Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.
Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
> Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'
People would always be complaining that Google wouldn't index their pages for months but if you: (1) burn an RSS feed, (2) subscribe to the burned feed, and (3) add items to the feed, the items would be indexed almost immediately.
I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.
(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)
Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.