You're not wrong, but I think rather than bringing up counter-examples, you've produced a list of similar problems.
When someone tries to find a new website someone told them about for the first time... what % of that is filtered through Google? If it's a majority, which I suspect it is, then it's still definitely a problem.
The side effects of their search algorithms and how they control the flow of information has also been a topic of regular discussion/scrutiny for many years (just one example here [1])
> and if they really tried people would leave
Where would they go?
- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
- [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/google-engineer-reveals-searc...
- Google doesn't censor anything
- Google censors things that a lot of people agree are offensive
The 2nd gets into tricky territory, because not everyone agrees on what is/is not offensive. I happen to think that most of the things they remove are probably good to remove. But the implication is still that Google wields (and at times uses) enormous power.
Things get even more grey (and potentially problematic) when you get into ranking algorithms, which have the power to sway opinions on major topics/events.
And as you mentioned, my parent comment is also a response to the very direct (and incorrect) claim:
> It seems that they do [control information], but they don't.
maps - apple, microsoft, openstreetmap
mail - dozens of providers
compute - amazon, microsoft, digital ocean, linode, rackspace
Not sure what else google do, I rarely use them
I am not sure about that. People are generally slow to change habits, especially that Google's control will not grow in a sudden fashion, but rather incrementally.