Destroy Google To Gleefully Rebuild The Internet
While my SEO friends are keeping a close eye on how AI impacts Google search results, there’s another massive hurricane brewing that could alter Google’s business: a monopoly ruling.
“…The Google case is almost certainly the most consequential US government lawsuit against a tech company since the Justice Department sued Microsoft for bundling its web browser with Windows in 1998.”
Yikes.
Most of the time these have no effect, but it doesn’t matter until it does. And much like a hurricane, there have been a ton of monopoly warnings in the past.
Though the case doesn’t look good. From the same Platformer article above:
Ultimately, Google controls more than 80 percent of the search market, and its size and power exert powerful control over the web and how money flows through it.
The government has to prove that this state of affairs was achieved through illegal means, though. And reading through press coverage, I’m struck by how few of the quoted law professors seem willing to argue that the Justice Department is on firm ground here. If the government somehow manages to win the case, the consensus seems to be that it will be through a novel interpretation of the law.
Even though as an SEO and content marketer, I’ve learned a lot about how to rank on Google, I still like the opportunity for different distribution channels.
If Google is not the default on your Safari Apple iPhone browser, then there’s a sliver of an opening for other competitors like Bing, DuckDuckGo, or even a way for Apple’s own.
It has the potential to rip into Google’s market share.
So much talk has been focused on the cable bundle, meanwhile the Google bundle (email, search, maps, ads, docs, storage, oh yeah YOUTUBE) and the Meta bundle (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Threads) and others like it have been chugging along.
A lot of traffic only goes to a few sites.
Google owns the top 2 sites (and Meta owns 3 out of the 10!)
I hope Google is splintered.
If this monopoly case against Google is the actual big one, I hope it gets blown to pieces.
And then we can gleefully rebuild it, by doing things like:
- More unoptimized blogs with meaning.
- Less monitoring
- Less cookies
- Newsletters by you, not algorithms.
Let’s trust people to curate for us, instead of algorithms.
That’s the internet so many want to rebuild.
Google is the default for so many, it’s the logistical place to start.
The only way to get there may be to nuke the whole thing.
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