> egregious abuses of power like this

Do you honestly think removing URLs from search results is an "egregious abuse of power?" This is the company that buys credit card transactions from Visa et al. and associates them with your maps and and history for the benefit of advertisers, and you're complaining about them removing a design element 95% of people probably don't care about?

I meant Google in general. It’s yet another tiny step in a terrible direction. At this point I would love to legislate most of Google out of existence, personally.

I don't really buy using legislation. Alternatives exist and people don't seem to care to use them. That's the market at work.

> I don't really buy using legislation. Alternatives exist and people don't seem to care to use them.

Google is engaged in using its market dominance in one segment to gain or maintain dominance in others, while suppressing the competition. This is illegal behavior for which Google has been fined several times over the past few years.

Just consider that in past Android versions there was a hard-coded Google search bar on the default home screen that you could not remove. Google has been forced to ask users and offer a set of alternative search engines on devices with recent Android versions. Same goes for Chrome and competing browsers [1].

Right now Google Search detects the Firefox for Android user agent and serves a second-tier search experience for Firefox users on Android. They have been doing this for the past 6 years [2].

[1] https://mashable.com/article/google-browser-search-engine-ch...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444

How is Google stopping users from using another search engine?

Once you have monopoly power, the market can do little. Google has that power now.

You mean like the power of yahoo/altavista back in the day?

You mean like when the internet was small and being on top of yahoo/altavista search results was mostly irrelevant to your bottom line?

Google does lots of great things for people, so it looks to me like you're overreacting. Finding the right balance is important in regulation.

Google is unequivocally evil. It doesn't matter how much good they do when they are being evil.

It’s important to keep in mind that imbalance goes both ways.

Yes it is when taken in aggregate with all of the other changes which have been hostile to users and good for their ad business. One example is how they used AB testing to justify, over the course of a decade, a slow redesign of Sponsored Results so they look nearly identical to like regular search results.

Their unethical behavior lead me to quit, divest, and delete all of my Google accounts.

Re: the phishing example, it's roughly analogous to a business refusing to put up caution signs around dangerous areas like slippery floors or where there's construction. It's such a small thing that could help prevent enormous losses from clients and yet they won't do it for shady business reasons.

> Do you honestly think removing URLs from search results is an "egregious abuse of power?"

Yes, it very obviously is. Google the search engine, and therefore Google, would never have gotten off the ground if it had hidden URL from the beginning.

> and you're complaining about them removing a design element 95% of people probably don't care about?

If so many people don't care about something so basic and crucial to not being a serf in the information age, then that makes the issue even more important, and Google's behaviour even more egregious.

Does an abuse of power become less egregious because there are even worse ones?

What about the rest of the world? Everyone uses Google, not just the US.