DoJ Sues Google

The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Google for abusing its dominance in online search and advertising — the government’s most significant attempt to protect competition since its groundbreaking case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

Google probably has gotten too big and too powerful. Once companies reach a certain critical mass, they become evil. They can't help it.

But it's worth recalling how this all began. In the late '90s, the predominant search engine was Yahoo. Yahoo was frustrating as fuck to use. When you got a result, the first two pages were nothing but ads. You had to go down a couple of pages to get to the results that you wanted. That might not sound too burdensome, now, but back then, most people who were at home were accessing the Internet through a dial-up service.[1] Given the slow loading speed, the fact that Yahoo's pages were loaded with graphics only slowed things down even more. So using Yahoo was like slamming your hand in a door.

Then along came this minimalist search engine called Google. Maybe one or two lines of ad listings, but that was it. No graphics. Compared to Yahoo (and the other search engines, of which I've forgotten), Google loaded amazingly fast. However long it took it to become the predominate search engine, it wasn't a long time. They didn't even need to advertise, word of mouth did it for them. Within a year or two of Google's debut, I didn't know a single person who didn't use it.

Unlike Microsoft, Google didn't need, then, to strongarm computer makers to preload its stuff. They didn't need to. Their stuff was, simply, better. On my iPhone, Apple Maps was often significantly off, with destinations being a mile or so closer or further up the road. Google Maps hasn't had that problem.

I don't doubt that, since Google has grown it a behemoth, that they now engage in monopolistic and anticompetitive. It's inevitable for very large companies to do that. But still, it's worth remembering that Google got to where they are by having a better product.
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1. This is why Cyber Monday was such a big deal; people did their online shopping at work, whre they were more likely to have igh-speed Internet service.