This comment seems to be perfectly emblematic of demonizing a target, rather than even attempting to take a more balanced approach (such as original comment). Does the next comment then deify Google, until the next one demonizes them yet again? That's the problem with binary criticism.

Surely the goal should be to be accurate rather than balanced?

> breathtakingly damaging behaviour

This seems typically hyperbolic. What are examples of Google's "breathtakingly damaging behavior"?

People remember a WWW before ad-words and SEO changed everything.

Yes, me too. It was an internet that only a relative handful of people produced content for because it was not worth the time for the vast majority of people.

It's easy to put the target on Google and ad-words and SEO but literally no one has ever scaled payment for internet content.

The countless people in India, Brazil etc who make livelihoods out of producing content make it out of Youtube ads, not Patreon.

I’m not persuaded there are so many more longform or knowledge content creators today, publishing more of the contentful “fan fact” (as opposed to “fan fic”) content that mattered to them enough to publish.

I find roughly the same amount of useful information now as 20 years ago, buried by the content-mill spam from the “countless people” you mention.

I’d argue peak content may have been 2002 to 2007 or so. The original content mills (HuffPo 2005; Buzzfeed 2006) even had mostly useful content while honing in on the viral content form.

There’s likely more substance now than then, but the signal to noise ratio is so much worse you’d have a better chance of finding the needle in the haystack then.

I’d like to imagine people with something to say can and do still self-publish. Perhaps a reason posts about personal blogs are so popular here.

Conspiracy to cheat workers out of billions of dollars of wages comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

There’s also the project to build a government logged and censored search engine to get back into China.

https://thinkprogress.org/google-dragonfly-china-censorship-...

Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez were breathtakingly damaging. Union Carbide was breathtakingly damaging. Enron comes to mind.

I’m not a proponent of wage-fixing, but I wouldn’t call the damage breathtaking.

Google allegedly was planning to re-enter the Chinese market, but Yahoo and Microsoft currently operate search engines there that comply with Chinese government regulation. Where is the outrage?