Interesting READ
http://theweek.com/articles/693488/google-monopoly--crushing-internet
I thought Google was the internet. How can the internet be crushing the internet. I think I'm missing something.
But this is the nub of it isn't it?
QuoteNow, it is true that Warner was getting most of his traffic from Google in the first place — which brings me right to the core of the case for regulation
The big question is what would the web look like if the Google Search engine disappeared overnight. Let them keep other services (if they can). But would having the search engine disappearing change anything? Everytime I've done a blind search engine test, Google wins by a lot, but realistically, Bing today is better than Google was five years ago. But then do we just go back to a Microsoft monopoly?
How do you actually get competition in search engines? And barring that, how do you regulate a search engine as a public utility? These aren't obvious.
We missed our chance back when there were still several other crawling search engines we should have broken up Google. If we broke it up now 1. Bing's servers would collapse, 2. It would leave MS with a monopoly. However MS is not in the advertising business the way Google is so a Bing monopoly would not be as bad. Also, breaking up Google would probably cause new players to enter the search field. Long term, that might be a good thing for the web, because IMHO it has gotten overly slick, corporate, shallow and filled with sheit mainly because of Google.