Insidious Bored Games

Insidious Bored Games

Personally, I use DDG because I really don’t care for Google’s search results anymore. I also don’t like how Google uses my search history to customize my news feed. Someone once asked me who won the previous night’s football game. I Googled it, and suddenly I was seeing a bunch of articles every time an NFL player took a shit. BTW: I don’t even like football.

Actually, I recently stopped using their news feed as well. Too often the “news” is just fluff pieces or links to sites with soft paywalls, and by the time it shows up on Google news, it’s always old, so it’s not really “news” anymore.

I still use Gmail though. It has really good spam filtration, and I can access it on all my devices. I also like that it’s not stored on my own computer, so I never have to worry about losing old emails. I really have no complaints there, but perhaps some people do.

And there are plenty of options out there if you want to avoid the big G. Sometimes I take advantage of those options. Take this site for instance: I installed a plugin that prevents fonts from being downloaded from Google’s servers whenever anyone visits. Sure, it might make the site look more consistent across platforms, but it can be used as a tool to track people across the internet, and that’s a shitty thing to do.

And yes, at one time I thought Google was pretty nifty, but now they’re sort of ho-hum. There are better options out there, and if you can’t or won’t avail yourself of those options, then it’s not Google’s fault. No one is forcing you or anyone else to use them.

So in my opinion, Google cannot be considered a monopoly. Even though it turns out they have engaged in some shitty antitrust violations, it still doesn’t make them a monopoly. Even if they have 100% of the search engine traffic, they still aren’t a monopoly. Why? Because Google does not sell search results. Google sells advertising, and the last time I checked, there aren’t any shortage of advertisers out there.

So where did this bullshit stem from? A while back Trump had expressed his dissatisfaction with Google’s Liberally-slanted search results. Later, in a drive-by interview, President Trump said his administration was “looking at” antitrust proceedings against Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Trump never used the word “monopoly”, but naturally after a few iterations through the echo chambers, the fanbase took this as evidence that Google was a monopoly… which it’s not.

It just seems to me that people who believe these kooky things drank too much of the political Kool-Aide.

Pax,

-f2x