US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
380 comments
·May 10, 2025snielson
CobrastanJorji
This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.
Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
ChuckMcM
At Blekko we advocated for this as well.
Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.
Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.
It would be a very different world.
indolering
Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?
nashashmi
You mean like a white label search engine? Customized with settings?
mullingitover
Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.
My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.
toomuchtodo
This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).
Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.
mullingitover
The problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would need to change and allow ccbot instead.
It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
fallingknife
Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?
sanderjd
Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and storing the data? That's a very different thing than "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it is undifferentiated.
bbarnett
One problem, it leaves one place to censor.
I agree that each front end should do it, but you can bet it will be a core service.
vasco
> The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity
No they can't but do you have a source?
oceanplexian
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly.
How so?
A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.
sokoloff
Costs almost nothing, but returns even less.*
There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis.
* - or is perceived to return
stackskipton
Not everyone wants to deal with caching proxy because they think the load on their site under normal operations is fine if it's rendered server side.
null
Onavo
In the past month there were dozens of posts about using proof of work and other methods to defeat crawlers. I don't think most websites tolerate heavy crawling in the era of Vercel/AWS's serverless "per request" and bandwidth billing.
immibis
You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven, monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs makes that impossible until they switch away.
tananaev
Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's because of the all the data it knows about website stats and user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know what websites are good based on user preferences and that's where you need to have data. It's impossible to build anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of user data.
luckylion
Sounds like you're implying that they are using Google Analytics to feed their ranking, but that's much easier to game than links are. User-signals on SERP clicks? There's a niche industry supplying those to SEOs (I've seen it a few times, I haven't seen it have any reliable impact).
AtlasBarfed
Page ranking sounds like a perfect application of artificial intelligence.
If China can apply it for total information awareness on their population, Google can apply it on page reliability
1vuio0pswjnm7
CommonCrawl is not a vlaid comparison. Most robots.txt target CCBot.
hkpack
Most of the tech is set for being a monopoly due to the negligible variable cost associated with serving a customer.
Thus being even slightly in front of others is reinforced and the gap only widens.
Aurornis
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site,
Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience.
I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
> My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground
I think there’s a lot of that in this thread and it’s opening the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.
mattmaroon
Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers than they already do? It would seem that it’s only a monopoly insofar as it’s really expensive to do and almost nobody else thinks they can recoup the cost.
natebc
A few?
We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done.
EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
CHALLENGE: 829,586
DENY: 621,462
ALLOW: 96,810
This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security" company peddling a WAF.
robinsonb5
A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is enough to cause real availability problems (and expense) for numerous sites.
One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.
So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.
shadowgovt
Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.
The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).
dang
Discussed at the time, in case anyone is curious:
Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)
rubitxxx2
Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.
Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?
This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)
I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
lolinder
> Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone
Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
rubitxxx2
> Ooh, can we?
If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote comes true, yes we can!
Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
gamblor956
You jest, but splitting out just certain Internet Explorer features was part of the Microsoft antitrust resolution. It's what made Chrome's ascendancy possible.
AtlasBarfed
I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.
You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.
Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.
I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.
I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.
Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.
Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.
If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.
Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
486sx33
Google killed Google. They should not have decided to become evil. Search can easily be removed, G Suite should be separate too.
freedomben
> Search can easily be removed
This strikes me like "two easy steps to draw an owl. First draw the head, then draw the body". I generally support some sort of breakup, but hand waving the complexities away is not going to do anybody any good
jmyeet
That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.
I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?
I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider...
luckydata
It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.
alabastervlog
If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.
riku_iki
> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.
it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.
I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
AtlasBarfed
At this point, why are you so concerned about Google's business?
This was 10 years ago. I could argue a moral Superior that Google possessed over Microsoft and Facebook, but man those days are looooooong gone.
ketzo
Really? Google would still have an astonishingly large lead in the ad markets.
riku_iki
Not sure how they could hold lead in case they lose search traffic.
Disposal8433
[flagged]
minwcnt5
Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.
They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.
Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
beambot
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
Someone steelman this for me...?
felineflock
YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.
Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.
From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.
lolinder
> seems much less anti-competitive by nature
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
croes
Google killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used.
The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.
Not really less anti-competitive.
skybrian
By one measure, Edge has 5% market share, twice that of Firefox.
On Desktop it’s 13%, which is second place.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
fc417fc802
Does that chart differentiate between before and after edge internals became chromium though?
cyanydeez
Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.
HaZeust
Public goods are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't match the criteria.
fc417fc802
You've cherrypicked the phrase "public good" and applied an out of context definition that doesn't fit. The thing being discussed was public utilities. Those are a sort of public good in the same sense that public parks, public libraries, and free education are all public goods.
The local electric utility isn't "non-excludable" (unless you ignore criminal law) but it is certainly a public utility, a natural monopoly, and public good by most metrics. The vast majority of jurisdictions regulate it accordingly.
photonthug
Interesting definition. This applies to almost literally nothing except Jefferson’s candle and IP. Actual literal fire is considered worthless and IP is bazillions of dollars of closely guarded secrets. Public transits, seemingly unlimited water sources, or neighborhood parks all suffer from overcrowding so this diminishing availability thing is tough to meet
s1artibartfast
Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities.
rexpop
Interesting distinction!
Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision.
However, utilities are typically excludable (service can be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so they are better classified as private or quasi-public goods.
So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should be public utilities?
A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries are most efficiently served by a single provider, making competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that public goods should be funded through taxation based on individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the government should organize and finance such goods, often through public utility models.
So I wouldn't say public goods have nothing to do with public utilities.
null
danboarder
This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".
Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.
So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.
And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.
ChuckMcM
I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.
wvenable
Search will become AI. It might be that there be zero "AI" players involved though as Google is just as capable of doing AI.
danboarder
Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?
MPSFounder
I will take that bet Chuck. Maybe not completely replace, but AI will be the defacto search platform. I find myself using Google less and less these days
bdangubic
I only use Google when I am in the mood to search for something and find it below the fold after scrolling through mindless semi-related sponsored links
SV_BubbleTime
If for no other reason that I can perform combination searches.
I don’t need to search MQTT and AWS and v3/v5 and max packet sizes all separately anymore.
0xbadcafebee
I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.
Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
- Google Maps
- Google Mail
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Groups
- Google Forms
- Google Cloud
- Google OAuth
- Google Search
- Google Analytics
- Chrome
- Android
- Android Auto
- Fitbit
- Google Fi
- Google Fiber
- Google Flights
- Google Translate
- Google Pay
- Waymo
Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.
There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
wavemode
It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable company
wpm
Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks.
Better late than never.
x0x0
This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through.
etc.
hshshshshsh
Isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will find hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly. What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.
jmward01
Kind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?
light_triad
It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.
bogwog
> and provides liquidity by acquiring startups
You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.
I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.
Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
threeseed
Of course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI.
And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company and not the only one.
Workaccount2
The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.
This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
sambeau
The really uncompetitive behaviour started when Google removed the search string from search links. That killed 3rd party (and home-grown) analytics, which in turn facilitated large scale tracking of users from site with analytics to site with analytics.
If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you had to use Google Analytics.
xiphias2
AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.
Ekaros
Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.
Seattle3503
> but data isn’t the deciding factor.
That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and win in that market too.
fundaThree
It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
jaco6
[dead]
iamkonstantin
It would be cool if Apple/Google/gatekeepers considered similar measures for the App Store / Google Play related search where similar constraints apply.
creato
It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.
At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
hu3
Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google.
Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
stonogo
You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.
RainyDayTmrw
Make no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit, if only incidentally.
In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.
sroussey
So should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?
RainyDayTmrw
I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.
erxam
Is it really?
I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes.
In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves. Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect their emails 100% of the time and they've won.
EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm not so sure.
owebmaster
Google started to merge both (ChromeOS+Android) so maybe they would be would together
The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search