"I'll Just Google That"

This doesn't mean what you think it means... but is a Google break-up coming?

When the internet was young, the phrase “I’ll just Google that” meant you could request information and receive results about “everything” so you could sift through to find what you want and to find information that made sense to you.

You know that’s no longer the case, right? Did you know Google controls between 90% and 95% of all your online/smartphone searches?

Of course, that means we’ve all been force-fed Google’s version of reality for quite some time now (!!) while they suck up all your data for their ad platforms. Google is convenient, for free, but “free” actually does have a price, you know.

However, “the world’s default search engine” could be changing soon, thanks to an extraordinary ruling by Washington D.C. federal judge Ahmit Mehta in a 2020 antitrust case brought against Google and Alphabet by the Department of Justice.

Citing the stranglehold Google has on searches, Mehta ruled in early August that “Google acted illegally to crush its competition and maintain a monopoly on online search and related advertising,” and granted "structural relief" - which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.

Of course, Google plans to appeal the ruling.

Google's search engine is a big revenue generator for the company, bringing in billions of dollars thanks in large part to advertising displayed on its results pages.

… prosecutors accused Google of spending billions of dollars annually to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default search engine across platforms.

… Google typically pays more than $10bn (£7.8bn) a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady stream of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market.

Under President Trump, federal antitrust regulators — with bipartisan Congressional support — are in court with similar lawsuits against Meta Platforms, Amazon, and Apple for illegal monopolies online.

Perhaps one day soon, maybe, you can browse and search the internet and then find “everything” so you can uncover what makes sense to you. Otherwise, if all we can get is results that are filtered by just one company, what use is this powerful thing called the internet?