They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.
Oh boy is this incorrect.
Outside the Silicon Valley / well-educated upper middle class / tech worker bubble, tech companies are more trusted than most political parties and government and religious institutions, and this is true across the world as polls show. People who are not into tech have no idea about Google's business deals or App Store anti-steering provisions. They use Google as long as it delivers great results, and switch to searching on Tiktok or asking Chat GPT if it doesn't. HN is probably one of the most anti-tech places on the internet, maybe outside of Mastodon.
I think HN is more the bellwether.
The bar is that low huh?
But otherwise I don't think an average non-tech person would be likely to notice a difference between Bing and Google. And ms, ddg, Kagi and perplexity would love to see lots of people actually looking for alternatives.
Docs/sheets/pages/whatever wouldn't change since they're supported by the paying users. The rest, Google is going to kill at some point anyway like they did with hundred other projects.
They only one I really don't know how it would be affected is Android.
Apple levels of arrogance.
Apple tried the same approach when the EU was slapping them down with DMA and few were having it, calling Apple out for their immature responses delusionally thinking that because people were glued to their phones they would some how value that above their representative government.
If standard oil had control of the information space history would be very different. Not even Ma Bell had the power that google has
Meanwhile just about every product Google has I can use someone else.
They don't even ban you (it's very hard to get banned on youtube) and it's the advertisers themselves who decide this.
>nor did they scan people’s communications They don't scan emails and never have.
And you could move to an alternative browser/search/youtube (if someone could host one profitably) by the end of the day.
But sure, being de-monetized on a website, that's way worse.
And yes, Ma Bell had the ability to listen in to every conversation had on a wire. Not just some, all. Meanwhile most conversations I have on the internet don't involve Google in the slightest.
Google can be your email, your phone, your ISP, own your health data, control what you watch, listen, search for, it can control your ability to make money or even control access to your data and documents.
Can be.
Google doesn't control what I watch. Google doesn't control what I listen to. Google doesn't control my email. Google doesn't own my health data. Google isn't my ISP. Google doesn't control my data and documents. Google doesn't control my ability to make money. Google doesn't control what I search for.
Meanwhile with Ma Bell, it was Ma Bell or just don't have telecommunications.
In a world where the competition's price for most of those services is "free", charging for used-to-be-free stuff sounds like a sure-fire suicidal business strategy.