Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine.

However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.

But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm.

(I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)

> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm

Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again.

It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm?

Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.

A sea of comments and this one is the only one mentioning Bork. Well played. Hopefully we can swim closer to looking at things in the round rather than this very narrow and very conservative view of the structures in which we live and operate.

> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm.

Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm.

It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.

> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm.

It kills competition since most of them are financed by an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without competition we get such nice things like randomized automated life time bans, non existent customer service, products that are randomly killed, overly anti competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just one of many many issues.

There are entire businesses that run entirely on instagram or etsy, which don't even touch SEO.

You completely missed the point of the comment.

Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data.

Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results.

Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products.

HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?

> Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data.

Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the data and then making their own in house products?

Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off successful products down to the color and bottle shape.

But any idiot can figure out which are the successful products on those search engines. They are literally there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity.

The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.

But any idiot can’t get Walmart or Amazon to prominently place their copycat product on shelves or in search results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the competitive placement of their products in the market.

For flights, you could just query the source directly: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/

Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA to search their flights.)

On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.

You could always write a program that fuzzed urls at random then downloaded whatever's at that address with curl!

OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal.

Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics.

So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it.

I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like.

There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.

No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.

Yes, you have to use the municipal electricity. You cannot lay your own power lines, it's illegal. And in most urban areas, you can't run your own generator for emissions restrictions. You also can't power your home with a bicycle. Even champion bicyclists output 50-100 watts.

Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.

Such a tiny, piddling outlook on the world.

You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and buckets. As others have said, you can do power with candles, bike generators, and wood fire.

Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell no.

I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond cave-man level.

Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies, effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be actively harmful.

Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-everything technological solution", it is actively attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best. We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to preserve our liberty.

Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?

You could just create battery trailer to power your house and drive to the next Tesla charging station with it whenever it runs low. No need for power lines or any power generation in your backyard. Maybe someone should propose that trailer idea to Elon? Tesla already produces everything necessary to take yourself of the grid, it only needs to be bundled up right.

No need for a trailer, since a typical EV already has more capacity than most home battery solutions. Example: A 2021 Tesla Model 3 Long Range AWD stores 82 kWh[0], while a PowerWall 2 only stores 13.5 kWh[1]. So a single Model 3 is the equivalent of up to 6 PowerWalls. All it's missing is official support for vehicle-to-grid connections.

[0] https://electrek.co/2020/11/10/tesla-model-3-82-kwh-battery-...

[1] https://www.smartsolarenergyco.com/tesla-powerwall-review/

You might want to rethink your bike claim; it is certainly possible.

Only as a technicality. Domestic electrical power use varies worldwide from “none” to “tens of kilowatts”. This, for example, is what it takes to run a UK household on bicycle electricity: https://youtu.be/C93cL_zDVIM

No, not even as a technicality. It is possible, full stop.

You can make that decision in rural areas. It costs a lot of money to get wires run to a new house. You might use solar instead with a generator as backup.

In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed, got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory for the house.

Almost like you don’t even own the house.

Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).

> so naturally there's a monopoly.

And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.

> creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly

So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?

Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive.

I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.

> So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?

Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete.

Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.

Imagine if thirty years ago we declared the yellow pages a public utility.