policies and rules are often the pain point. Google doesn't hire anyone - they have the team that runs the approval systems and will review certain extensions, but it's completely automated for 99% of all cases.

The only people that probably do use contractors are Amazon for their Alexa skills and Kindle apps.

I notice this a lot with tech companies - secret rules. They won't tell you what the rules are because they want to keep you dancing. Nobody knows where the borders are, so that gives the company a lot of power and leeway to ban anyone they don't like or that crosses them in any way. More than once, I've seen the "Nope, sorry. TOS! Hands are tied!" when a company dares speak out and gets cancelled.

Imagine if you were getting your house inspected and your insurance drops you as a result of the inspection, but won't tell you why.

> None of the huge tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/Amazon/etc) have an easy (or in many cases any) way to contact human service representatives. This is intentional.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us/ - I have never failed to talk to a human that way.

(For AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/)

> Complaining on the internet should not be a support channel.

Oh the many times I have written to a company's "Support" forms and never got a response. And then I wrote to them on Twitter (message) and I got my answers in 2h or less... Unfortunately social media tend to be the escalation point..

I fully agree with that. But I think there is another angle to this that is often ignored/overlooked.

With their (intentional) behavior you described, these companies often violate even basic legal principles and sometimes even specific laws (depending on country/jurisdiction). Moreover, these same companies (again, intentionally) also use their financial/legal weight to pretty much stifle/kill any individual attempts to bring them to task for those violations. In fact, that itself is illegal (antitrust) behavior in many places.

This isn't just about governments failing to regulate these companies, but probably even more so about their failure to even enforce existing rules and protect citizens against such abuses.

It's a pretty good demonstration of how bad the state of class (in)justice really is, including all the corrupt governments that keep it a reality.

Google doesn't care.

This is why I like the hybrid approach that Android has for apps, at least as of 2020.

That it has its walled garden, but it is possible to install from arbitrary sources (with sufficient warnings to users of those dangers). In iOS, you can't sideload at all.

You already can run your own Chrome Extensions repo: https://developer.chrome.com/apps/external_extensions

You can easily see for yourself on the twitter thread that is linked in the article. There's also this tweet for context: https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1273824813270700038?s=20

They thought we weren't using the TTS permission, but we are.

You think Google told the reason beyond "it was a boo-boo"? Highly doubtful.

A hypothetical Chrome Inc. (or Chrome Foundation) could make its money off of selling rights to the search bar (hypothetically to Google anyway), and, I suppose, donations. Enterprise support would be another thing they'd have to provide (and could sell), especially if they got the Chrome OS project.

It'd be a speed bump, and they wouldn't have the full resources of Google, but I think it could make it. (But I don't know if it should, the open-source Chromium base isn't committed to only by Google.)

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

-- Robert Heinlein, 1939