How so? If I don't like my internet provider, my only other option is dialup. If I don't like Google, there's multiple alternatives for all of their services that I use

While you can place your data in services which are not Google, if you want to consume data, you are often going to have to deal with Google. For instance, almost anyone who shares any sort of video whatsoever puts it on YouTube. It doesn't matter if I'm not a YouTube user, I have to go to YouTube if I want to watch someone else's videos.

And Google is far more than just where you go to search or store your email. Somewhere around 90% of the web uses Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Fonts, so they can track you regardless of where you go online. And that's before you get into the fact that plenty of websites are on Google's cloud services, which you may not even know. (I left Google Docs for another service, for instance, but it's still hosted on Google's servers.) Even if you're not logged into a Google account, Google is tracking you and profiling your behavior across the web. (Google also collects credit card data, so they can track you in brick and mortar stores now too.)

Using Google's browser to access the web is also becoming increasingly inescapable, now that the company with the second largest market share in web browsers is switching to Chrome's codebase. Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium. In fact, the very protocol we use to talk to the web is constantly being revised primarily on Google's lead and direction. HTTP/3, QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS, etc. is all about moving the web's standard to something more palatable to Google's business models, and making them harder to block or filter out.

It's incredibly naive to believe you can escape Google. I've spent years de-Googling, and there's plenty of data Google still has on me.

ISP monopolies are a big problem, but they won't follow you when you move. A high bar for escape, to be sure, but escaping Google likely requires an even higher bar: Entering the witness protection program and getting a new identity.

What a joke. To claim that for example using Chrome is “inescapable” is pure hyperbole. You’re worried about Google tracking your credit card purchases but not worried about credit card companies tracking that? Because I assure you they do. And ISP monopolies do follow you when you move: across huge swathes of the US you have one or maybe two options for internet access.

> Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium.

And the reason they don't have more market share is because Chrome is still faster and provides a better experience on average than Firefox does. I switched (back) to Firefox a few years ago, and I'm mostly happy with it. But when I try to get others to switch, those that end up not switching try for a few days and run into horrible performance issues that cripple their browsing experience. Clearly this isn't a universal issue (my experience is fine), but it's a big enough issue that it likely hampers further adoption.

I pretty much never hear "Firefox doesn't work properly on X site" as a reason they can't use Firefox. In the end, people use Chrome because it tends to give a better experience for people, even given its lack of respect for their privacy.

AFAICT, Firefox almost exclusively has performance issues on Google's websites. Which is a reinforcing point to the threat of Google's monopoly.

The only website I've been to that Firefox struggles with is roll20 for some reason

That doesn't make sense - while Google may have a dominant position in a winner takes all ISPs can exclude others from the market far easier. If Google becomes grossly unreasonable it is easier to leave them - in a Geographic area your options are more constrained by physical availability and prices can be raised largely arbitrarily.

You have claimed that it's a stranglehold, but never explained what actually makes it so, given that any would-be Google and Netflix competitor would have access to the same pipes as those two, and on the same terms.

Economy of scale. For instance, Netflix has CDN boxes all over the planet, colocated by the ISPs. ISPs have to colocate them for free, because with net neutrality, they have to either accept the massive network traffic over their peering connections, or accept the box. Any smaller provider would need to pay for the privilege of colocation in an ISP's datacenter, and they'd also have to supply all of those boxes, that a company on Netflix's scale can easily afford.

Without net neutrality, ISPs would be free to charge big players like Google and Netflix more money, and that would leave a lot more room for smaller players to get involved. Getting "the same terms" as Google and Netflix is not always, inherently, a good thing.

> Without net neutrality, ISPs would be free to charge big players like Google and Netflix more money, and that would leave a lot more room for smaller players to get involved.

When ISPs decide that they should charge more for all video traffic, the smaller companies can't pay it but the larger ones can. Why would the ISPs act in the benefit of small companies when they can make more by charging more for all streaming video.

Except this usually works out the exact opposite, where the big companies get discounts in exchange for (predictable) volume.

That logic assumes ISPs would be interested in helping out smaller players.

That seems suspect to me...