Do you feel Google has a monopoly?

[Jason]

It seems like they make or break people, but nowadays a person could reject SEO and with the same effort have a good shot somewhere else. Anyway, I was doing good on Google and Bing and later just Bing, but search engines got way tougher, and rightly so.

 

[Arantor]

Of course they have a monopoly. They have one in search, one in the browser field (and which is why they continue to fund Firefox, so they can pretend they’re not a monopoly there).

Fortunately their other endeavours have not been so successful.

 

[Empire]

The intense regulation of monopolies exists for a reason. If there is only one grocery store in the entire country they can charge whatever they want and you are forced to pay. Google is not like that, the moment you don't like the service they are providing you can switch effortlessly.

The same applies for Youtube, if you don't like youtube there are other video hosting websites. Google has zero obligation to host people's videos for free, if they don't want that content on their servers they don't need to keep it up. Switching to an alternate video hosting website is effortless for both the content carter and viewers.

 

[Arantor]

Google is not like that, the moment you don't like the service they are providing you can switch effortlessly.

Search... well, the *vast* majority of users still use Google; as a site owner you have zero choice in playing with the Google monster. As a user, sure, you have choice but depending on your choice of browser this might be harder to change.

Speaking of browser, are you trying to tell me that Chrome isn't effectively a monopoly? If Google wants something in the spec to benefit themselves, they'll shoe-horn it into Chrome and as a result everyone downstream inevitably picks it up. Consider: Google basically funds the entirety of Firefox's development so they can point to it to say 'look we're not a monopoly' - but basically everyone else on the desktop is a Chrome reskin (Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, Opera etc. are all based on Chromium which is still driven by Google)

And that's before we get into all the less monopolistic services that Google runs that you see in surprising amounts of places; Google Maps gets embedded in a bunch of sites, Google Fonts appear on many sites, so many domains are using Google Workspace for their email.

Moving away from Google is in no way an effortless move. I suggest you try it sometime to see how difficult it really is.

Edit: I suppose that’s also the reason Epic’s anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google was a win for Google, because it’s so easy to switch? Oh wait, no, Google lost that lawsuit precisely because it’s not that easy to switch and Google were abusing their position as a monopoly.

 

[Darth Cognus]

As someone who's spent considerable time detaching from, and when that was not entirely feasible simply isolating Google among other big entities: yes it is an effective monopolist and I will add YouTube to the equation.

But it is not the only or necessarily the worst offender, big entities have gobbled many digital fields and used these monopolies to present a relative illusion of choice between other mega entities if they even give that much. But that's another story. See the state of internet access in a majority of the United States, a monopoly between a handful of companies and setting the stage for net neutrality concerns. Funny enough it would seem Eastern Europe has the best deal on this. See Microsoft with its current monopoly for Windows and dominating market position on various techs, see Meta/facebook which monopolizes entire countries and makes using them the only internet option besides composing the majority of used internet worldwide, see apps that try to get away from the Google/Apple dichotomy. See Amazon's snuffing out of small bookstores and forays into web hosting, entrenching themselves as providers of an effective majority in the internet. For that matter CloudFlare has a concerningly large share: benevolent enough for now but competition is fleeting or already massive.

I think this is sort of inevitable, these companies have unprecedented ability to use massive resources to offer convenience at scale. No homebrew shop, website or independent effort can compete with competently directed resources put together to make something that has never been seen in human history, only mirrored in the monopolies and efficiency of ancient days that made the most of their means at the time and became dominant until something truly new came along. They will continue to expand and extinguish competition unless sufficient pressure is put upon them to step on the brakes and society catches up.

By creating big structures and making them the effective default, these companies dominate the field and to remove them is to remove conveniences that become expected in the lives of millions of people. So I expect there to be more of this as time goes on and new struggles that come with being pushed into more connected, centralized systems unless a solar flare or worldwide EMP snuffs it all out and makes it start over. Or massive government intervention, what have you. I'll go back to Google now.

Your search engine options in the lead are Google or, distantly, Bing. Don't like it? Switch to something that hardly anyone uses and is not very good, or use a frontend that... wait... depends on Google or Bing to do anything.

Don't like YouTube? Use any number of obscure irrelevant services that will never get the traction of YouTube videos when the algorithm is in a good mood. If you just want to host a video file yeah, you've got options, if you want anything more than that your options are negligible. Switching is effortless, switching your audience? I invite you to actually look into this if you think it is in any way that simple. It's only feasible if your audience is mom, pop and a sympathy friend. Or maybe ultra far righters on bitchute...

Google dumps hundreds of millions into Firefox to prop it up and everything else is Chrome with paint, which is working well for them when they want to push a manifest that neuters adblocking.

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Arantor gets it, plenty of examples. So in so many words, yes.

 

[kolakube]

Did not know about Google's funding of Firefox, my beloved browser of choice since forever. Going to research that tonight.

I refuse to install Chrome to my computer and don't use any Google services that I know of, with the exception of Google Fonts on client sites (but you can download the files locally now, at least).

 

[Darth Cognus]

As an example of the proliferation of Google, noscript reports gstatic and googletagmanager seeking script access on this very page. Which is better than getting hit with straight analytics but it's an example of how google is into everything because most sites tend to have google this or that loaded in. There's various extensions to bypass third party CDNs in particular if you're bothered by it.

 

[Arantor]

And you can bet that Google is more than happy to give webmasters tidbits of insight and access via GA and GTM in exchange for all that behavioural data webmasters are giving it.

No-one ever looks at the money side of it. Google wouldn't give away this stuff for free unless it were making money out of it somewhere else.

 

[Mike30]

Google is a monopoly since very very long time ago. Chrome is mentioned above. What about android? Google got us all some way or another. It's frightening.