I'm writing this as a subscriber of The Economist for over 15 years, someone who mostly admire their writing and reporting, even if I don't always agree with them.
The Economist ran a comprehensive review of their own coverage of climate change and renewable energy and last year, and admitted that they were completely wrong on the subject in the 70s and 80s. I wonder if a future Economist editor in 2060s would reach a similar conclusion about their current coverage of Big Tech.
But Google is also bad for the world in many other ways. They control our information. Through the curation of search results, censorship or demonetization policies on YouTube, policies on their ad network, and even seemingly harmless things like fact check labels on content, they control and shape our ideas. If you take their huge reach, control over the information we consume, and recognize the massive bias present in their employee population, it’s obvious that their existence is also a risk to our political process.
I haven’t even touched on the privacy issues, but they’re there.
But let’s set all of this aside, because I feel like we can waste a lot of time debating details and avoid taking action. Their size is a problem in many number of ways, and the specifics don’t matter. Companies that are too big corrupt our economy, our politics, and more. Let’s fight for better laws that make it very simple to break up companies that are too big.
The company's primary purpose was search results and ads, and these have all but become useless compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Today, you can't find what you are looking for beyond surface level topics.
Google collates data on you in into dossiers on everything you do and then sell it to the highest bidder without full disclosure to the end user, in cooperation with other tech companies (Facebook et al; "signals").
They have been caught red-handed wiretapping millions of people while only getting a slap on the wrist (i.e. that Google Maps case with WiFi AP mapping from their streetview cars, and roving sensor networks). Each count there is a felony, they paid a measly fine of a few million while raking in billions from the sale of derived data.
They manipulate elections, leak AI secrets to China, and adopt algorithms that align closely with CCP rhetoric and practice (shadowbanning posts for or against certain topics).
We are getting close to entering a war footing with China, and Google is a strategic company with national security implications.
Any country in similar situations can't allow traitors of strategic importance to remain in privileged positions. Its a national security issue, and doing nothing is the worst possible outcome.