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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility.

I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.

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I'm surprised I haven't seen much in the responses to this comment that the issue isn't so much that consumers have other options (though given how high Google's search reach is, how relevant is that if hardly anyone does), it's that for most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business. There is just no viable path to avoid Google as a business when they control 80+ percent of search market share.

And you not only need to play the SEO game, you have to pray that Google just doesn't decide to get into your business and start returning their own results instead (which is exactly what this lawsuit is about). Especially since Google has had the chance to suck up all the data that you've provided in optimizing your site to provide the most relevant results.

Yes, reading through so many responses it's clear that even on HN in 2021 we need to remind people that you are NOT Google's customer. You are the product!

That cliched sentence is bullshit. Google is an aggregator of supply, and profits off this position. The users are not “the product,” the products get commoditized for the users by Google, and it is this process that makes them money.

As a user, I am quite happy with this status quo. The quality of the service is pretty good, and there isn’t much user-facing rent seeking. Compare this to the app stores, which are a true public utility monopoly in Apple’s case, and you’ll immediately see the difference of true monopoly.

> ...most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business.

Your perspective is a bit skewed here towards the software world. There are businesses on every street-corner in the US, and for that matter world, without any meaningful internet presence or need for great search engine ranking. And for that matter, consumer products and consumer-facing businesses are only a subset of the $20T+ economy of the US.

These businesses without internet presence usually still want to be shown on g.maps.

OTOH maps add businesses even if the businesses don't add themselves.

That falls under what I'd call not a meaningful internet presence because it is google handing over the same info from maps and business directories.

Do you Google shoes to find shoes,some workout shorts or any consumer product line? Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point. What do you Google from a consumer perspective?

> Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point.

I can't believe this is a serious comment. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars would say otherwise. I search for consumer products on Google all the time.

It's definitely hyperbole to say "irrelevant", but I think the overarching point is right.

When I'm looking to buy something, I'll usually start my search on Amazon or Pinterest or Walmart or eBay or Etsy. Google is definitely a search of last resort.

Everyone's behavior is different, but while Google may "own" search for knowledge, it absolutely does not "own" search for consumer products.

You should check shopping.google.com. They aggregate all these, and their search us way less broken than Amazon's.

I think they are right. Even personally with the Google/DDG split I use, I almost never search for products on them. I go to Amazon or any other retailer. If I don't know what to buy and I need reviews outside of Amazon then I might search for it on Google/Youtube or browse some specific site like WireCutter.

For me and for people I know, even the general search is now more and more served by new search engine platforms like Alexa/Siri which are the only search engines on products like Echo and have a monopoly.

With vertical search platforms coming up, looking at just a general search engine is the old way. Search is no longer just the traditional old style search engines from 90s. Alexa/Siri haven't been monetised yet, but you can see the dominance of Amazon in product search space by their rapidly growing ad revenue.

Ugh, no.

Nobody give a flying flitwick what products you buy - there are only products to buy on the major exchanges (Amazon/Walmart/<InsertGroceryStore>).

No, this has directly to do with stealing ideas on a mass scale, and then not really being able to cope without handing your sht over - if your business is to sell e.g. lift truck systems to big box stores, and you spend time, energy, effort, going through all the systems to figure out what you need to do properly build systems which those big box stores want, there NOTHING STOPPING GOOGLE FROM STEALING ALL THOSE IDEAS VIA SEARCH RESULT AND PUTTING THAT BIZ OUT OF BIZ.

Now yes you can argue some of it might* be covered by Patent - thing is lawsuits cost time and money, big biz like Google? It can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and spend a lot of time wasting your money while you try to litigate it's IP theft. Meanwhile, because it dominates search results, your revenue streams drop to zero and you can't afford the fees to win...patent becomes irrelevant.

Or worse, because patent's need to be complete ideas/concepts, it auto-files the patent before you ever get done dusting off the cobwebs on your concept.

"Just hire a patent lawyer" - don't be ridiculous, that's exactly how you kill/stifle innovation. Nobody's innovating by first hiring a patent lawyer, that's what you do after the fact or if you just have buckets of money to throw around... (again, killing innovation by reducing 'innovators' to rich fuckers versus anyone who has a good idea and can implement it).

I’ve built two multi-billion dollar consumer retail companies where we didn’t focus on SEO nor was organic or even SEM traffic a significant source of new customers. If you want to dump your money into SEO/SEM go for it but that’s not how the retail startups are spending their money.

Uh, yes? All of those. What do you do, hope a salesperson in a retail store doesn't rip you off?

You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels...

Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely irrelevant aside from their ability to help Google sell ads) they are focused solely on search. Not saying they are "right" just that Google's search dominance is a thing and they use it support their own stuff. Eg: You can buy our electricity but it only "recommends" appliances we also sell

I think you're making a category error in your analogy.

DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.

Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water - they can free one from over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for extensions.

DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs, an insignificant spec compared to the latter.

Edit: DuckDuckGo US market share: 2.5% [1], US population getting their water from a well: 13% [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1220046/duckduckgo-searc...

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

> Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water

... in certain geologic areas. And this doesn't work if you live in an apartment. I do feel like this is a big example of the "why don't you just" discussion from last week.

"Why don't you do something that works for over 40 million people all over the US" is a very far cry from "why don't you build your own power plant, datacenter, and networking infrastructure." It's a far better argument than DDG which - if my usage is anything to go by - is just a frontend for Google with convenient shortcuts to specialized searches like Github.

If you live in an apartment, you live in a multi-family building built by a developer with a lot more money than a single family can spend. They're exactly the ones who can afford alternatives, like paying the city to tear up roads and lay down a pipe to municipal water.

The point is that a well supports a tiny number of people compared to a municipal water system, but it's a real alternative. In the search engine space, DDG is just token opposition and there is no one analogous to a property developer that can afford a competitor to municipal water so it's Google or nothing.

> a frontend for Google

Bing*

"perfectly good alternative"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Water (or mineral) rights are often not included when you buy property within a city, too. "Just dig a well," is often literally illegal. Water rights are notoriously complicated and obscure.

Sure, but he poster is arguing that having alternatives is no reason to not declare a large company’s product a utility.

My municipality is great for wells, most houses use them, but the water company that was recently introduced is still classified a utility.

DuckDuckGo gives vastly different search results from Google. Last thing we need is the government involved in “improving” search results.

Then you can also play a tragedy-of-the-commons aquifer game with all the commercial users of water in your area. Can you afford to keep making your well deeper than theirs? There are a few towns in California engaged in the resulting endgame.

Often, cities will not allow you to use your own well, insisting you move on to city water.

Wells are regulated where I live.

People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

> So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

That's missing the point.

Regardless of whether you personally type google.com or duckduckgo.com, most people use google and so they get directed to other Google products and don't see competing products, and that hurts competition in those spaces.

So why then isn't this an anti-trust case instead of trying to make google a public utility? It seems Ohio is throwing cases and seeing what sticks.

That's a good question, and I don't know.

Can a state bring an anti-trust case or does it have to be done by at the federal level?

> People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL. So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

You talking like BUILDING A POWER PLANT is on par with drilling a well in your backward.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of DRILLING A WELL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than BUILDING A POWER PLANT.

---

Does that mean water shouldn't be a utility?

Or what was your point exactly?

It's relatively simple and easy to change your default search engine and/or type in a different url, in fact, it quite literally costs you $0 (as in - it doesn't cost you any more to use ddg over google), so digging a well, and the further cost of routing your pipes to pull from that underground water is infinitely more expensive to do. This is the principle behind utility companies being regulated: it's insanely expensive to do the alternative of using that utility company. Now, Apple and Google (in terms of Android) might need to be considered some sort of public utility (eg. providing an app store) since it would cost competitors tens of billions of dollars to match the existing ecosystem, but Google Search is far from being considered a utility.

The point is neither drilling a well or building your own power plant are realistic alternatives for 99% of the people. Whereas switching to ddg is a realistic alternative for 99% of the people.

Is that also a realistic alternative for a business?

To just place their ads on DDG? Where only about 2% of consumers are? And a huge part of DDG's users have ad block?

That would be a death sentence for a business, when the competitors have access to >80% of consumers on Google.

The lawsuit is about Google and their customers (the advertisers), NOT their users (who are actually part of the product Google sells).

There are at least a dozen companies you can buy water from and have it delivered to a giant storage tank made by at least 5 different companies. Or you could use a number of companies to dig a well for you.

Many people don't have access to municipal water and when I didn't, this is what I did.

Those companies aren't utility companies though.

The main, monopolistic solution of municipal water certainly is. The point is that options can still exist in a monopoly. Google still has a monopoly despite the existence competitors.

Most apartment buildings won't let you store large amounts of water on property.

That's not even remotely comparable.

Firstly it's not structurally practical to store giant tanks of water on private property. So the comparison makes no practical sense anyway.

But more, there is a significant market for private water in other properties. It's a non-trivial market which serves a significant proportion of the US population.

There is no significant market for private/non-Google search. Not only is DDG a footnote, but Google's dominance forces businesses to take steps to optimise their Google rank - or face penalties by losing access to potential customers.

Google can also remove businesses who aren't even customers from its rankings on a whim, with no redress.

It's clearly a monopoly.

When I lived in China, I didn't have the luxury of having access to Google, so I used Bing instead. It was actually quite reasonable for most of my needs, I'm not sure why more people don't give it a go. Of course, now that I live in the states again, I use Google, but most of my searching is on YouTube anyways (which was something else I didn't have access to in China).

I'm pretty sure those same apartment buildings wouldn't let you set up the large scale server farm required for you to set up your own search engine alternative to Google either.

Isn't DDG just a frontend for Bing? I can host my own searx instance, but that's not a real search engine and it shouldn't count IMO.

No, or at least not only. They mix a few sources.

I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality. the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.

I would like to learn more. Why is a well cleaner or higher quality than a big city municipal water supply? Is it because city water requires harsher treatment because it comes from a huge pool of waste while a well comes from a clean watershed?

Untreated borehole water is often unsafe to for humans to drink, at least that's usually the case here in Australia.

As for cities, it depends entirely on the specific city.

The city I grew up in was supplied by a river that was unsafe to even swim in due to agricultural runoff and high levels of heavy metals from volcanic activity. Our drinking water was so heavily chlorinated that you practically needed a water filter to make it drinkable.

The city I went to university was supplied by an aquifer and modern, high quality piping. The water was such high quality, it required no treatment at all.

It’s not. There are a ton of variables that determine the quality of your water. In many cases, well water will be significantly worse (my childhood home being a great example).

I'm sure there are different geographical and utility costs, but every well I've ever priced was between 25-100 years to break-even .

How long to break even after building your own search engine?

Are those the right categories? Utilities are built (at least partially) and maintained using taxpayer money. Google acquired dominance by collecting user data. In both cases users, as a class, get access to essential services that what wouldn't have been possible without their contributions.

Utilities were also originally private competing companies and then they consolidated and the gov decided to make them regulated monopolies bec it made more sense then 10 different companies running their own electric lines. It’s possible to argue that one good search engine makes more sense vs 10 different small ok ones, the gov should step in and regulate.

I think he's not - when you look at it from the point of view of someone who wants to buy search advertisements.

Duck Duck Go doesn't come nearly close to the kind of reach Google has.

The difference between DDG and Google ads is quantitative - not qualitative.

I am on my own rainwater tanks. I don't see any reason it's not a viable alternative considering how many of us use it.

You can also go buy books and search for information without using electrons but the analogy is flawed. Your rainwater tanks do not have the economy of scale necessary to produce a natural monopoly until you build a tank and distribution system large enough to supply fresh water to an entire town, at which point it makes it difficult or impractical to compete.

To a certain extent, utilities differ in that they are regulated monopolies protected by the government. Any competing water company, for example, can’t just start running water mains without government approval. In exchange for that protection, the existing water utility incurs additional regulations, like needing approvals to raise rates and bring required to provide services to areas where it may not be profitable by itself.

Regarding your electrical example, that only works in isolation. You cannot just decide to tie your solar or generator to the grid, for example, because that utility is a regulated public good.

In general by government protection we just mean that they are receiving property protection from police and from local governmental offices for like water quality inspections, park maintenance, general public services like the post office, etc, right? not that the government decides anything of note for the utility/company of people who are doing their best to run things based on merit and performance and team cohesion and actual delivery of objectives? not any political shit? I ask because I'm truly afraid at what people are starting to think when they talk about government's role, at least from my age or younger and I'm probably on the younger side on this forum so I want to know what the more experienced people here think about this kind of thing.

It’s hard to answer completely because it varies by municipality and I’m not an expert. But the public utility commission does regulate quite a bit, potentially ranging from where a utility can build, how much renewable sources they must have, how much they can charge, etc.

In exchange, the utility can essentially be guaranteed that competitors will not be allowed to enter the market. In the past few decades, there has been more movement towards deregulated markets but not without issues. (See the documentary “The Smartest Guys in the Room” if you aren’t already familiar with the story of Enron).

With tech (from search to ISPs) there are monopolies. Do they break them up or regulate them like utilities or something else? Our politicians are starting to tackle some real issues and we'll have to see how this shakes out.

Interesting perspective,thanks for sharing!

That is a terrible argument. "Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous. Just have the decency and maturity to admit when you are wrong instead of arguing that you should "go dig a well" in the middle of the city. This is why we can't have reasonable conversations anymore.

You completely misunderstood the comment you're replying to. He's saying that the mere existence of alternatives does not preclude something from being a utility.

Thank you! I am also not even saying Google _should_ be a utility just that the standards for what makes something a utility candidate are not standard but rather arbitrary. Most utilities came about through lobbying one way or another not through some clinical application of rules.

I am concerned with Google's search dominance and its ability to use that to suppress and manipulate even if it is just to get me to buy something.

I pretty sure that you completely missed the point of the comment. - Woosh.

He wasn't arguing that building your own toilet is a good option - just that it exists as an option.

And the fact of options merely existing, doesn't automatically exclude something from being recognized as a utility.

>"Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.

"Go buy an iPhone" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.

Same situation, different words.

It’s actually illegal to drill a well in a municipality that provides water service. You’d have to move to a rural area.

Even if you do move to alternatives to public utilities, many areas will not allow you to disconnect from them and have a required minimum bill.

For example, If I got many solar panels and backup batteries to power my house, I would still be required to pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not be allowed to disconnect from them.

> If I got many solar panels and backup batteries to power my house, I would still be required to pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not be allowed to disconnect from them.

That may be true for water and gas, but is usually false for electricity.

My neighbor gets city water and has a well for grey water. I live in Washington. Today you learned.

This is nowhere near universally true

People need to stop acting like the law is the same everywhere. "X is illegal, period" is probably only true for murder and theft, and even then, with a lot of regional variations.

> You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store.

This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".

Digging a well would be creating your own search engine. You can pay someone to come in an drill that well for you that doesn't exist a paid search engine.

Ddg would be like taking the water from a public fountain.

More like using the "free" fountain with a DDG logo on it with water being transferred from the nearby Microsoft fountain (but with a promise that they add their own magic sprinkly stuff to the water).

Not necessarily. I know cities where you HAVE to use their water if you want running water. No digging a well.

Move?

That costs more money

It might be out off topic, but this reminded me of one of the songs that gets recorded and released with every new version of OpenBSD[1], when we're talking about water. It's fun.

[1]https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#36

1) Google isn't carrying anything. It's your ISP that's actually carrying the bits to your house/work/phone/implants. 2) What google search is providing is literally content that they've created. I really don't see how this suit won't get dismissed on first amendment grounds.

I am not saying the suit has merit or will or won't get dismissed. I am saying Google's dominance in search and its willingness to use that to suppress/influence should make everyone want that to be a more competitive market.

It is not good that you need to pay "protection" money to Google so that your business shows up when your exact business name is searched (if your competitors buys your keywords). That is of course ok because its Google's business decision. What is less ok is that there are no new search companies making any headway in regards to market share. It is a stagnant sector of what should be a dynamic industry.

I want an endless corporate bar fight of companies trying to be better at search that works incredibly/game-changingly with any tool I have (not just Google apps).

Google has a near monopoly on search traffic.

Businesses HAVE to use Google for ads. Only placing ads on DuckDuckGo is not a viable strategy when more than 80% of all search traffic is via Google.

Google prioritizes their own products. Sometimes they even copy ideas and implement their own version of a product, and then they bump the competitors below themselves in the search results.

THAT is the problem, and why the lawsuit might hold water.

I am not aware of any city or town that has utilities and allows property owners to opt out and dig a well or put in a septic,

Maybe you could use composting toilet however you would still be required by law to hook up and maintain a connect to the public water and sewer system or the city would condemn your home

And if you are currently on a well and your municipality brings sewer or water service down your street, you are usually required to connect to them and decommission the septic system and well.

(I've heard that you can sometimes keep the well for irrigation purposes, but the house cannot be connected to it and the water cannot go down the drain.)

Or like many people put it after the Parler shutdown, build your own water station and power plant from scratch.

how do you dig a well if you live in the city? Buy water from the grocery store to take showers? cmon, this is ridiculous

Is there a single internet savvy person besides stallman who is able to 100% avoid google? Even if you don’t use gmail, almost everyone you message does. You lose access to most online videos. Google domains, fonts, and maps entangle a truly massive number of websites, including healthcare sites. In Covid, lots of clients or employers use google video calling. Schools almost but not quite make you use google drive. If you don’t optimize your website for chrome, you worsen the experience of 90% or more of your users. If you don’t play the seo game, nobody will know your site exists. It’s not a realistic choice for 99% of people

> But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers.

Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube, because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box?

Same thing if you want to watch interesting videos: most of the content is on YouTube.

That's not video hosting that's monopolyish, then, that's English-speaking-audience video discovery, which is a quite different proposition.

Agreed, but that's a technicality. What matters is, if you want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube. (You can host elsewhere, but over 99% of your revenue will come from your notoriety at YouTube, if not YouTube directly.)

And if you want videos, they're all on YouTube. You can search for them elsewhere but most of the content is on YouTube, and you won't avoid it even if your search started from a general purpose search engine like DuckDuckGo.

One notable exception of course is porn. But that's such a separated segment that it's pretty obvious I meant "non-porn videos" all along in this thread.

What kind of living are you making just posting videos to youtube?

A random example but most stage hypnotists sell their shows via vimeo. If you ever go to a show and want to buy a copy they will send you there. The stuff they post on youtube is mostly highlights or lower quality video. It would take them 100,000 ad views (1,000,000 regular views) to equal one copy sold.

Youtube could get you some views but you need to make your money elsewhere. In the case above the additional revenues are from vimeo. Youtube's role is to hopefully get someone to book the event but you would be better off having good word of mouth than hoping someone sees your videos on youtube and lives in the same area and tries to book you for a corporate gig or faire.

> Youtube could get you some views but you need to make your money elsewhere.

Yes of course. But YouTube will still be responsible for most of that money: want a sponsor to pay you? You need to have enough viewers in the first place. Want donations? You need enough viewers for donations to flow in. Selling swag? You need enough viewers to know about your store.

Even your stage hypnotists: why people go see their shows in the first place? I bet many learned about those shows from YouTube. Also, stage performers are a bit different in that their main activity happens offline. If all your activity is online, you're back to YouTube being the only point of entry.

Have you not heard of YouTubers? There are a lot of people who make a living off of YouTube.

When talking about the concept of monopoly, it's quite relevant which part is under discussion. For example, a lot of video content I consume is from Instagram or TikTok. This stuff is real and it counts. Creators there often have little to no YouTube presence, and are relying on their platforms for the same question of discovery, and your claim about 99% of their revenue simply isn't accurate. This is a quibble, except for the fact that when we're talking about monopoly, every exception counts.

"If you want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube." If you want to short-circuit a lot of the work of audience development by having a recommendation algorithm point a firehose of eyeballs at your stuff, you have to host on YouTube or a comparable platform. However, that is a very different thing, and not a technicality at all! The business model of a YouTube creator is precarious and contingent, because their relationship with their audience is so thoroughly mediated by the platform that the platform's whims give and take away. ("Hit the bell so you don't miss a video") Essentially, there's a risk of taking the dependent-on-platform-aspect of this business model for granted in a way that obscures the alternatives people really do use these days. (E.g., I know we probably all hate those Wordpress sales funnel things, but from the perspective of "how do I make money from my content" they're genuinely an option we should be contrasting here)

Another exception would be gaming videos where Twitch is rather popular. Sure, many Twitch users will re-upload their streams on YouTube (no reason not to, YouTube is a popular platform still even in gaming), but most of the revenue will actually come from Twitch. That said, for most videos YouTube is realistically the only choice.

Video discovery in itself is not monopolyish either. It is the vertical integration of video hosting + video discovery that makes the monopoly.

Hence the solution being a break up; separate youtube-the-video-hosting-infra from youtube-the-recommendation-engine, allow market access to infra, allow competition on video discovery.

To be fair, “English-speaking” is pretty relevant in the state/country being discussed.

Discovery and hosting are the exact same thing right now. People don't open up their RSS reader to find new videos, they go directly to youtube. If you aren't on youtube then you won't be seen.

Except me, if I open up my RSS reader, I'm usually looking for something new. I turn Youtube videos into audio podcasts using a service, and put them in a podcast client that's separate from my RSS reader.

Its rair for something to be so accurately true, yet so irrelevant

Tiktok has a lot of interesting videos and a big english audience

Try finding a smartphone under 250$, try advertising any small business on the internet, try avoiding meets meeting when you apply for a job

These are things that are done locally. You can find a smartphone for under 250 at any phone store. Or by calling a number. I got one by text the other day through my carrier. I can't find an iphone 12 for that online or locally legally and I would have better luck getting a stolen phone cheaper locally.

Small business are finding success through facebook and other social platforms. Not sure google is a player here. Remember google+? I can't believe they shut that down with a decent userbase because it didn't reach some scale meanwhile any startup would have called it a big success and built on it.

>You can find a smartphone for under 250 at any phone store.

These phones all run android or have no features which are required in the modern age. The OP point is that avoiding google is a privilege many do not have.

>Small business are finding success through facebook

Your competitors are advertising on facebook and google. If you want to compete you have no choice but to do both.

I have no idea where you get the type of iphone you describe online for $250.00. If I was an apple guy I would want to buy new and pay full price so apple had more money to make the products I love.

I didn't upgrade since 2013, and since getting my new phone I found no new features important or even that useful. Having more memory allowed me to download more. Bigger screen doesn't fit in the pocket. Features like split screen or shake twice for the camera ti show up or the new ways to lock and unlock your phone don't really matter.

This is exactly the point. There is no $250 iphone. So unless you can afford a much more expensive phone, your only option is a privacy invasive google phone.

Being able to chose not to use google is a luxury here. Therefor google is a monopoly for these low income people and also a utility since having a phone and the services that come with it are essential.

> Your competitors are advertising on facebook and google. If you want to compete you have no choice but to do both.

My intuition is this is not a meaningful factor for a locally-focused business.

And if you are bigger than local it doesn't matter if you are forced to do business with google? It's pretty easy to come up with a number of ways people are forced to use google products and how they should be treated different to small services.

Right now it would be completely within googles right to block an individual from using youtube at all. You would have no legal recourse against this and it would massively impact your life. Almost all video on the web is on youtube. Even government information videos are hosted on youtube now as well as countless general information videos and health/safety videos.

It's pretty easy to make a case that everyone should have a right to watch videos on youtube because of how important the content on youtube is. This is what making google a utility means. If some random forum bans you, you get on with your life. If Google does something it can have serious impacts on your life where you have no options for alternatives.

The pine phone is under 250 dollars, and runs Linux. Although, you have the issue of if some service are accessible via an app on iOS or Android.

Used phones exist, and even more are out there if you are willing to do things like replace a screen at home.

Facebook and instagram exist for advertising: Small businesses aren't going to get much traction on google anyway without specific searches for it, though android is finally catching up and I now get local places in game adverts.

Do a different job.

> Try finding a smartphone under 250$

Jio.

> try advertising any small business on the internet

Facebook is the dominate player here.

> try avoiding meets meeting when you apply for a job

Zoom? Bluejeans?

Yeah, it's really cool that a company has done a good enough job in so many different areas that the other alternatives are often unambiguously worse.

No, its products are forced down your threat and impossible to avoid.

If they're hard to avoid, it's because lots of people are voluntarily choosing them because (in their estimation) they provide the best value for cost.

I personally find it rather annoying that the mumbly trap influence has infiltrated a lot of popular rap, and if I'm going to hang out with other hip hop fans, I end up hearing some stuff I don't personally love. But it's popular because a lot of people like it. It's not impossible to avoid -- there's just a cost to avoiding it because of its popularity.

Google's like that.

We’ve got multiple comments right here saying how easy it was for them to avoid Google completely.

My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills.

They are smart. Advanced degrees in STEM. Multiple languages. Doesn’t matter.

I can’t imagine the transition from Google to DuckDuckGo/Firefox/ProtonMail being easier.

Am I wrong about that?

What step were they unable to complete in the process of changing their browser's default search from Google to Yahoo? (With your walking them through it, I mean?)

They need to be able to get to Yahoo Mail from their home page and the search engine result page.

This is a hard requirement.

I second whynaut's suggestion.

That's precisely what I did for the elders.

I set up pinned bookmark shortcuts on the 'tab bar' (had to enable the 'show bookmarks bar' option).

Now they have a button for 'mail', one for 'search', one for 'maps', and one for 'facebook' etc. Those buttons are always visible, no matter how far they venture into the internet. Solved the problem for them (or rather, for me, lol)

I imagine you can inject the necessary buttons via userscripts, if this is truly a “hard requirement.” The bookmark bar is, of course, the standard solution to this.

No stake in this, just a suggestion and also a little curious. Could a shortcut pinned to the tab or nav bar work? I keep my email in a pinned Safari tab.

> My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills.

How old are your parents?

Is it search you're referring to or the email platforms of each?

1. Planning to avoid Google is a lot easier than being forced to with little/no notice.

2. You’re thinking as an individual, but there’s also how Google treats businesses. It’s a lot harder to replace Google Ads than gmail.

Now put yourself on the other side of the equation. As a business you rely on Google Search because it's effectively the only search engine anyone uses. As a video content creator you rely on Youtube because no one is searching Vimeo for your product, nor are they relying on Vimeo recommendations to find it. As a developer you primarily target Chrome-based browsers because that makes up four fifths of your user base.

Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).

Except it's actually not that easy. Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website. Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post). Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means that there's a google embed in the page your looking at. Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor. If you have an android phone (most of the world does) you're forced to use google play services. In today's world, they're unavoidable. That being said, making them a public utility is a bit forward...

"Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website."

I actually mentioned that. Just shim GA connections; this happens with most ad-blocking software, and I believe happens in Firefox's "strict" mode by default. It's really trivial.

"Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post)."

Only true if the majority of people you converse with over email are boring.

"Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means that there's a google embed in the page your looking at."

Again, why would you ever look at an ad? That's a ludicrous idea.

"Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor."

Bittorrent.

"If you have an android phone you're forced to use google play services."

Completely false. Android works fine without Google Play Services.

EDIT: Made words better.

I think it's more possible than others are suggesting, but I think there are exceptions.

There is no good competitor to YouTube - there are a lot of bad ones yes, but no good one. I'd argue this is objective fact.

I use fastmail and my own domain, but most people use gmail - I don't think that's that big of a deal though.

It's odd they'd target Google in the OP - telecom providers like Comcast and Spectrum are much worse in how they treat their customers and in those cases there really isn't another option most of the time.

RE: YouTube alternatives there's also PeerTube which also can use p2p delivery.

Can confirm that Android works great without Google Play Services, I don't have it. Most Play Store apps break but most of my apps are from F-Droid anyway.

PeerTube is not a serious alternative to YouTube. Almost all of the most popular content is missing and there are no reasonable alternatives. It claims to have over 400,000 videos on the site; YouTube gets 700,000 _hours_ of video uploaded each day.

Android without Google Play, unless you live in mainland China, does not "work great" the way most people want. I've done it and it was basically like not having a smartphone at all.

You cannot use banking apps, social media, games, streaming/Chromecast, maps (yes, I know OsmAnd exists; it has next to no information about businesses or landmarks and takes several minutes to plot a route that Google Maps or Waze calculates in less than 5 sedonds). Firefox is a reasonable alternative to Chrome and K-9 mail is good but that's about it. Unless MicroG suddenly became good in the past two years it's not a feasible solution even for people who are technically-minded.

> (yes, I know OsmAnd exists; it has next to no information about businesses or landmarks and takes several minutes to plot a route that Google Maps or Waze calculates in less than 5 sedonds)

OsmAnd, unlike Google Maps free tier, will always draw you an actually optimised route (though without considering traffic congestion).

> the majority of people you converse with over email are boring.

The majority of people are “boring.” Not acknowledging your approach’s failure points (in this petty way) isn’t good marketing, really.

>""Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor."

Bittorrent."

I should avoid Google's monopoly by becoming a criminal?

Torrenting is not a crime. Piracy is a crime and a popular use of BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is also used for distributing non-criminal things like Linux ISOs and some app and game updates and art dumps (I have friends who release via torrent monthly) and datasets (for research and AI) and many other things.

Insinuating that using Bittorrent is inherently tied to criminal activity is like suggesting the same for a person who uses a car.

He was talking about videos, that is bittorrent as an alternative to youtube. So how do you discover legal videos that interest you on bittorrent?

The same way I discover new movies: See what everyone else is checking out.

Now try advertising your business while avoiding Google. Keep in mind that if you don't buy ads under your Company's Name from Google, Google will allow your competitors to buy those placements and make them the top results anyone searching your company on Google will see.

Advertisement is immoral and totally unnecessary to have a profitable business.

> advertisment is immoral

Interesting opinion... have any facts to back up such an opinion? What's immoral about... spreading information about you and your business?

There are immoral ways to go about advertising, without doubt. But advertising itself is immoral?

"What's immoral about... spreading information about you and your business?"

Non-consensually forcing anyone into anything is wrong. Advertising violates the NAP.

"But advertising itself is immoral?"

Indeed.

"non-consensually forcing anything into anyone" You have a perverveted view of "forcing" if you think sharing information is, as it sounds like you seem to be saying, the equivalent of rape.

If I say something you disagree with... I'm not violating a "Non-Aggression Principle" - unless you think that opinions make you weak (I believe diverse thought makes you stronger - can't get new ideas without communication).

And if you think communication REALLY is "aggression"... how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole of an opinion?

Sharing info isn't itself immoral... it's LITERALLY the bedrock of civilization, free will, free speech, self defense, etc - all start with communication. The right to say stuff others don't like or even GASP saying stuff that make them uncomfortable - like pointing out your paradoxical opinion. (HOW you share CAN be immoral... but not sharing/communication itself)

Advertising, at it's core, is sharing information. Without freedom to communicate? without the ability to share ideas? We'd be afraid of fire. we would be monkeys in caves...

"You have a perverveted view of "forcing" if you think sharing information is, as it sounds like you seem to be saying, the equivalent of rape."

Something doesn't have to be rape to be non-consensually forced upon someone; consider slavery, or compulsory schooling, or non-free Javascript. A well-documented method of torture is obscuring a captive's vision and looping a single song on repeat.

"how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole of an opinion?"

You asked for me to share the opinion, and as such, have given consent. Wider, though, this is a message board. The point is to share on-topic messages. This includes opinions, but does not include ads.

Advertising at its core is manipulation, not sharing information. Most advertisements grant the viewer net-negative information.

I'm curious to know which profitable companies never advertise.

Sourcehut, as a recent example.

Tesla, Huy Fong Foods (Sriracha), Costco, Krispy Kreme, Kiehl’s, Spanx, Rolls-Royce, and Zara are some examples.

I wouldn't add Tesla in there, its CEO is an audiovisual billboard by itself.

What do you do when you have a job interview that is scheduled as a Google Meet meeting? Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?

I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account.

I think you can just talk to the person at the other end and ask for accomodation. I use Zoom for interviews, but if someone emailed me and was like "can we use Google Meet" I would be happy to change. Similarly, if someone texts me "I can't open that link to the photos you sent", I can just email them the photos.

It's not really a big deal, and I don't think that your unwillingness to talk with your friends or business partners makes Google a public utility in a regulatory sense.

>just talk to the person at the other end and ask for accomodation.

And for almost every job position. They will tell you Meet is what they use and if that doesn't work for you, they are happy to cancel the interview.

> I don't think that your unwillingness to talk with your friends or business partners makes Google a public utility in a regulatory sense

I mean, the tautological definition is that the regulators will decide whether Google is a public utility, or perhaps too big and needs to be broken up (a question separate from this particular lawsuit). All of us are just on the sidelines discussing it, and perhaps trying to influence our elected representatives.

The fact that courts and regulators are at least considering it does mean that there is some merit to the argument that it may not be practical to live Google-free these days. It's probably not just me being unwilling to talk to my friends and business partners.

If you need a google work account I guess choices need to be made. It is rare that hr wouldn't have another option available for the interview. But many employers use it.

Newborn's pictures could be obtained another way if you were a close relatives or friends. If you are not close enough then the desire to see them decreases anyways.

You always have the choice of creating a new google profile and disreguarding it later.

Many have

"What do you do when you have a job interview that is scheduled as a Google Meet meeting?"

Unlikely scenario; the companies that overlap with my set of skills either have their own offering or use a libre one. I will admit, this might be harder for other people (my skills hover around RTC heavily).

"Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?"

My friends range from "Too young to be using a 'boomer' service like Google Photos" to "Too old to be doing anything technical that isn't just texting photos via SMS," and most of them in the 25-30 child-having age either also avoid Google or would just show the pictures in person. I don't live in the Valley, though, so this could be a regional thing.

"I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account."

No, I don't. It never seemed necessary to me.

Firefiox: I remember the first few versions since the rewrite. It was very fast. Fast forward to today and it's so slow.

What is the reason? Are the privacy changes affecting this by using more resources or pages are requesting domains that hang for too long?

It gives rust a bad name because this is one of the bigger rust products I know.

Hardly any of firefox is using rust. Servo was abandoned. I think the only rust part of FF right now is the CSS engine.

> I think the only rust part of FF right now is the CSS engine.

That's not correct.

Currently, 9.5% is Rust https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/

Servo was abandoned after all of the fanfaire? Was a reason ever given? I thought we were in the servo era.

Mozilla cut a bunch of jobs and the servo team was one of the teams cut. The servo project is not officially canceled but there is no clear future for it.

I’m disappointed to hear Firefox is deteriorating daily.

I disagree about DDG’s search quality. I tried it for six months and that was not my experience. Eventually went back to Google.

I believe it depends on people. For some DuckDuckGo works perfectly, and they rarely go back to Google, if at all. For others it just does not work.

This reminds me of the dream of displacing Microsoft Word. Can we make a better product? No we can't. Only Microsoft can, through upgrades. The competition is stuck with making the same thing, and therefore not better, or something different, which is always "worse" because people are used to Word.

Also note that DuckDuckGo has a fundamental disadvantage: by not tailoring its searches to your history, it cannot possibly guess what you want to see as well as Google. Sure you're not trapped in your own search bubble, but you don't feel that. You only feel that the damn search engine can't find that website you are searching for for the fifth time already.

Pro tip: to get back to a web site, type its URL, or use bookmarks. Somehow I've seen many professional programmers fail to do that. I give them a URL, and they type it on the freaking search bar. (The more modern version is failing to type or auto-complete an actual URL in the omni bar.)

Yeah, it's certainly unfortunate. It gets just a little worse with every single update. The last one removed compact mode, which was the only thing making the UI somewhat bearable on-screen. It is now terribly large and unappealing.

What do you use a search engine for? Depending on your set of interests, turning off or on localization might have helped.

In the current build, there is an about:config setting to re-enable compact mode.

Yes, but they've expressed a desire to get rid of it in an upcoming update.

FWIW, I've used Firefox on a daily basis for years, and I have no complaints about desktop Firefox. (Firefox Android does leave some things to be desired, but also functions just fine as a web browser.)

I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence. So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol.

Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?

I don't care about centralization or their tracking particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that waste computational resources, which all of their software does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes me feel good, and megabytes being wasted by tracking scripts and terrible Javascript frameworks does not make me feel good, so I avoid their standalone services and block their parasitic services.

However, email isn't really a good decentralized protocol. All federation fails at being meaningfully decentralized given enough time. There are great decentralized protocols; email is not one of them.

It’s insane how fast a barebones linux desktop system feels these days. Even an rPi 4 can be really snappy with the right desktop environment and window manager. It makes one realize how slow and inefficient all these modern web technologies have become in practice.

It’s been happening for decades, but while computers get orders of magnitude faster, software gets slower at a faster rate, consuming all of the gains and then some.

Edit: here’s an interesting example just looking at input latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ if you take the browser into account as part of the system as well, I’m sure it’s much, much worse.

Have you tried the new chromium based Edge?

Using a proprietary web browser would be like using a blowtorch that claimed to be powered by "magic." While I might use, say, a "magic" recipe, or a toy that claimed to be magic, I certainly wouldn't use a real, combustive tool that claimed to be magic.

I don't use google products much anymore, but the transition takes a long time, especially getting off of gmail.

I'm also not sure it would even be possible to transition if you don't have access to your google account anymore. You would just be literally completely shut out of many of your online accounts.

And for watching online videos there really isn't any viable alternative to youtube.

Only people like us, developers, geeks uses those kind of services. The majority uses google.

I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products

I am pretty sure that number is close to zero. googleapis.com is a Google product, and not using it breaks half the Internet. Trust me, I've tried.

Other alternatives are fine, but Vimeo isn't alternative for viewer (or even uploader). YouTube is a platform that hosts many unique contents with many worldwide viewers.

Indeed. I still have a Google account but the I don’t remember the last time I signed in with it.

How many of those users have 8.8.8.8 as DNS and have no clue they pipe all their usage to google?

All alternatives for Google search end up being Bing and it sucks when compared to Google.

Bottled water, water tanks, septic tanks, solar/wind power, generators, ...

There is market competition in some utilities depending on where you live

DuckDuckGo is 10 characters while Google is 6. That is a 67% overhead. If it was ddg or duck I would be more tempted to use it.

How about duck.com? Though it's an extra letter compared to just google). Alternately, setting it as your default search engine sidesteps the issue just as well :)

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