What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...
This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.
Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).
As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.
Google tapped into that by creating an ad economy, which since it's inception also comes with a payment optional feature (ad-blocking).
People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.
I actually wonder how much people actually like the current web. People bitching about popups and ads is enough of a staple of our culture.
What Google "gives" isn't popping from nowhere, the billions they use to fund it still came from us, just in indirect ways.
If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.
People are blind to this, they think Google is a charity that got greedy. Meanwhile they haven't let a Google ad through their ad blocker for 15 years.
Youtube Premium is $13.99/mo or you get ads with also zero tolerance for ad blocking. We've already been there for a while wherever Google is serious about it.
I don't think people understand that it would be trivial for Google to block anyone with an ad blocker from accessing any Google domain.
And if they did that, cut off the people who use the services but never pay, those people would complain.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/107221-youtube-anti-ad-blocker...
And little of value would be lost.
No. Google is making money, it is not a charity. More than that, they do everything they can to obfuscate that fact and brainwash us into thinking we just get it for free thanks to their generosity. It is not the case at all. All these services are data funnels for the actual main business of Google, which is to sell ads.
If they make money off our backs, it is not unreasonable to have some expectations.
Which is why the services exists at all, thank god for that. What it is though, is cheaper and better than the alternatives, which is why their products are so overwhelmingly popular.
There are many difficult-to-estimate costs for monopolies, especially ones like this. That does not mean that the costs do not exist. That's the entire point in making people believe that things are "free" or "cheap", you rob them of even the opportunity to even evaluate alternatives to realize how much better it could be. There are very good reasons that these kinds of things should be illegal.
Actually, we don't. Google is a prime culprit in the 'enshittification' of the Internet. As Cory Doctorow can explain[0] to you.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#b...
At least they opened up the password completion APIs.
Google, interestingly, is much better.
I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.