alt Hacker NewsThe consumer, who have never paid google a cent despite using their services daily for the last 20 years, likley spending a solid portion of their waking life on one of google's platforms, has never benefited?
And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?
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Has the cattle benefitted from the free food the rancher gave it? I suppose it's a question of perspective.
And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.
Google doesn't make money from you "paying a cent". They make money from you paying advertisers who pay Google. So the relevant metric is how much you spent on Google advertisers.
You have paid a lot, if not in money. You paid with your data, that Google read from your emails and searches, and sold for money.