Comment by dataflow
6 days ago
> This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
> You are being very naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
No, I think you're being incredibly naive if you think the outcome you imagine would necessarily come to fruition without Google being a "monopoly" (however you define it). It didn't happen for Microsoft (Chrome is an angel compared to Edge), and nobody has managed to create comparable solutions for so many other products Google offers that have nothing to do with the browser or search.
gmail works really badly in firefox, it doesn't show new emails unless you force a refresh while it seamlessly loads them in chrome. There is also a popup whenever you use gmail, youtube or google search telling you to switch to chrome because it's "safer and faster".
Google was also caught giving special treatment to google-related domains in chrome, and had to revert the advantages around cookies that they gave to themselves.