Cutting Google accounts out of your life, however, is an entirely different undertaking that would take much longer and have a big impact on how you use the web.
Nobody, including Google, is stopping you from doing that.
Note, this is different from actual monopoly of railways (I have to use Central Pacific Railroad) or ISP (My city only has Comcast) or electricity (If I want electricity, I have to use PG&E).
The barometer is whether there's meaningful alternative. Can I do X without the $company in question = not a monopoly.
You can ride a horse. Ergo, not a monopoly.
>ISP (My city only has Comcast)
You've got starlink. Not a monopoly.
> You can ride a horse. Ergo, not a monopoly.
Are you really saying that there is no other search engine you can use besides Google?
In 1870, if you wanted to get from Chicago to San Francisco, it would be facetious to claim that Union Pacific did not have a monopoly on that route. No, Union Pacific wasn't forcing you to board their train. Just like you can Ctrl+T over to duckduckgo.com/ or bing.com/ or kagi.com/ in seconds, and never go back to Google. You could avoid the railroad monopoly by 'just' riding a horse, or walking, or taking a boat down the Mississippi and launching a sailing expedition around Cape Horn. That's still a monopoly.
And if your entire business strategy is to have a website and depend on Google search results to drive traffic, you are doing it wrong as many news organizations like Buzzfeed found out.
I do occasional self promotion and “thought leadership” bullshit to put my name out there. I go to where the eyeballs are - LinkedIn. It’s far more likely that the people I want to reach are on LinkedIn than my blog that I don’t have a link to anywhere. I just use it as a publicly accessible place to workshop my writing and thoughts before I post them to LinkedIn.
And I will play the world’s smallest fiddle for advertisers even then, if you have a product to sale to consumers, you are probably better off using Amazon or a Meta app to advertised. It’s better targeting and ads are less likely to be blocked.
Just use an ad blocker. O wait all the chromium browsers just made that harder with manifest v3. 75% of browsers are chromium based?
I don’t think it’s fair to compare digital services to something like PGE. Fundamentally different.
Google lost the case. They just weren’t punished how they should’ve been.
Edit: wow and how could I forget 8.8.8.8 or google’s own transmission lines!
Isnt adding Google Analytics to the website a decision solely and independently made by the website in question?
It is like saying, I dont like Coca Cola but when I go to McDonald's to eat food, they only serve Coca Cola. Hence, Coca Cola is.. bad? McDonald's is free to chose any business partner they like, and you insisting that McDonald's shouldnt use Coca Cola sounds silly.
My point is that it’s incredibly difficult to avoid Google. Especially for people who aren’t nerds.
In the US, iOS has 60% market share and installing an ad blocker is a matter of going to the App Store and installing it and then enabling in settings. They all walk you through the process. It’s the same on the Mac with the Mac App Store.
Google pays Apple to be the default search engine.
Google transmits our data undersea.
You can’t easily avoid them!
But no one has been proposing that Google not be allowed to have underseas cables
The argument is that you can cut Google out of your life. The reality is you can’t and many don’t even realize how deeply intertwined it is.
I sometimes dont understand the logic of some people.
Is coca cola then a monopoly on soft drinks? I would say obviously yes.
This is the situation the current internet and applications are in. They only service users who utilize Google in some type of way, for the majority of apps.
Its deceptive to say "well it's just that one bank". No, that one bank is an example. That's not the breadth of it, and we both know that.
You are doing the same mistake PP did, projecting from yourself to others. Not everyone can do this or knows the resons why it is important.
If the search market was that flexible, it wouldnt really make sense to spend a fortune to become the default SE.
I use Safari on my Mac because Chrome is worse on battery life and doesn’t integrate as well with the rest of my digital life. I use Gmail. But at the end of the day, it’s just another one of my emails.