Like hell they do(have a monopoly)! there are plenty of other searchengines out there, and ther is nothing that forces you towards google (unlike some other services, all search engines are available everywhere, barring government censorship in some countries)

try Bing.com, duckduckgo.com, or even yahoo.com (and there are many more)

and then tell me google is the one that should be sued because of the results in their searchengine

A really hate when people confuse "better than everyone else,with margins" with "has a monopoly". It's not even like their searchengine gets pushed on computerbuyers by the software installed by default, since that software would normally be windows with accompanying browsers, that all try to push Bing.com as their default search engines...

but people use google anyway because they generate the best results to searches, if they stop doing that, there's nothing to stop everyone from switching, that's why they have to keep it good. there's no lock-in.

what really pisses me of with these decisions is that if you replace "google" and "alphabet" with placeholder-names, none of their arguments holds water to any reader. try it yourself! ;)

> Like hell they do(have a monopoly)! there are plenty of other searchengines out there, and ther is nothing that forces you towards google...

90% market share.

Besides, I keep hearing that argument but it never made sense to me. The monopoly is not (mainly) about the users of the search engine - they could in theory switch to something else (even though for some mysterious reason, most of them don't. See above.) The actual monopoly is for the sites that depend on Google to be found. The simple choice for then is to submit to Google's standards or lose the majority of their traffic. So talk of force is justified here.

I have shied away from certain designs because Google has very specific ideas about how a site should be structured, rooted in the pre- web app days. If Google had real competition, they would adapt to better index "modern" designs and architectures. Instead, developers/designers have to limit ourselves if we want Google to not only index our content, but not penalize our rankings.

Well, that or look at your headers and serve the googlebot what it expects, and show everyone else what you actually want to show - as long as it's not too different content-wise.

With power comes responsibility.

I think they gladly pay the fine.

What would be the nuclear disaster would be a low that requires them to share user interactions with other search engine operators, so they can also improve their results.