Comment by echelon
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services.
In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.
In the search space though, competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.
Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.