[throwawaybbb]

Imagine if 70% of roads were privately owned by one company. That company, call it roadle, opened a restaurant chain. There is free parking in front of all roadle restaurants. There are always roadworks around all non roadle restaurants.

This is what search is like today.

[unishark]

The problem with this analogy is it implies people are forced to use roadle if they want to get to 70% of places. They can only allow their own destinations and cease to be a search engine at all. However in this case any competitor can produce an equally complete road system. This is why roadle has to constantly add additional services to entice drivers. Otherwise they're a commodity. To treat it like a private-road dystopia is to deprive customers of the benefits of competition in this market.

[trianglem]

That analogy does not work. It’s more like google is a telephone directory.

[cycrutchfield]

Not at all the same comparison. People that don't like Google or their additions to organic search results can simply switch to another competitor.

[mamurphy]

>Not at all the same comparison.

No, their comparison was perfect! They said roadle owned 70% of roads, not all of them. Sure, businesses can hope that they get their traffic from non-Google search, but if customers are going to Google for 70+% of search, that's a doomed business strategy.

Their point isn't that Google is bad for consumers, it's that it's unfair for businesses if Google is driving all the search to its own properties that you are trying to compete with.

[ironmagma]

Google is essentially a piece of international infrastructure at this point. If it went out of existence, the productivity of millions of people would take at least a minor nose dive and the funnels for user conversion for businesses would change drastically overnight leading to a macroscopic restructuring of business priorities.