My business can be destroyed by Google on a whim at a moment's notice. How did it get to be so bad?
People used to depend on at&t for business and still hate it back when they owned the entire phone system (including the phone on the wall).
Now, it's pretty hard if not impossible to compete with them thanks to the network effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
How could any company that's interested in being "open" compete with a behemoth that has the advantage of countless engineer-years that have been spent developing their solutions, as well as millions of participants that have given them the data, which probably cannot be legally mined and imported and certainly isn't exported?
The answer is that they can't and being upset about this is probably a valid emotional response, even though it could be worded a bit better.
Edit: I can't help but to think of how the industry handles DNS domains, for example, the .lv domain for my country is looked after by the University of Latvia: https://www.nic.lv/en/about-us
I wonder what a similarly distributed registry of companies, for example, run by the governments of each country (which could then be integrated with the company registers) would look like. Of course, whether the quality of engineering or the overall experience would be up to par with Google's is debatable.
That said, the distributed COVID contact tracing approach that we saw was a little bit like this - even if Google and Apple did a lot of work for the underlying library, each country developed their own contact tracing app and eventually all of those could interoperate. There's no actual reason why the FOSS community couldn't build something like that, but for finding companies etc.
Competitors had decades to get a federated solution together and simply didn't. Attempts got mired in squabbling over data ownership, bickering about costs and fees, failure to agree upon an open protocol, and all manner of other nonsense that Google was able to solve by being a single player and coordinating all the moving parts internally.
Market concentration. Almost like you might benefit from some kind of Ending Platform Monopolies Act.
I wonder if they've considered how this kind of messaging could backfire. You tell a bunch of small businesses who don't like you keeping them in a cage that there is some pending legislation and they should write to Congress. They might look into it first. Are you sure you still want them to write to Congress?
My business can be destroyed by Yellow pages on a whim at a moment's notice. How did it get to be so bad?