[thewebguyd]

Financially? Sure. Politically? Not a chance, they'll get bailed out or partially nationalized.

Frontier labs will be considered essential to national security, Microsoft is basically a public utility at this point, Facebook is too important for the spread of propaganda (although this one has less of a case/justification for a government bailout), Amazon (via AWS) runs massive parts of the federal gov (along with Azure), Google dying would cause almost an immediate global depression (73% of mobiles run android, the massive ad network).

These companies are so entrenched in day to day operations and into the economy that they cannot fail without ushering in whats effectively dark ages 2.0

[okeuro49]

Is Google really a critical dependency for android? I've installed Lineage OS before which worked.

[thewebguyd]

Yes, because of play services. Eventually the world would adapt, but the immediate effect is that nearly every major commercial app that is increasingly requiring play integrity, play services will stop working. Push notifications will also break, as will the payment network. Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay etc are essentially shadow banks now.

The real impact of Google going dark though is less Android and more ads. Google fails, the revenue pipeline for 2 million + websites goes to zero overnight, and millions of digial businesses and agencies will go bankrupt within weeks. It would completely collapse the business model of the modern internet.

[chrismorgan]

You almost make me hope, that the web can be saved.

[SkiFire13]

And you did not notice how many things require Google Apps/Play Integrity? Heck, most people don't even know how to install apps without the Play Store.

[spwa4]

Indeed. People forget how quickly and easily companies become too big too fail. The US government bailed out, took over, privatized (not just once) Iridium, just because they had satellites and Global Crossing, just because of fiber ownership.

AI labs would be a lot worse. A lot.