Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
Sure you can, you can set a negative price such that you pay a user for using your service which bing literally does [0].
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/search-and-earn
What's that meant to mean? I use firefox, and I don't even see any suggestion anywhere on any Google properties to use Chrome, though there used to be something on the front page. Certainly never seen anything in gmail.
I agree that gmail is a disaster for people running their own email servers, though.
Look at the current pricing of medicine in US! Instead of going after those they decide to go after Amazon and Google. US is a place that many living outside of it could never quite comprehend.