I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.
If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.
It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.
Most CEOs plan and hope for it.
And that is a part of the problem.
I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation.
For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.
Were all built within google. For most people (who do not sell software on the internet) we get a great trade from the current state of things!
Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.
Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.
Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.
Chrome's renderer (Blink) is indeed a fork of Safari's renderer (WebKit) but that in turn was forked from Konqueror's renderer (KHTML).
They're not disputing that google has provided all these services, they're arguing that google's ability to subsidize them prevents market solutions for these same problems being produced.
The internet is, in this view, somewhat of a planned economy with Google as the central planning committee. You get google's maps and google's docs and google's search, rather than a maps marketplace, a docs marketplace, and a search marketplace.
Google is able to enforce this on the market because it holds a unique position where it can extract a significant amount of the value generated in the internet economy in 'ad taxes'.
Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.
I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.
People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking.
The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."
You know what will be short lived? The disruption itself. We're not talking about the death of Sol.
The most significant fact in all of this is that everything will stabilize and we'll all be fine (except the monopoly, which is the point). And when it's all said and done, we'll come out the other side better for it.
Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free.
>How is this a desirable outcome?
The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.
Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems:
- There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need.
- When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results.
99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues.
Thank God for Kagi.
> gmail
Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail?
> maps
I'll grant you this one.
> android
It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.
> chrome
The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior.
Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.
Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.
Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.
> Gmail
Gmail is the best email provider of all time by a huge amount and has been since it's inception. I use proton mail as well and it's worse, a lot worse. It's slower, has fewer features and is not as good looking. From what I've seen of apple Mail and outlook they are worse still.
> Android
Personally, I prefer Android. There are a lot of things I'd miss going to iPhone. Like custom launchers, having a different browser, an app drawer, the way widgets work, ect...
> Chrome
I am concerned about the chromium engine creating a browser monoculture so I use Firefox. I have used Firefox every day for years and I have to say it's worse. Whenever I use chrome for a small thing I need I realize that its better. It's faster, better looking, things just work on it (I know part of this is because of its dominance but that's irrelevant when evaluating product quality). I don't use it but I'm not going to pretend that it's worse.
It is a bit like comparing a bank, a stock option broker, and a gambling site, and discussing which provide a better product to hold your money. It make no sense comparing them unless we view them as providing the same service.
Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back.
The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.
I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty.
As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great.
Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.
People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.
I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased.
Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.
Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712
I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab".
As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.
In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before
Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive.
I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month.
Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.
- one skippable 5s ad
- two skippable 5s ads
- one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads
- aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable
- two 15s unskippable ads
- removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip
- removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings
God knows what they're cooking up next.
And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all.
I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices.
To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost.
The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.
It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works.
Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
Remove active content from online advertising and I'll disable my ad blocker.
No, that’s not how it works, at all.
I give money to some people on Patreon, I pay for Nebula, but I am never going to give Google a single euro willingly. I’ll leave YouTube in a heartbeat the moment the people I follow (whom I am already giving money otherwise) make their content available elsewhere.
It's good you do it, thank you, and people run at the opportunity to show everyone they are doing the right thing (creating an illusion of popularity), but I can tell you from having seen the stats - essentially nobody does it.
Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.
I believe you, really. I still prefer that than people profiting off me without my consent.
There is hope, there are some media who manage with strategies ranging from complete paywalls (like Nebula, though I would be very curious to know how profitable it is for the uploaders) to the opposite (like the Guardian, who seem to be getting enough money despite very little friction to get to the articles).
Thinking about good old-fashioned newspapers, most of the readership did not pay, either. There is no reason why a combination of subscribers, non-invasive advertising, and sponsorship could not accommodate a certain number of freeloaders.
> Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.
Nebula has a chicken and egg problem, and YouTube has an infinitely broader reach. It certainly is not perfect. That said, I don’t think Nebula needs to make as much money as YouTube, just enough so that people can make a living producing good stuff instead of slop optimised for ads.
YouTube is no longer using ads to pay the bills. They're using them to be user hostile.
Normally I would say "just use a different service". But YouTube is a de facto monopoly.
Hence, if YouTube wants to act user hostile, you are well within your moral rights to be service hostile.
The same people telling us to 'just watch ads' then complain when the web gets a bit more crappy the next week, when another service or site uses the shifted window of tolerable behaviour to become more user hostile in chase of a bigger cut of the loot.
And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.
This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.
Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).
As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.
Google tapped into that by creating an ad economy, which since it's inception also comes with a payment optional feature (ad-blocking).
People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.
I actually wonder how much people actually like the current web. People bitching about popups and ads is enough of a staple of our culture.
What Google "gives" isn't popping from nowhere, the billions they use to fund it still came from us, just in indirect ways.
If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.
People are blind to this, they think Google is a charity that got greedy. Meanwhile they haven't let a Google ad through their ad blocker for 15 years.
Youtube Premium is $13.99/mo or you get ads with also zero tolerance for ad blocking. We've already been there for a while wherever Google is serious about it.
I don't think people understand that it would be trivial for Google to block anyone with an ad blocker from accessing any Google domain.
And if they did that, cut off the people who use the services but never pay, those people would complain.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/107221-youtube-anti-ad-blocker...
And little of value would be lost.
No. Google is making money, it is not a charity. More than that, they do everything they can to obfuscate that fact and brainwash us into thinking we just get it for free thanks to their generosity. It is not the case at all. All these services are data funnels for the actual main business of Google, which is to sell ads.
If they make money off our backs, it is not unreasonable to have some expectations.
Which is why the services exists at all, thank god for that. What it is though, is cheaper and better than the alternatives, which is why their products are so overwhelmingly popular.
There are many difficult-to-estimate costs for monopolies, especially ones like this. That does not mean that the costs do not exist. That's the entire point in making people believe that things are "free" or "cheap", you rob them of even the opportunity to even evaluate alternatives to realize how much better it could be. There are very good reasons that these kinds of things should be illegal.
Actually, we don't. Google is a prime culprit in the 'enshittification' of the Internet. As Cory Doctorow can explain[0] to you.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#b...
At least they opened up the password completion APIs.
Google, interestingly, is much better.
I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.
Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.
And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.
And don't even get me started on gmail!
What functionality are you expecting?
In the first case they could have paid someone $20 on fiverrr or whatever to go and physically look to see if it's closed and update it more quickly. Not sure about the second case, but either way if a maps service put in the effort to have more accurate hours they could do so, and that would be a reasonable thing for users to pay for.
And even if Gmail does have a majority of the market, there are plenty of other email providers.