Luckily, other browser manufacturers (Mozilla, Vivaldi, Brave, and even the WWWC) have already spoken out against this proposal. Google loves marketing it as ‘optional’, which it obviously won’t be once implemented. A system like this would be very dangerous for smaller browsers, as it’s incredibly vague who decides what authorities would be allowed to verify browsers.

Additionally, this is presented as a way to remove captchas from the web by proving a request is coming from genuine hardware. However, this proves absolutely nothing about a request being genuine or non-spam. The only thing this proves is that it was created by a ‘genuine device’, so all a malicious user would have to do is to (automatically) send the request via a verified device and they’d pass the check.

Google needs to be broken up. It needs to separate in at least 5 different companies:

1. Admob/Adsense
2. Ads/Adwords
3. Search
4. Android
5. Chrome

They dropped the “don’t be evil” a while ago.

Google became what it is because they had the best search results. Today, other like qwant and sometimes even bing are better. If it was not for Android, the reasons for remaining stuck with Google would have become sparse already. And I daresay Apple is now the less evil option.