alt Hacker NewsComparing something to a public utility is not me saying it's literally a public utility. Google runs a monopolistic service that is essential to a lot of our public life, in a segment that has high cost of entry and infrastructure cost. They make the service worse to make more money. It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized. The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Other search engines exist. Bing is right there, and Microsoft is more than willing to eat the high cost of entry and infrastructure cost.
> It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized.
I agree that electricity and railroads should be regulated like Google Search.
It's really weird that snail mail in the US is a government monopoly. When even social democratic Germany managed to privatise them.
> The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Don't a lot of people in the US use iPhones? They don't ship with Chrome as the default browser, do they?
(And yes, Safari is built on top of the same open source engine as Chrome. But you can hardly call using the same open source project a 'monopoly'. Literally anyone can fork it.)
There's also plenty of other browsers available.