:monotone voice: No. Don’t. Stop.
I use Google for the same reason that I use the other Big Tech products: because, bluntly, I have no practical alternative*. I have no inherent love for any of them, and I certainly have no real urge to keep them from being metaphorically gutted like a fish. I’m sure it’d be painful to bust the Google trust – but then, getting a new crown put on can be painful, too. Still has to get done.
Moe Lane
*I know there are alternatives, sure. Just no practical ones.
To your post-script, Mr. Lane .. getting a crown is a choice .. the alternatives include getting the tooth extracted.
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In the case of Big Tech .. I’m down with either. We’ve lived with the pain and risk of sepsis long enough.
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Mew
I’m shackled to G at work. It’s not an ideal situation.
The question would be… would breaking them up achieve anything?
That .. greatly depends .. on what fault lines Google is broken upon.
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Splitting search away from office tools away from Android would be .. potentially useful.
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Splitting Microsoft OS away from Microsoft office tools was meaningless.
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Mew
Alphabet (Google’s parent company) subsidizes at least some of its subsidiaries using profits from others. For instance, my understanding is that YouTube is essentially run at a loss (or at least this was the case several years ago; it might not be true at this time). The advantage for Alphabet is that this prevents anyone else from reaching the critical mass needed to be big enough to compete with YouTube. YouTube essentially maintains its market dominance because “that’s where all of the videos are posted”. If you go somewhere else as a viewer, then you’ll have access to fewer videos. And if you go somewhere else as a content provider, then you’ll have a lot fewer people watching your videos.
Now having said that, the problem then becomes, “Assuming that Google does get smacked down, how do you prevent someone else from simply replacing them in the same position of market dominance?”
I saw somewhere the other day that Bing (which is the search engine I use) gets less than 5% of the search engine market share, and it’s the second most used search engine. I don’t know how its results compare to Google (though I generally don’t have a reason to complain), but I do enjoy the often gorgeous pictures that are posted to the search engine page when I pull it up.
Quite a few websites have embedded ‘Google site search’ toolbars .. helps Google out a bit on the numbers, like airport screens locked on CNN helps their numbers.
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As for “how to prevent” .. well, there’s a couple ways. The first is to not break YouTube out of Alphabet’s monopoly, but regulate it to the point it’s not an attractive business for someone else (TikTok) to try to go into. Turn YouTube into a heavily-regulated utility that’s turning a razor-thin profit, instead of a platform Google subsidizes because of the interesting data it gathers…
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The same works for search .. although Google really has less to fear there – search isn’t small potatoes, it’s no potatoes .. there’s some profit in selling ads, but the big money is, again, in acquiring data. This also works as a heavily-regulated utility, especially if consumers of Google Search have the option of a U.S. style (i.e. done properly) opt-out of personal data gathering.
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It’s, in other words, not something I’d like to trust to the current batch of nitwits, second-sons, n’er-do-wells, mouth-breathers, and knuckle-draggers infesting the Capitol Dome …
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Mew