[giga_chad]

Google has us all by the balls. As a small business owner, in my particular market, I can't survive without their services, even though they suck and I hate them, and their entire company.

My business can be destroyed by Google on a whim at a moment's notice. How did it get to be so bad?

[concinds]

The best thing to do is add opening hours/other info to Apple Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMaps once they start allowing that. Right now Google has a monopoly because every local business in most countries just bother updating opening hours in Google Maps, so consumers have no choice but to use it. Apple and Bing aren't open, but at least it would help remove Google's monopoly on useful information.

[YetAnotherNick]

That's an odd way to frame it. "even though they suck" they don't suck in giving you free traffic though and your complain is that they could stop giving it?

[kortilla]

That’s quite often how people view protection rackets. It’s very easy to hate a monopoly that has infested your life.

People used to depend on at&t for business and still hate it back when they owned the entire phone system (including the phone on the wall).

[KronisLV]

Essentially Google has filled a vacuum where other solutions could have existed, say, something based on the OSM dataset and non-proprietary technologies - possibly a federated set of solutions for finding businesses like cafes, restaurants or shops and such.

Now, it's pretty hard if not impossible to compete with them thanks to the network effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

How could any company that's interested in being "open" compete with a behemoth that has the advantage of countless engineer-years that have been spent developing their solutions, as well as millions of participants that have given them the data, which probably cannot be legally mined and imported and certainly isn't exported?

The answer is that they can't and being upset about this is probably a valid emotional response, even though it could be worded a bit better.

Edit: I can't help but to think of how the industry handles DNS domains, for example, the .lv domain for my country is looked after by the University of Latvia: https://www.nic.lv/en/about-us

I wonder what a similarly distributed registry of companies, for example, run by the governments of each country (which could then be integrated with the company registers) would look like. Of course, whether the quality of engineering or the overall experience would be up to par with Google's is debatable.

That said, the distributed COVID contact tracing approach that we saw was a little bit like this - even if Google and Apple did a lot of work for the underlying library, each country developed their own contact tracing app and eventually all of those could interoperate. There's no actual reason why the FOSS community couldn't build something like that, but for finding companies etc.

[shadowgovt]

I have no particular expectation that if we were to break up Google, some kind of grand federated system would take its place.

Competitors had decades to get a federated solution together and simply didn't. Attempts got mired in squabbling over data ownership, bickering about costs and fees, failure to agree upon an open protocol, and all manner of other nonsense that Google was able to solve by being a single player and coordinating all the moving parts internally.

[stronglikedan]

They can provide services and still suck (and do), if there's not a viable alternative way to acquire those services. No flaw in OP's logic.

[giga_chad]

Yes, what gave it away?

[AnthonyMouse]

> My business can be destroyed by Google on a whim at a moment's notice. How did it get to be so bad?

Market concentration. Almost like you might benefit from some kind of Ending Platform Monopolies Act.

I wonder if they've considered how this kind of messaging could backfire. You tell a bunch of small businesses who don't like you keeping them in a cage that there is some pending legislation and they should write to Congress. They might look into it first. Are you sure you still want them to write to Congress?

[otagekki]

OpenStreetMaps could be used as a good enough alternative and could easily be the Wikipedia for Maps, but sadly the search results on Google would never allow that.

[swiley]

Work to get away from them and try to think ahead next time you use online services.

[nightcracker]

If a significant amount of your new customers find your physical shop through Google maps, what can you do? If someone wants to find a hardware store near them, good chance they'll just write "hardware store" on Google maps. The entry point of people's search is Google - you've already lost the game before it ever started.

[giga_chad]

I don't use their services and yet my livelihood is entirely dependent on them (and Facebook). That's how bad it is.

[amundsentb]

You get a service that your livelihood depends on. It seems to me like the proper response is more like gratitude.

[d3nj4l]

I'm very grateful that the mob didn't break my thumbs.

[sokoloff]

Same way that Apple, Amazon, or Facebook got to where they are: working to give users what users want (or think they want).

[chalst]

Are you aware that both Facebook and Amazon have used their market dominance and ability to buy smaller firms to prevent serious threats from emerging?

[tantalor]

Yellow pages has us all by the balls. As a small business owner, in my particular market, I can't survive without their services, even though they suck and I hate them, and their entire company.

My business can be destroyed by Yellow pages on a whim at a moment's notice. How did it get to be so bad?

[orang2tang]

I don't have a ton of knowledge about Yellow Pages, but something makes me thing that them being in print prevented them from changing the meta at a moment's notice, and therefore being able to destroy any section of businesses at a moment's notice.

[JohnWhigham]

Weird analogy since Google killed the yellow pages.