Google has monopoly in search, and near-monopoly in desktop email.

People are forced to use it, whether they like it or not.

People are not forced to use Google Search of Gmail. They are free to use alternatives like DDG or Bing and Yahoo Mail or etc

> People are not forced to use Google Search of Gmail.

I think the GP misspoke. It's more accurate to say that people are forced to use Google products. Even if you use DDG and Fastmail there's no escaping reCaptcha, AMP, and Google Analytics - unless you want to limit yourself to only a few websites.

I don’t think so. I think GP used the term monopoly when oligopoly would have been more appropriate. I use the term oligopoly but it’s quite common to say monopoly because it’s a very similar thing. Also Duck Duck Go is not comparable to Google Search or Bing.

But the AMP infection has spread to those as well. Well, DDG at least. I had to stop using the "news" tab on DDG because of the high percentage of results there that are AMP links.

Yes, they are “free to chose alternatives”. But Google is a monopoly, so...

And through the monopoly users are forced to use AMP.

Do you know what the word monopoly means? It comes from mono- meaning one. So if there are alternatives, there isn’t one option, therefore, it isn’t a monopoly

Google doesn't have to be literally the only search provider to have a monopoly. It just has to have virtually all the market share (it does) and high barriers to entry (it does). Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems in the nineties, despite the existence of other OS's.

Don't have to be pedantic about it. Google is big enough and controls enough marketshare that it can be considered a monopoly. Especially when it rolls out something like 'AMP' that eventually causes others to follow suit to support it.

Hey sorry for offtopic, but I saw your post about TwitchVC - is it dead now? Join link from blogpost doesn't work

Calling Google search a monopoly is trivially wrong given totally viable and easily usable alternatives.

Ads, however...

You cannot make an appointment on the california DMV website without using Google products.

Nobody's "forced" to use it. Users can turn off AMP in Gmail, and email authors can continue to just use HTML emails if they don't like AMP. HTML emails will continue to display in Gmail just fine for the foreseeable future.

“Forseeable future”. Aka “as soon as Google decides they benefit more from AMP”.

Much like “we won’t ever use AMP to rig search results”.

And yes, users are forced to use AMP through their search, for example.

Even if they wanted to, Google couldn't kill HTML in Gmail without breaking a huge number of emails for their users. AMP adoption would have to be near universal before they'd even consider something like that. Gmail, for example, still supports plaintext email just fine even though HTML has been supported in just about every mainstream email client for years now.

I just looked through all settings, how do I turn AMP off in gmail?

An AMP developer confirmed two things:

1. Setting Gmail to not automatically load external images will also ensure Dynamic Email (AMP for Email) is disabled by default as well.

2. The specific Dynamic Email setting should be "rolled out to all users over the next few weeks".

I think you had a typo in the last line. Google cancels projects because they _are_ popular.