How would you even know that?
Yet. If I start feeling like Google operates as a compromise with the Trump administration, it super freaks me out. Kind of like what happened with Facebook?
Maintain solid products? Google kills more products than they run.
Stewardship of customer information? They're the biggest advertiser and have had multiple scandals.
Good customer service? Not in this universe.
Clear rules? Ask anyone that's lost their entire google account, email included, for a BS accusation of click fraud.
I think I trust my phone company more than I trust Google.
> Maintain solid products? Google kills more products than they run.
Google Search, Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps are all amazing free products that have immensely benefited the world. Yeah, they kill a bunch of products, but that doesn't mean they don't maintain solid, if not amazing, products.
> Stewardship of customer information? They're the biggest advertiser and have had multiple scandals.
Do you have any evidence that Google sells non-anonymized customer data to advertisers? Can you cite a Google scandal about selling your data? Complying with subpoenas or government authority notwithstanding.
> Good customer service? Not in this universe.
Yeah, I agree with this one lol.
> Clear rules? Ask anyone that's lost their entire google account, email included, for a BS accusation of click fraud.
Yeah, I agree on the rules being opaque.
> I think I trust my phone company more than I trust Google.
I don't know what country you live in, but if you're in the US, do you mean the people making your phone (Huawei, Xiaomi, ... or you know Google) or the carriers who have been selling your location data [0]?
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/31/carriers-violated-federal-...
By carriers, I meant the mobile carriers. I can at least avoid them. Avoiding Google is significantly more difficult.
>Do you have any evidence that Google sells non-anonymized customer data to advertisers?
That's a rather specific subset of "multiple scandals" that I didn't say or imply. As to what they've been doing wrong, we could start with the recently uncovered uniquely generated tracking ID in Chrome (currently on the front page), or the Google+ data leak that led to the service being shut down, or the email scanning for ad targeting that was happening as late as 2017, or when they had to fire an engineer for snooping through people's gmail accounts. All of these tell me that their internal controls are not that great.
What puts the topping on the shit sundae for me is that they're an advertising company at the end of the day. Their user's privacy interests and their own interests will be perpetually at odds. That by itself makes them unworthy of trust in my eyes.
Perhaps I was just lucky?
Searching? Again, Google in clear first place, everyone else tied for last.
Video? Nobody uses Vimeo, and their content rules are even more strict than YouTube's.
A couple of those names I've never even heard of before.
And why does it matter what place Google is if you're searching on Bing? Do you use products only because they're popular? Bing will find all the same stuff, I promise. Give it a try.
If Vimeo sucks and their rules are even more strict, why aren't you complaining about that too? If YouTube sucks and the competition is even worse, what exactly are you comparing it to? Why aren't you petitioning the competition to pick up the slack? The alternatives are just fine and plentiful, you just don't want to have a worse experience and yet you are quick to criticize the option that provides the best one. I don't get it.
I use Google search to this day, despite trying to avoid Google as much as possible, precisely because Bing/DDG doggone well does not find all the same stuff.
>why aren't you complaining about that too
I mean.. I just got done complaining about how trash most of the alternatives are, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
This goes back to my original point. Just because these "other options" technically exist does not make them viable options for use.
Most of the RBOCs were purchased...by other RBOCs, or AT&T itself. The research output of AT&T halved. The well-regulated monopoly was sacrificed for what is now more or less unregulated yet governmentally-defended triopolies in every area AT&T was touching, and then some. The quality of the service has dropped dramatically, even if there was cost reduction (which arguably is tied to said decline in quality).
There was a great book written by two engineers working on the Bell System a few decades ago with a rather rotten title, but a subtitle that'll allow you to find the book just the same: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World. I found it really fascinating in many ways, although I'll admit that it served to justify my own beliefs, rather than making me change them, so I could be biased.
Also I don't think in this case that the determination that something requires action to mitigate anti-competitive behavior means that the government declares what happens. Not a lawyer, and have not read any precedent but I'd imagine a first step would be to ask these companies about a structure that would work best if business units were separated, with some guidance, rather than some declaratory thing.
As required by law[1], though, definitely not by choice[2].
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=0083f0a8d5...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/chart...
Yeah, I'd definitely say it didn't work out.
The Standard Oil breakup was mostly useless, their monopoly power had mostly dissolved as they weren't anywhere near a monopoly by the time it happened, and for that matter, it rewarded Rockefeller by making his wealth skyrocket.
In the country, we had a party line up to that point. Same location today is still rural but has digital telephony, high speed Internet, and multiple cellular providers.
This is a great answer on Quora from a few years back to a question on why call audio hadn't improved, where the author explains that it hadn't just not improved, it had actually declined over time:
https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-audio-quality-of-phone-cal...
There was also a great IEEE Spectrum post from a bit before the takeover of VoLTE and wideband audio as to why the decline had happened (and was probably going to accelerate as providers moved to switch from the PSTN to VoIP internally):
https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-...