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Comment by anders_p | Hacker News Reader

> People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL. So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

You talking like BUILDING A POWER PLANT is on par with drilling a well in your backward.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of DRILLING A WELL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than BUILDING A POWER PLANT.

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Does that mean water shouldn't be a utility?

Or what was your point exactly?

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It's relatively simple and easy to change your default search engine and/or type in a different url, in fact, it quite literally costs you $0 (as in - it doesn't cost you any more to use ddg over google), so digging a well, and the further cost of routing your pipes to pull from that underground water is infinitely more expensive to do. This is the principle behind utility companies being regulated: it's insanely expensive to do the alternative of using that utility company. Now, Apple and Google (in terms of Android) might need to be considered some sort of public utility (eg. providing an app store) since it would cost competitors tens of billions of dollars to match the existing ecosystem, but Google Search is far from being considered a utility.

The point is neither drilling a well or building your own power plant are realistic alternatives for 99% of the people. Whereas switching to ddg is a realistic alternative for 99% of the people.

Is that also a realistic alternative for a business?

To just place their ads on DDG? Where only about 2% of consumers are? And a huge part of DDG's users have ad block?

That would be a death sentence for a business, when the competitors have access to >80% of consumers on Google.

The lawsuit is about Google and their customers (the advertisers), NOT their users (who are actually part of the product Google sells).

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