We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

Only competition can provide a solution. We have lost sight of this principle even though all Western democracies are built on the idea of separation of powers, and making it hard for any one faction of elites to gain full control and ruin things for everyone else. Make them fight with each other, let them get a piece of the pie, but never all of it. That's why we have multiple branches of government, multiple parties etc. That's why we have markets with many firms instead of monopolies.

There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future. The past was riddled with despotism and many things that the average man or woman today would consider horrific. The basic principle of democratic society is to prevent those things from recurring by pitting elite factions against each other. Similarly business elites who wield high technology to gain their wealth must also compete and if there is any sign of them cooperating too closely for too long, we need to break them up or shut them down.

When Apple and Google agree, cooperate, and adopt the same policies - we are all doomed. It must never happen and we must furthermore break them up if they try, which they are now doing.

This doesnt work if the market incentives themselves encourage these rent seeking actions.

We have given capitalists more and more power pver the last few decades and instead making things better, its just allowed them to nueter the government regulations that would have prevented them from fucking common people over. The market can not solve for this the same way it cant solve for education or the military. This needs laws

I wish this was a higher up comment because it's such an important point, and it's totally an achievable thing.

Governments should be supporting this competition, or at the very least not encouraging monopolies/duopolies. Give loads of support/help to startups, small businesses. Let the large corps fund themselves.

But instead, we end up giving them huge tax breaks, anti-competitive legislation and even give them a voice in government.

in the face of large monopolies such as today's platforms, to keep competition you must regulate with laws that stop consumer abuse

>There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future.

I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point.

There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It does seem to me we are now way past that.

Of course I'm in support of consumer protection laws but what needs to be more widely understood is that with Google specifically, probably with Apple and maybe with Microsoft, we are at a unique point in history where passing laws isn't enough.

There are laws on the books, Google's breaking them, and it's just forging ahead with more of this anti-consumer control crap anyway. Google's unique in American history, it has recently been ruled an illegal monopolist in two cases in two markets and a third ruling against them in a third market is likely to drop soon. Even Standard Oil didn't achieve a rap sheet like Google's.

Yeah of course we need government action and I'm calling for that. But people need to realize that this monster is way bigger than just passing a law. The judges need to be choosing harsher remedies including a breakup. The enforcement apparatus needs to be stronger, willing and able to seize direct control of the company if it doesn't comply or complies maliciously. EVERYTHING in the system needs an upgrade because Google is so uniquely huge and criminal in the context of American history.

They are a different, far larger and more intractable problem than your standard, garden variety corporate criminals and extreme measures are needed to rein them in.

Now, imagine a future where the Web platform didn't become a duopoly and Phone+Tablet+PC OSes didn't become a triopoly. A half dozen vendors globally for one, and a different half dozen for the other. That's a very very different world where someone is going to carve out plenty of market share by letting you continue to install your own apps even if they're ad blockers or whatever else you would like. You just wouldn't get 12 companies plus the US, EU and Chinese governments or whoever to all agree on a single platform. We need the big guys to fight. We need the market to be divided. We need competition. We need to slay Google and never have another Google again.

So exactly what law is Google breaking? They are not a monopoly in the US or even 50% of the phone market.

And are you going to force app developers to support all of these platforms?

> So exactly what law is Google breaking?

I mean, why do you need us to repeat these very well publicized convictions that have been all over the news? They've been found guilty of anti-trust violations in multiple cases in multiple American markets. The details are just a Google search away... Are you disputing the court rulings that Google possesses a monopoly? Which court?

In the US where has Google been found guilty of anti trust when it came to mobile?

There's no reason why democracy can't peak again and reach new heights. But that won't happen automatically.

Personally I think there are technological preconditions for stable democracy that have recently been countered by authoritarian leaning technology. We need to invent counter technology to those things.

In fact true competition is only possible via open standards, protocols and technology stacks.

We need agreement to ensure the large corporations adhere to these.

For your convenience, I've accessed a summarizer technology which you can try out any time you need it. You'll find it at https://chat.openai.com/ .

Here are the big, recent U.S. antitrust rulings against Google, with what each court actually decided and where things stand:

#1 Search monopoly (DOJ v. Google – “Search” case) — liability found (Sept 2024) A federal judge found Google illegally maintained monopolies in general search services and general search text ads, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Remedies are being handled separately.

#2 Open-web ad tech (DOJ & states v. Google – E.D. Va.) — liability found (Apr 17, 2025) The court ruled Google monopolized multiple digital advertising technology markets (tools used by publishers and advertisers), harming publishers, competition, and consumers. Remedies proceedings are underway.

#3 Android app distribution & in-app billing (Epic Games v. Google) — jury verdict + injunction affirmed on appeal (Dec 2023 → Oct 2024 → Jul 31, 2025) A jury found Google violated antitrust laws through exclusionary Play Store practices and tying Google Play Billing. The trial judge issued a nationwide permanent injunction (Oct 2024) requiring Google to open the Play Store to rival stores and payment options; the Ninth Circuit unanimously affirmed (Jul 31, 2025).

Case #3 is the direct answer to your question, but I want to again point out that the really serious problem is how Google has abused its market power in MANY US technology markets, and found guilty of these abuses independently by multiple judges in a short span of time, a feat of criminality even Standard Oil failed to achieve. This is why a historic level of action against Google, probably greater than that taken against Standard Oil, needs to be taken.

It's all in the court cases and it's all available publicly online for the interested public to read.

Edit: also, this comment is already too long, but in case it doesn't stand out as obviously to everyone else as it does to me, Google now introducing an additional layer of Google approvals above the multiple app stores that the court is forcing them to accept in case #3 is so amazingly, obviously a telegraphed case of malicious compliance, they are not even trying to hide it. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I'm saying passing more laws is part of the solution but not nearly enough on its own.

Weirdly, when the market was smaller, when there was less money available, developers DID support multiple platforms.

Today, when we have significantly fast tools, more standards, more shared knowledge, and MUCH more noney moving through the ecosystem, yet somehow it’s harder to support more platforms.

There’s a problem either at the level we’re talking about (the mono/duo-polies), or perhaps one level higher (national economies). My hunch is that it’s the same problems that are widening wealth gaps the world over (not just in the tech industry), but I’m open to other ideas.

I disagree that there's a technological solution to late stage capitalism and the slow death of liberal democracy.

New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions - the most powerful groups before the technology was invented simply own the technology after it's invented and use it to further cement their power.

I think the luddites were on to something. We don't need technology, we need humans doing things a little differently, maybe even doing bizarre things like setting factories on fire. Personally I hope we can try other things before setting factories on fire, see Keith McHenry's version of The Anarchist Cookbook for peaceful resistance solutions as well.

The point is though without a restructure, new technology doesn't liberate, in fact it further entrenches existing power structures.

This doesn't seem right to me. It is often in companies' best interests to adopt standards, but that is because it allows them both to have an optimized supply chain.

Car manufacturers today have a lot of standards that I expect would make competition from any new contenders harder not easier. Tesla would be an example of that, they did survive but the industry thought it was never going to work precisely because of all the standards and regulations required.

On the other hand, early car manufacturers didn't have standards and shared technology stacks. At that time new car makers popped up everywhere and we had a ton of competition in the space.

Open standards are good for the consumer and good for any features that require interoperability. It has nothing to do with competition though.

And when was this utopia in your opinion? This sounds like rosy retrospection to me.

Or are you talking about a very specific industry, because the thread sounds like it is all society or "Late capitalism" which I disagree with.

> New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions

This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media.

Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism...

Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.

All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.

There is no authoritarian leaning technology. People figured out how to create 1984 while saying they defend free speech.

It is simply that, eventually, people learn how to use technology to their advantage.

We don't need agreement for this. In the past, hardware was limited, and you could only really implement one (maybe two) network stacks before things got silly. Nowadays, a software-defined radio can speak ten thousand protocols, for a lower cost than saving a cat video to your hard drive.

We only need that the standards are open, and described clearly enough for a schoolchild to implement, and that we are not prevented from adding additional protocol support to systems we acquire.

Hardware protocols are a bit different, but I actually dislike the USB-C standardisation. We already had better de-facto standards (e.g. small, "fixed-function" devices like feature phones and e-readers all use Micro USB-B for charging). Our problems were mainly "this laptop barrel charger is incompatible with this other laptop barrel charger", and proprietary Apple connectors.

The most important hardware protocol is power supply, which we can fix by requiring well-documented, user-accessible contacts that, when sufficiently-clean power is applied to them, will power the device. These could be contacts on the motherboard (for something designed to be opened up), or something like Apple's Smart Connector (without the pointless "I'll refuse to charge until you handshake!" restriction).

Requiring open, well-documented protocols which aren't unnecessarily-complicated is imo more important than requiring standard protocols.

I don't believe there was any utopian period in the past, but in US history, the Gilded Age had a lot in common with our current day (corruption, centralization of wealth and power, stemming from new technologies). And it was followed by the Progressive era and then the New Deal which were distinctly more populist in nature. Those were the eras of American history where the US got serious about anti-trust and unionization respectively.

Sorry, but you're incorrect.

If a particular product is tied to a specific proprietary tech stack, then the consumer is also tied to specific suppliers. This is known as vendor lock in.

Microsoft used this approach with Internet Explorer back in the old days; ensuring that it provided proprietary elements and implementation, that would encourage developers to provide websites that only functioned using their browser.

Open standards allow choice.

We're not just talking about hardware here.

Any standard that is developed closed-source and is protected or proprietary, can and will prevent consumer choice further down the line.

Interoperability of data, choice between vendors, and the ability for smaller players to compete with established larger players are all directly negatively affected by a lack of open standards.

They're negatively affected by a lack of openness. Some proprietary XML nonsense that's well-documented makes interoperability a week's work, maximum. Meanwhile, Microsoft's incomprehensible "open standard OOXML", supported by every document editor I care to name, is a huge impediment to interoperability. Limiting myself to even the well-designed ODF format means there are features I can't implement in my software: standardisation comes at the expense of innovation.

In software, the problem is closedness, protectionism, and undocumentedness, not proprietary wheel reinvention.

>In software, the problem is closedness, protectionism, and undocumentedness, not proprietary wheel reinvention.

Quite simply, the first three problems are actually caused by proprietary wheel reinvention.

That can be one aspect of it, though I would argue that doesn't mean open standards are always better for competition.

I think you're also assuming the only competition that matters is long term. In the short term the potential for locking users into your own ecosystem can incentivize short term competition.

Long term competition seems like a good goal, but that assumption wasn't part of it at the beginning of this chain.

> that doesn't mean open standards are always better for competition

Yes, they are. Show us a counter-example.

If we don't think about long term competition we end up in the scenario we are in now.

Two main players. No choice.

> You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private

It's called "social cooling": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363

> but we simply aren't there yet

Actually, I2P is already here. It should be promoted more.

There is a small community of billionaires who control everything to the best of their ability. They control for their own benefit.

Technology, its development and production, is one thing that they control.

The rest of the population (the nonbillionaires) is another thing that they seek to control. It's near the top of their list.

Phones, internet and social media are tools for controlling us. Arguably. Right?

Correct. But proprietary wheel reinvention is necessary (albeit clearly not sufficient) for progress, so we mustn't prohibit it!

The web is open and is famously very competitive. We have three whole browser engines and only two of them are implemented by for-profit corporations whose valuations have 13 digits. I mean other ones exist, but the average modern developer claims it's your fault when something doesn't work because you use firefox or safari and also demands the browser rewrap all the capabilities the operating system already provides for you because they can't be assed to do the work of meeting users where they are.

In a world with over 3 billion people we have 'three whole browser engines'.

I don't want to be mean, but this isn't a great counterpoint.

No it isn't necessary for progress.

Standards can be (and are) developed cooperatively and these still allow and encourage progress.

I'm not opposed to open standards, but what makes you think that a corporation which simultaneously violates anti-trust law in three markets and evades meaningful enforcement can be forced to comply with standards?

The problem is not primarily technological, it is a problem of rule of law. Google is a serial violator, found guilty multiple times. So it is a failure of enforcement of law (unless government actions in the near term end up being very dramatic).

If someone points a gun to your head, I guess you could solve that by inventing a personal forcefield. But until you do, we need law enforcement as a deterrent against murder. Otherwise murderers will just keep on doing it.

I'm not sure what the number of people in the world has to do with whether an open standard does or doesn't promote innovation. The user asked for a case where an open standard didn't do that and I provided one. Whether you think it's a great counterpoint is entirely irrelevant to me.

C23 would not be nearly as good as it is without proprietary C compiler extensions, and other non-C programming languages. Sure, C23's versions of some features are better than many proprietary implementations, but they wouldn't exist at all if the lessons hadn't been learned from that exploration.

Once upon a time, Jabber was the messaging protocol. But what killed interoperable instant messaging wasn't a shift away from Jabber: it was a shift away from interoperability. Requiring all chat communication systems to be Jabber wouldn't have helped, and it would have prevented IRCv3.

But browser engines are entirely functional based on open standards!!!!!

This is the core proposition!

The benefit of open standards here, is to the consumers of these standards .. not the engines.

Open standards allow the consumers (websites / apps) to be able to benefit.

I didn't use the right word, maybe you can help me pick a better one. You are of course correct that technology has many times completely changed our societies, but my point is that despite overwhelming transformations, the core of societal organization doesn't change: those with capital control those without. Those with capital determine what labor those without may do, when, where, and what becomes of the result of that labor.

The printing press resulted in the first ultrapowerful media companies that were able to capitalize on later revolutionary technologies such as radio and television (for those nimble enough to keep up with the times). Even in that era the newspaper was leveraged to serve the needs of the wealthy and solidify their power. Countless unpublished books that couldn't get picked up by the publishing houses. And the end game of those media technologies is Rupert Murdoch, Disney.

You are right, power shifted from the church to other Capital holders. And the laborers continued to labor at the whim of some new master.

Railroads led to Standard Oil and America's first ultra powerful monopolies, laying rail to serve their needs (or wasting rail to suck money from the government) rather than the needs of the people.

Sailboats created the East Indian trading company and actual corpotocracies, as you said.

Incredible changes to society in so many ways except perhaps the most important, and that's my point: it won't be technology in the end. It wasn't technology that led to the syndicalization of pre Franco Spain, or the revolutions in Russia and the ROC, or the development of the Paris commune, events that signify some of the few brief times in our history that the core paradigm was shifted if only briefly.

>Once upon a time, Jabber was the messaging protocol. But what killed interoperable instant messaging wasn't a shift away from Jabber: it was a shift away from interoperability.

And how is interoperability possible without agreed standards?

Did you see my earlier comment? Car manufacturing for decades or so years didn't have open standards with regards to parts used or how they were built. We ended up with a huge number of competing car manufacturers compared to what we have today.

The presumption that started this thread is that open standards are always good for competition. I think browsers are a good counter example where open standards led to three browser vendors, we have less competition rather than more.

Do you expect that browsers relying on closed standards would result in more competition under the same circumstances? You didn't demonstrate that.

The same way it always has been? Microsoft Office implements the WordPerfect formats, and WordPerfect implements the Microsoft Office formats.

I agree with this. And yet.

> It is simply that, eventually, people learn how to use technology to their advantage.

What should we call this accumulation of lessons in how to do things for your benefit? It can be and is encoded as algorithms is it not?

Didn't older cars rely on open standards making it possible to go to any repair shop? Or maybe it was effectively open stanards, i.e., nothing prevented you from learning how they worked and modifying them.

Nowadays, all cars became hostile to users thanks to the closed software: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/06/mozilla_vehicle_data_... I wouldn't call it "better competition".

Without open standards, we would need to pick a browser and provide for it.

If we needed to support another browser we'd need to provide a new solution built to its specification.

Open standards have allowed the possibility of multiple browser vendors, without making the life of browser consumers (i.e. developers and organisations providing apps and sites) a living hell.

Without this, we'd be providing apps and sites for a proprietary system (e.g. Macromedia Flash back in ancient history).

Furthermore, when Flash had cornered a market, it had absolutely no competition at all. A complete monopoly on that segment of the market.

It took Steve Jobs and Apple to destroy it, but that's a different story.

--

The reasoning for only three engines, isn't the fault of open standards.

There are many elements of our economic system that prevent competition. Open standards is not one of them.

My original demonstration wasn't actually the browser question. Auto manufacturers did show much higher levels of competition before standards and shared components.

Though it is worth noting that there was heavy competition in the browser space prior to the specs we have today. Part of the reason we ended up with a heavily spec-driven web is precisely because the high level of competition was leading to claims of corporate espionage, and it was expected that end user experience would be better with standards.

I absolutely agree the end user experience is better. I disagree that has anything to do with competition.

Browser engines are extremely difficult to start today because of the extensive, complicated, and ever growing list of specifications.

We had a web before open standards. It wasn't the best user experience and each browser was somewhat of a walled garden, but there was heavy competition in the space.

Older cars could go to most mechanic shops because older cars were more simple. The fundamentals of how the cars worked were similar not because the companies collaborated on parts and designs but because they were comparatively simple and all were based on combustion engines that required certain components and physics to be similar.

Well, most. There were the odd steam powered and even early electric vehicles back then. I wouldn't expect either to roll into any mechanic shop in town and get service.

>I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.

True enough. Although I think Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth came closer to our current situation with The Space Merchants[0] (which I just read, almost by accident).

Orwell was more explicit in his exposition of totalitarianism and told a more compelling story than Pohl/Kornbluth did in their tale of authoritarian/corporatist dystopia.

That said, the universe of The Space Merchants more closely matches the current environment, IMHO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants

We are totally talking about a technology-driven shift in who controls society though. In the past it was kings and the church and their wealth was certainly a factor but the king's direct control over the state monopoly on violence, and by extension over land, and the church's control over information and belief, were the greater factors. Remember all these kings started out mostly as thugs with bands of other thugs behind them who had the biggest weapons and the most violent tendencies. And the churches started out as smaller dudes who were willing to eat mushrooms, wear face paint, and tell stories about how the biggest thug in the pack was the son of a god so you had better obey him.

Now, because of technology shifts, it's the political/bureaucratic and merchant classes in charge. The king and the church are pretty much powerless. The military class has gone both ways depending on what country we're discussing. In some their growing ability to commit mass killing has given them dictatorship powers. In others they are relatively defanged by the political/merchant classes.

Wealth is a very interesting thing because it was originally a byproduct of power. The king sent soldiers to collect taxes. The church propagandized you into tithing. Now the relationship is inverted and the wealth creates the power. Silicon Valley spends $140M on lobbying to get the legislative outcomes they want.

IMO the more we zoom in to shorter spans of time the less we see technology toppling an entire class of elites in favor of another. It doesn't happen in 30 years. It takes hundreds. That said, technology seems to just keep on moving faster, so I wouldn't discount it playing a bigger role in the future than it did in the past.

That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!

My go-to in fiction for comparison with the authoritarianism of the modern world is actually Brave New World. We were drugged (whether pharmacologically or psychologically) into submission, more than we were beaten into it.

1984 is great however for getting the surveillance point across in the most brutally direct way possible. The telescreen was a mind-bogglingly prescient idea for a guy writing a book in the 1940s. "Omnipresent and almost never turned off, they are an unavoidable source of propaganda and tools of surveillance." We actually did it. We invented and embraced George Orwell's telescreens of 1984, en masse. The only difference is we put them in our pockets and carry them around all day, instead of having them in our living rooms.

>That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!

Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed with the novel. The characters were rather two-dimensional and the plot was somewhat muddled.

That said, its depiction of a corporatist/authoritarian society incorporates some of the tropes (rewriting history, mass market influencing/propaganda, redefining "good" and "bad", demonizing the "other" etc.) included in 1984 and Brave New World (BNW), but in a far right wing context. Which, as I mentioned, is more apropos to current circumstance than are the left wing "utopias" depicted in 1984 and BNW.

As such, while I don't discourage you from reading The Space Merchants (or its 1984 sequel, The Merchants' War -- which I haven't read), I'm not saying it's a fabulous piece of literature. Pohl[0][2] has written much better stuff, with similar cynicism but significantly better plotting and character development and takes on technology (cf. Heechee Saga[1] -- which I highly recommend -- and others).

In any case, I agree with your assessment of BNW WRT today, but with a far right wing dystopic bent rather than a far left wing dystopic one -- hence my reference to The Space Mechants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Saga

[2] Pohl was, as were many mid 20th century Sci-Fi (and other) authors, alarmed by the rapid population growth after World War II, especially as Malthus[3] was widely read at the time and we had not yet seen the fruits of the widespread agriculture technology deployment of the 20th century (Green Revolution[4]).

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Edit: Clarified prose. Added footnotes for more detail.

It was a literal hellscape before open standards.

I imagine there's most likely a subset of the population who believe that open standards are aligned conceptually to regulation, and that any form of regulation in a free market is wrong.

This subset of the population is misguided at best, and delusional at worst.

Open standards are essential.

Without open standards, we would likely choose _one browser_, due to the economic cost of development.

One manufacturer would call all the shots for the _one browser_.

There would be zero competition until something calamitous happened to the manufacturer and the pendulum swung to a new monopolist.

We even have an example of how this plays out to fall back on; Macromedia Flash.

Did that hellacape include more competition between companies building web browsers?

Which is a process of reverse engineering and guess work.

Unless the formats are clearly-documented, and not overcomplicated. The WordPerfect format is philosophically similar to RTF, except that it's easier to get a plain-text version. Quoth http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/WordPerfect:

> If you're a programmer attempting to get a program to extract the plain text out of a WordPerfect document, and are not interested in the fancy formatting and other features, this is a fairly simple process; just make the program skip the parts that are not text.

The "fancy formatting" is pretty easy to parse, too, as I understand (though I've never tried it): it's pretty much one-to-one with what's shown in the program's UI, which is literally designed to be easy to understand.

Formats like DOC (Microsoft Office's pre-DOCX format) and PSD (PhotoShop's horrid mess) require reverse-engineering, even given the (atrocious) documentation, because they're overcomplicated and the documentation is not complete. This is what I'm saying should be prohibited. We don't need to mandate that people use existing protocols or file formats.

I think everyone would have a problem with the type of domination exhibited by Apple & Google, if they understood it.

There are many voters who are not well versed in tech. You can see this reflected in the kinds of politicians that win, and in the types of issues they are (and are not) fighting over.

It's up to us to make the issues clear and simple.

None of this is about mandating or forcing adherence.

Open standards allow interoperability by default. Open standards simplify development. Open standards encourage the creation of new markets. Open standards allow competitiveness that provides the consumer with choice, which is ultimately what a free market economy thrives on.

How would you suggest we ensure that the large corporations adhere to open standards, if not by mandating it?

Are browsers mandated to follow standards?

With Microsoft bundling IE with the OS, no.

It is literally impossible to implement the full WHATWG spec, as an independent developer.

You haven't answered the question.

That's because it's a big question. You can make a browser like Dillo, but it won't be able to run web-based banking software. You can make a browser like Konquerer, but it won't be able to use Netflix, or reliably get past Cloudflare walls. So, I'd say… yeah, browser developers are effectively mandated to follow standards – except that (as I said before) it's impossible for an unauthorised developer to implement the full WHATWG spec.

You're being obtuse.

Standards aren't the issue here.