Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
I gave you examples where it has. Yahoo’s massive search lead was completely destroyed by Google, who offered a much better product at the time, and they even tried the “one-stop shop” thing that Google is known for today.
But that’s not what companies tend to do. Once companies get a commanding lead, they take their foot off the gas and try to rake in profits. That happened to Intel, and look where they’re at now. As long as there’s no anti-competitive behavior, the system will eventually correct itself, because the dominant company will take its foot off the gas. If it doesn’t, then it really doesn’t matter if they have a massive marketshare because the customer is happy (e.g. Valve), but that’s incredibly rare.
In a fair market, you won’t just have one challenger though, you’ll have tons. Investors love underdog success stories because going from nothing to significant market share makes a lot more money than maintaining a lead, so there will always be support for challengers to the status quo. Look at cars, Tesla ate everyone’s lunch on EVs to become the most valuable car company. People thought the car market was largely impossible to break into, yet Tesla was able to do it. Why? Lots of capital and a strong, new-ish tech (yes, EVs weren’t new, but fast EVs were).
Yeah, monopolies will try to buy their smaller competitors, and it’s on regulators to block those sales if they’re anti-competitive, and it’s also on those smaller competitors to say no because they believe in their product.
By separating the various components so they don’t have as much power.
Right now, a competitor can’t really win at search because it’s not the default everywhere, and Google has basically paid to be the default everywhere. So breaking that anti-competitive behavior is the first step. A company also can’t win at video because Google subsidizes YouTube with its profitable search business, so if that’s forced to be profitable on its own, it’ll have to raise prices, which creates an opportunity for a challenger to step in. For web browsers, Google basically has massive intertia, which it maintains by having Chrome be default on Android, and Chrome is the lynchpin to pretty much everything. The solution there is to force Android to be self-sufficient (i.e. provide it’s own, non-Chrome browser), and for Chromebooks to also be independently successful (i.e. separate it from the Google Search product).
If each of Google’s products had to be profitable on their own merits, competitors would have a realistic shot.
If you’ll look at the market though, there are competitors that are ready to start taking marketshare:
So if you break up Google, the market is ready for competition, they’re just being suppressed because of Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
That’s how business generally goes. The successful ones don’t attack the golden goose directly, but instead chip away at the edges. That’s what Proton, Kagi, etc are essentially doing, and AFAIK they are commercially successful, they just have a hard time competing with “free.”
I’m not talking about every government, I’m talking about this one specific government, because that’s the one that’s relevant in this discussion.
I do think that other governments also suck, they just suck differently. I just think the motivations for governments just don’t align properly for certain classes of services. But to make that case, I’d have to talk in the context of a specific government and a specific service, and in this case I’m talking about the US government and services Google provides.