At risk of nitpicking, why do say "controls" rather than e.g. "services" or "handles"? When you say "controls" it's like you're saying Google has some kind of monopoly power that makes it hard to switch. And yet anyone can easily switch to e.g. DuckDuckGo. If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.

Browsers would be a different issue. In that case, there are network effects like about what standards are supported and how, which make it difficult to launch a competing browser, even with technological superiority, and in that case, it would be reasonable to worry about too much market share.

They do in fact control Android. The open headset alliance means Android is open source in name only. Only tinkerers/hackers use ASOP derivatives by itself (or some foreign manufactures that cannot to offer Google Play services .. or Amazon Fire makers).

They dominate the software ecosystem. Although it's not difficult to load 3rd party applications, it's certainly not common. Their removal of the Podcast Addicts app is a great example. Also you cannot interface with things like Android Auto without getting Google's golden approval (so no Android Auto for F-Drop apps)

I did a full post on all the gripes I had with Android a few years back, and I think they all still apply: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/

The sentence he was specifically talking about: Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]

I think Podcast Addict is back on G Play. Google apologized for the removal.

Only reason it worked is because of public shaming (here on HN and elsewhere).

If some less popular app is banned they have little recourse except hope for their story to go viral.

Simple add on - i can no longer uninstall any google apps from my droid phone. Best i can do is disable.

On this topic. WSJ states DoJ is readying antitrust vs google ij near future. May turn out to be quite an accomplishment if done

> If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.

It the same monopoly that a town center has in term of political activities. Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event.

As a society where I live we recognize the benefit of political diversity, and we acknowledge that the disruption that such political activity bring is usually minor. As long it does not cause prolong and significant disruption to everything else then the benefit of giving everyone equal right to demonstrate in the town square is a benefit.

I do agree however that Browsers are more similar to regular monopolies worries. One company in control of the market will increase prices, decrease innovation and create perverse market incentives.

That's a horrible analogy.

While people can be physically only in one location, they do get their information from a variety of source online. Comparing Google to a town square is dumb, when you account that Facebook has much more engaged users than YouTube.

At the time of writing I'm reading stuff on Facebook, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Twitter, Reddit and watching YouTube videos in between.(HN as well) I'm present on all of those "squares" at the same time.

I guess people has a bit different view about how sticky platforms are. If I imagine that google would take a political side in the US election and ban all site and comments of the other side, my belief is that it would have a direct impact on the election results and there would be nothing that the banned party could do. Politics right now depend highly on being visible on google search, Youtube and google ad network. A small but noticeable portion of users would move out, but it would not be close enough to compensate the loss and the impact on the political climate would take years to recover.

I would like to be wrong on this and that google do not have this kind of power.

> If I imagine that google would take a political side in the US election

They did. Maybe not in public, but it has been communicated clearly to the employees:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

While this is true, I do not think this applies to the point that GP was making wrt influencing election results. Taking a public stance and enforcing said stance on communication through their services is a far cry from an internal discussion within a company where most employees lean towards one side.

I'm not saying this is okay--it probably could've been conducted in a more (politically) inclusive manner. But my argument is that this doesn't apply to the GP.

Edit. Also of course the main post about comment censoring is troubling.

All analogies fail given certain conditions. However for the choice of which search engine to register with and which ad company to choose, most companies would choose G first. So, back to the analogy (which I found strange, but certainly not dumb) a company (or person) looking to be heard would certainly have far smaller reach if G actively blocked them from their services.

This analogy fails in principle.

For this analogy to be correct, there can be no equally populous squares. But there are equally populous squares.

The assumption was: "Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event."

So, no. One square dominates viewership (ie the town square <-> Google). You can switch to another square (ddg) if you want, but you don't get the viewership that you'd want to get the reach that you need.

This is the perennial discussion on HN as HN'ers get popularity confused with monopoly. I get the anti-Google sentiment but outside of the Play services agreements that Google got dinged for with Android manufacturers, they're not being anti-competitive.

If Google were to block search results to DuckDuckGo for example, that would be monopolistic and warrant antitrust action. As it is now, Google isn't blocking competition, consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.

Google has and does block competition, and they've attracted the attention of antitrust regulators for this on multiple occasions.

>Google has and does block competition

Can you share some of these occasions?

Here's some past regulatory attention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...

And some upcoming regulatory attention:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/technology/google-antitru...

That's not blocking competitors though.

I specifically didn't bring up the Shopping case because EU anti-trust law is very different, and the case doesn't qualify as anti-trust in the U.S.

The blocking of competition was mentioned several times in the links I posted. Here's a couple of quotes:

> Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors

> Google required that partners take a minimum number of Google ads and predominately place them above any other advertising, nor could place ads from other services above or alongside Google's ads;

> preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems

> Google entered into anticompetitive exclusive agreements for the distribution of Google Search on both desktop and in the mobile arena

> The Commission’s complaint alleges that Google reneged on its FRAND commitments and pursued – or threatened to pursue – injunctions against companies that need to use MMI’s standard-essential patents in their devices and were willing to license them on FRAND terms.

Huh, I did not know about the Adsense one, that's news to me. Interesting to see if it's relevant in the U.S. because it was only with large partner contracts and Google stopped it before the E.U. investigation even began.

Again, the EU anti-trust law is different from the U.S. I already mentioned the Android Play services case already.

Anecdotal evidence, but if you don't offer GoogleADX inventory, your site gets de-ranked in searches. I am very interested in the anti-trust probe for that reason.

They do deliberately slow their sites on Firefox, as has been discussed in many past hn articles. YouTube for example. Pardon my lack of references, you should confirm for yourself with a hn search in case I am mistaken

In addition to this, their use of reCaptcha makes using a non-chrome browser a significantly worse experience on several sites.

This is my biggest issue. I tried using Firefox exclusively for a period of time but experienced a 10x increase in the number of reCaptcha manual verifications I had to complete. Going to the same sites on Chrome has no reCaptcha.

For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.

I've used both firefox (dev edition) and chrome pretty evenly for a long time (work stuff in chrome, personal in ff), and I haven't noticed any more reCaptchas in firefox than I get in chrome. If you just started using firefox, I could see the extra captchas being due to having "too clean" of a browser, or a different browser that was never used before tripping some sort of anti malware or suspicious login system.

All just speculation, but I haven't noticed the same issue.

This is exactly it. Modern recaptcha is "reputation" based. So if it fingerprint matches you against a known profile, you never see the captcha. One could argue that a residential ip block combined with a common browser should be sufficient to filter most bot traffic, but it's not exactly in googles interest to worry about non-chrome user experience.

Well TIL. This gives me hope. I will put some time back into FF and see if there is an eventual drop in reCaptcha.

As a regular user of multiple browsers, I haven’t noticed this. Could you show a few examples? I’m not doubting your experience at all, I’m just curious to see if there may be a common thread.

Their handling of recaptcha should be criminal. They are the single most annoying thing to deal with this side of popups in their heyday

The YouTube example was a bug from 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17611444/how-to-speed-up-...

It's since been fixed.

Of course it was a bug. It could only be a bug. Would they really admit if it was intentional? Would they admit that their internal testing around Firefox is not as robust as Chrome? "Oh, whoopsie, no one here uses Firefox so we didn't notice it."

YouTube for me this week, only on Firefox, incidentally only fully loads 1/3 tries. Could be another bug

IIRC that's because YT switched to polymer, and since Mozilla doesn't support the new shadow dom APIs yet, YT serves it with the older version.

My understanding is that the "deliberate slowing" reported, was such that if you have firefox send a chrome user agent, that one gets faster (and functional) results.

Is that consistent with the "it is because FF doesn't support new thing yet" explanation?

No because again, IIRC, sending a chrome user agent to YT in FF breaks a lot of the functionality.

Does it? What stops working, since I haven't noticed anything?

Ah, “the parts that work are faster but a lot of it is broken” does seem like it suggests the benign explanation

I believe it was that YT was using the legacy v0 shadow DOM API that only Chrom[e|ium] supported, with a slow polyfill for other browsers, rather than the much better supported v1 API that all other major browser makers agreed to implement.

Oh, is that why it takes forever to load google search on firefox? how is that allowed? I'm speechless.

That's...not why, and it doesn't. Try clearing your cache, or loading a profile without any addons.

> how is that allowed?

It is not the case.

But who would have the legitimate right to stop it? Do we want government dictating product features?

How is that a feature??

>consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the word "despite". I still think the majority of the non-tech world is still oblivious to the privacy implications of G,FB,etc. Sure, I'm sure there's a percentage of people that have made the decision they don't care and are fine with it, but there are definitely don't know/understand.

No. It's in all the news. But the truth is people love Google. Google gives them so many services for free that they didn't have before.

In many 3rd world countries, smartphones were the "couple months salary" iPhone or an Android that's literally a tenth the cost.

To most of these people, Google has been an unalloyed good. Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.

> Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.

Two types of trust though. Trust in the products which they've earned in spades, and trust to moderate political speech which they have not.

This story is suggesting that they are willing to enforce standards set by the Chinese propaganda departments - which is to be expected, really, given their interest in regaining a presence in China. They aren't trustworthy in the political sense.

Huh? So we're supposed to thank them for the cancer they have wrought? Search was a good thing, then it got bastardized into a gaming system. Free email? Sounds great until the day you find out you're not the only one reading the email. Android is an interesting side project that has proven a useful alt to some. Again until you realize it, along with all of the other "useful" products, was just the long con into gathering all of the data to make Ads viable. If these products were just the products they appear on the surface, then maybe I'd say Google was reputable.

And most people are completely fine with having ads targeted at them.

You're just raging that other people have a different opinion about their online activity.

Now imagine you quantify the cost of having Google Search. If you search for florist - Google could charge you $10 for the results(florist CPC is very high) and up to $30 per search for a hotel in NYC.

>cancer

So dramatic. It's an amazing product that billions of people depend on that you don't have to use if you don't want to. Pretend it doesn't exist if it makes you feel better. Try Bing and Proton mail on an iPhone and never look back.

>If these products were just the products they appear on the surface

They're not a charity. If you're not paying for it upfront, you're paying for it with your eyeballs. Don't like it? Take your eyeballs elsewhere.

You are one of those confused HNers.

Monopoly power is different from abuse of monopoly power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Establishing_dominanc...

Right, hence the statement about anti-competitive behavior. GP is saying Google is a monopoly based on marketshare though, not monopolistic action, which is not correct.

As of some recent update on the ps4, at least since january, I am unable to enter any text on duckduckgo's search bar in the built in browser. The keyboard pops up briefly then vanishes. It likely works with an external keyboard, but the onscreen one refuses to appear. Google's search bar work's fine, the PlayStation's built in search works fine(but uses google), in site search engines powered by google work fine. But I have been unable to use duckduckgo on the ps4 since at least then.

I was capable of doing this before and regularly did. But, from what i've been able to tell, my web searches must all go through google now, either through the built in search feature or the browser.

If you haven’t already, maybe try the plain HTML [0] or (failing that) Lite [1] version of DDG.

[0]: https://ddg.gg/html

[1]: https://ddg.gg/lite

What about bing?

Well I never tried because the idea of using Microsoft's search wasn't much more appealing and honestly, I just never think about or consider them and kind of forget Bing exists. But it'd be interesting to see if it worked. They're more of a direct competitor to Sony at least in the console market.

A monopoly is not a lack of other options.

Nope. A monopoly is definitely the lack of other options for suppliers, i.e. a single supplier.

Conversely, a monopsony is the lack of other options for buyers. Words matter.

And conversely, other HN'ers get confused by a very narrow definition of what constitutes a market. It is this very definition that is under scrutiny.

Okay let me explain why this is a "control" rather than "service" or "handles". Say I am running an Ad using Google Ads. I get to reach all those people who are using Google services. And since Google has majority marketshare I can easily reach my customers and scale them as much as my budget allows. But at the same time I am bound by an ever-changing Google Policy that dictates what I should put in the Ad and what I shouldn't. Imagine that I or someone in my team pushes out an Ad that violates their policy somewhere. Depending on the scale of violation they can ban you form Advertising on Google platforms ever again. Now, you say that is a good thing. It keeps the bad guys out. I agree with you there. But it is not fool proof. I have seen Ads get rejected for frivolous reasons (like you can't have two different links in the same ad group). Now these rejections stack up and can get you a ban too. Have missed a payment because of some issue with your credit card or bank? Account suspension is a real possibility. Have you used the same credit card for two different Ad accounts? Be prepared to get suspended. Same mobile number for two different Ad accounts? Be prepared to get suspended. There are so many ways you can go wrong and get banned from ever using Google Ads again. Now this is where the danger is. If your business is highly dependent on Google Ads you will lose out on that huge marketshare you had earlier. I don't want my business to be affected because of some stupid policy violation that caused my account to be banned.

Found the google clown, I’ve been pissed at google for nearly a decade, and yet still continue to use my gmail address, because it would take me literal weeks to detach from it... and I’m actually technically capable of understanding what I need to do to separate.. 99% are not, they “control” these markets.

Thought experiment: Google controls 90% of the search market, the 10% (or 1%, whatever) they don't serve being made up of people who are oppressed in some way by the 90%, deliberately or otherwise.

Google censors information relating to that 10% for everyone else. They don't care enough to switch.

Centralization is an issue _a priori_. It's giving power to a single entity that we have no reason to trust will act in everyone's best interests.

And who gets to decide what is "best interests"?

Google Search is a consumer focused product, if they don't serve up the stuff that the users want - they loose viewers. No viewers - no revenue. Their bottom line depends on giving each person the best search results possible.

Pretending that they'll just decide to cut off even 1% of users is insane.

No. You're assuming that a particular sort of imaginary market dynamic overrides any and every other motivation anyone might have. That is nonsense.

If they can make 2% more by selling out half their users and giving them inferior results to serve the interests of somebody or something willing to pay Google money to screw over the users, they will do that without an instant of hesitation, in the absence of oversight. They are in an absence of oversight.

You are wildly in error to believe that people magically can tell they're not being harmed. People absolutely have no idea whether they are being 'given the best' anything possible, much less something like search results (or information in general).

It is highly profitable to screw over mass audiences for one's own benefit and there's largely no mechanism to prevent this… again, in the absence of oversight.

The citizens get to decide what their best collective interests are. They do that by, among other things, electing representatives that appoint officials to anti-trust committees.

Yes... I love when the "majority" decides to limit freedoms, under penalty of violence. Because apparently that is "the collective interest".

The most annoying bit is that it's never the majority. It's at best plurality that "gets" to decide.

I don't like it, but it's even worse when the minority decides to limit freedoms.

> When you say "controls" it's like you're saying Google has some kind of monopoly power that makes it hard to switch

No, "controls" means decides the rules and what is happening on that part of the market. Any number that is not 100% automatically implies it's not a perfect monopoly and it's possible to switch, but once you are within the area controlled by Google, it's Google's rules. Including removal any content Google doesn't like for any reason, blocking any action Google doesn't like for any reason, etc. So for 91% of the searches, Google decides what you can and can't see.

Google hasn't leveraged their ownership of the browser to enact censorship (frequently on behalf of most vile dictatorships) yet as far as I know (surveillance is another mater) but it certainly did and is using its control over search, advertising, video hosting, etc. markets to do that.

But how is that different than one company owning over 91% of the newspapers in the country? I think most people would agree that's a bad thing.

> If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.

All available search engines run on ads and offer roughly the same service. There is no competition in the market from the perspective of the consumer. How is this healthy?

> And yet anyone can easily switch to e.g. DuckDuckGo. If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.

Because people are conditioned by defaults. Google knows this, and so does every other business. Google had a good product, but Google also bought market share by bundling their products with random software (like adobes flash player, which later they unsurprisingly tried to kill), making a deal with Dell to bundle their software/toolbar, etc. Yes anyone in theory can switch, but its not really how people think. People are not as informed as we think they are, or aware of the pros and cons of various competing services and products. That includes most people, even people on this site, so its really not an elitist thing.

I can't switch to duckduckgo. I do the kind of intricate searches that don't find what I need there.

Try hiding your business’s website from Google and see how that goes for you.

Exactly, Google provides a lot of value. Stop acting like this is a one sided transaction. If you don't like the value proposition, you're free to leave anytime.

Just like everyone is free to leave their power company and install solar panels, just like everyone can leave their water company and have water tankered in. Just like you can leave your telecom company and use satellite data.

Just because a company is providing value that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be regulated. Just because you can technically leave a service doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't realistically locked into it and that that service isn't going to exploit that fact.

Google is not essential to live. You can also use Bing or any of the numerous alternatives. It’s not the same thing at all.

I don’t think it’s a nitpick at all. I agree that google is a private company and searchers have the option of using a different search at the click of an icon.

Usually I consider terms like “control” to be hotheaded but if you substitute “is in control of Which results are returned” you can see the consequence could be nefarious. This understanding informed antitrust theory up to the 1980s.

I don’t use Google for anything myself except for communicating with my gf’s kids’ scout troop. That doesn’t mean I think they have a bunch of evil geniuses cackling and rubbing their hands in building 42. The rehetoric makes me think some people do think this.

The cackling and rubbing of hands is an exaggeration of course but if anyone were going to be doing that it would be Google's customers, not Google's employees.

Tell your legislators you want to see antitrust action taken against Google!

They're abusing the hell out of their status. AMP, removal of adblock capability, driving web standards to potentially be more opaque, walled gardens, automated removal and takedown, etc.

If you're using adblock on my website - you're an asshole. You're consuming my work without a just compensation.

If it were easy, I'd have my server not serve anyone using an adblock... and instead present them with a paywall... Which you would probably bitch about.

Don't visit the sites that do that then. See? Magic!

No one is obligated to provide you with content on your terms, other than the government.

You wanna check out web monetization API - https://webmonetization.org

> No one is obligated to provide you with content on your terms, other than the government.

Where does that law / moral come from?

If I could snap my fingers and remove all of the paywalled sites from the internet, I would. People continue to post them, and all they do is jam the signal. I should be compensated for time wasted clicking on these links and then again on the back button.

Until the industry adopts either microtransactions or federated publishing, I won't pay or sign up for most content. It's too inconvenient, and information is nearly infinite. You're just making the opportunity cost differential higher. I have better ways to spend my time.

And speaking to the advertising issue, I've never personally bought anything from an ad. They're annoying viruses being leveraged against my consciousness that I didn't consent to. That's bad enough without mentioning the tracking and deceptive practices they employ.

The whole economic model is a race to the bottom and is fucked. I'm sorry you're working in such a painful industry.

Look at what streaming did to the music industry. It's convenient. I pay monthly and have no ads. Do this please.

So... On a thread that is about monopoly power, you are arguing that all of media publishing transition to a payments monopoly?

Interesting...

Speaking of that why don't you select an ad network that doesn't try do malign things to your uses?

People will consume what they need to consume. It is on you how you profit from it without infringing upon the people's privacy or time or bandwidth.

You should charge for your content and cast away the advertisers.

Well then this is kinda your fault for not providing a market for ad networks that don't invade peoples privacy now isn't it.

Federated. There isn't a single music streaming service.

There's 0 demand for it.

Spotify and the likes addressed a need in the market.

Advertising is still completely adequate method for compensating a lot of publishers.

Others, who don't mind giving the aggregators 30%, provide you with the ability to subscribe from Apple Newstand and similar services. There's been a bunch of services that tried to do content access like this... uptake was completely dismal.

Your [1] is incorrect.

It doesn't even include Baidu, which dominates China and has something like >12% of the world's market share for search engines, so how can Google have 91%?

The source is bullshit. Baidu, the Chinese search engine, has less than 3% market share in Asia? Where Google is banned for over a billion people?

Who believes this crap? You might as well have linked to a Facebook comment.

Like half of those billion people aren't even on the internet. According to the same source, Baidu has 65% of the Chinese search market, which seems about right. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ch...

Honestly about a year ago I decided to switch to an iPhone once the "contract" is up. I have used iOS and I didnt find it anymore special, but it isn't really that much different to me to be bothered by using either one. I will also take that moment to ungooglify my life including email and such.

I did the same a few years back, use duck duck go for search, iphone for phone, apple maps for directions, firefox|safari|brave for browser, it is really easy to get google out of your life, only thing I am still looking to replace is mail, if anyone has found something that is free(or relatively cheap) and is reliable I'd love to know.

Try fastmail. $30 for an annual plan and it works like a charm. A lot of people in here recommend it.

Do they still recycle the address if you stop paying?

In 2020 everyone serious about own stuff should use own domains.

Didn't happen in my case, but I can't speak for everyone. I tried an e-mail for a month, the trial ended, six months later when I went for the full plan it was still available.

I will sound silly, but I've gone with Outlook, just kinda waiting on them to allow me to use my domain from namecheap. They only support godaddy, if that doesn't change I'll find a different provider, but I went with them because I can get actual Office applications along with ad-free mail. I got an @outlook.com email though, but waiting on their domain support to not suck so much.

Protonmail[1] is a viable free alternative to google/microsoft/yahoo. Also has client-side encryption and is hosted in a mountain bunker in Switzerland, so there's lots of points for security & privacy.

[1] https://protonmail.com/

What is your alternative to YouTube?

Pornhub.

https://www.cnet.com/news/gun-channel-moves-to-pornhub-after...

That has obvious discoverability problems.

Bitchute seems to be gaining traction. Currently, they're where you go to watch banned videos and banned content producers like Infowars, Soph, etc.

PeerTube is one alternative that is recommended.

Does PeerTube have an answer to the discoverability problem yet? That's one thing I've noticed in the past.

It works if you have a specific URL to click on for a video, but if I just want to "find" a video, that will be relatively difficult.

Twitch.tv! It's not just for live streams either. You can watch lots of previously recorded streams as well. It's also not just for video games (though it is predominantly video games).

I can't think of a decent alternative, for learning khan academy is good. Sounds like a source for disruption :)

LBRY recently launched a web interface.

youtube-dl

Take a look at https://purelymail.com/ - $10 per year - unlimited domains and aliases.

A lot of webhost + domain offers come with complimentary email. Just remember to pay your renewals or all hell breaks loose.

if you have your own domain you can set up a mail server

purelymail.com is hella cheap!

That actually looks decently cheap but has anybody else on HN used this before? I don't think I've heard of it till now.

Apple is only better because it is smaller but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it... A pure and open Linux phone is the only way that it could get better.

"but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it"

Can you provide evidence of this? Not that I don't believe you (nor do I have any financial interest in Apple), but I'm not a fan of seeing baseless accusations on HN.

Sorry, I thought that it was well known... did a quick search and found this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/18/imessage-...

duck.com for more examples...

That isn’t an example at all. It’s a random assertion from a 3rd party with no validation.

so what is an example, according to you?

The onus is on you, the person who made the claim, to find examples that have enough evidence to be taken as factual.

I don’t trust any big company and assume they’re all lying, but I trust random online assertions without evidence even less.

An example would be them actually being shown to be lying about something factual.

Not just someone offering an opposing opinion.

”This article is more than 6 years old”

At that time Google’s motto was still “Do no evil”...

> At that time Google’s motto was still “Do no evil”...

still 2 years after Steve Jobs died which I think had a better moral compass

Until there's a proper mainstream one I can buy from my cell provider I don't think I can make such a switch. I need very specific apps on my phone for work.

which app is that if you don't mind me asking?

I've worked at two different places that had very specific 2 factor apps they used. I wouldn't be able to authenticate anywhere without iOS or Android.

Hm, I've switched to:

DuckDuckGo - search

Brave - browser

Android - you've got me there; but I might switch to Apple next year.

Gmail - ditto, but I'm hoping to switch to proton or similar

Youtube - alternatives like Bitchute exist for banned videos

Fortunately, although the GOOG does have a lot of best-in-class products out there, competition is rising. Consumers benefit from lots of choices.

Google biggest advantage (and its the same thing Apple and Microsoft are doing) is integration of services that ultimately make the users life easier. Personally I use a Mac and iPhone and all my data is stored in iCloud. I do a lot of my personal work with MS Office and my email is Gmail. But over time I have found that choosing an ecosystem does benefit you. Recently I switched my work tasks to Google suite products and dropped my Apple TV for an android based solution. The main advantage is now my TV, browser (chrome), gmail, youtube are all synced together. I can watch videos on my tv and save others to pick up on my phone later. I can edit my docs anywhere and link them into my emails easily. I have debated moving from Apples Photos to Google Photos so that my images are all centrally located for my own ease of use and cross platform integration. I still back up all files to a secondary drive and forward copies of important emails to my outlook account in case I ever get locked out of my google account, but the integration is really nice.

These numbers are just for the US. Comparing this to the AT&T break-up is not even similar, because Google has but even bigger market share when you consider their international operations as well.

You're toggling between global stats and US specific stats.

For example Android is ~52% of the US market.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

It is not just monopolistic control of their specific areas of interest. They have had pretty tight integration with the State Department, especially under the previous administration, getting involved in negotiations and all kinds of affairs: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems

(quote from there):

> Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.14

Are you saying the document quoted is not real? Sure, the scruples of the site may not be in alignment with yours, but if the data is valid...

Wikileaks has a rather infamous history of overstating the significance and meaning of the leaks they publish in ways that is straight up misinformation, or borderline misinformation. I'd take anything they say with a serious grain of salt.

What is a better source? Can you show some examples?

Another one:

Over 75,000 people are happily working for G with many more eager to join

Really hope the decentralized tech stack will get there over time. Fingers crossed.

Pied Piper?