[phantarch]

It feels like a centralized organizing service for web content (and by extension, retail goods sold online) is an inevitability in today's internet. If we switched google off, some other search engine would replace them simply because people need to be able to find things on the internet in a way that doesn't involve spending 30 minutes running through different "top hotlinks" lists on obscure web pages.

To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years from now?