Just for a minute, as we reflect on the reality of Google operating an illegal monopoly, can you think about what a web without Google would be? An internet without Google Search, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, and so forth would-there's no other way to put this-be quite clearly a different place. But would such a change be utility-related-or something else? Something bigger?

Alternative freemium products to Google exist. You can use DuckDuckGo for search, for example, Brave to browse the web, and Proton Mail for webmail, to name just a few of the non-Google options for key digital tools out there. There's even a web beta of Apple Maps these days. Or–hey–why not cut straight to the community mapping open data project OpenStreetMap? All of these are also services that can be accessed for free, too.

What would be different in a web without Google is absolutely much bigger than mere utility.

What's really at stake here is the business model underlying service delivery and the opportunity-if we can imagine for a minute a web that's not dominated by Google-for different models of service delivery — ones that prioritize the interests of web users and the public infosphere — to achieve scale and thrive.

Such alternatives do already exist, as the list above shows. But on a web dominated by Google's model of tracking-based advertising it's extremely hard for pro-user approaches to thrive. That's the real harm flowing from Google's monopoly.

Google likes to cloak its company's "mission" as "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," its marketing puts it. But this kind of high-flying boast has always served as a fig leaf atop a business model that makes vast sums by organizing data-most especially information about people-in order to make money from microtargeted advertising.

This feeds into Google's capacity to profile the online population and make money from services based on selling ultra-specific advertising. And it rakes in truly staggering amounts of money from this business: Alphabet, the brand Google devised almost a decade ago to pop a corporate wrapper around Google, reported full-year revenue of $307.39 billion for 2023. The vast majority of which is earnings from ads.

Be it through pay-per-click ads displayed on Google search or YouTube; or through other ads that Google may display elsewhere on publishers' websites; or through its other programmatic ad services, including through its AdX exchange; or its mobile advertising platform for app developers; or through Google's ad campaign management, marketing and analytics tools, all that's all revenue flowing to Google.

The simple truth is Google is making your information "useful" so it can feed Google's bottom line because it's in the advertising business. Put another way, its "mission" is chain-linked to a business model that's based on tracking and profiling web users. Organizing the world's information doesn't sound so benign now does it?

Think about how Google's incentives to organize data to fit with its commercial interests stretch to making user-hostile alterations to the way it presents information. Note, for instance, endless dark pattern design tricks it has deployed to make it harder for users of Google Search to distinguish between organic search results and ads.

Every confused user, who clicks an ad thinking it is a legitimate piece of information, feeds the Google revenue machine. Useful to Google, no doubt, but annoying for web users seeking some specific piece of information (tl;dr: precious time you waste = priceless to Google's profits).

Consider, also, a more recent example: Just last month Google was accused by Italy's competition and consumer watchdog of "misleading and aggressive" commercial practices. Including providing users with "inadequate, incomplete and misleading information" (emphasis ours) about decisions they should be able to exercise — thanks to a variety of EU laws — over the company's ability to track and profile them by denying its ability to link their activity across different Google-owned accounts.

Organizing this kind of "information" — about the legal rights of European users to be able to refuse being tracked and profiled for Google's profit — and making that information about how you can avoid being tracked "universally accessible and useful" does not seem to be on Google's priority list, the adtech giant. On the contrary: Google stands accused of preventing users' legal right to information that could help them protect themselves from Google's surveillance. Oh.

Market power
The market power by Google is linked to its possession of such enormous amounts of information about user intent that emanate from having a firm grip on online search.

Its share of search in Europe is always over 90%. In the U.S., it tends to be a slightly lower but still dominant share. And — critically — on mobile it's been able to ensure that its search engine (or, from an ads perspective, its user intention data funnel) remains the default on Apple's rival mobile platform because it pays the iPhone maker billions for the placement every year.

In fact, a New York Times report last fall suggested that Google pays Apple $18 billion a year. During the antitrust trial, Google also revealed that it shares an eye-popping 36% — more than one-third! — of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.

This is the substance of the U.S. antitrust ruling complaint: that Google has run an illegal monopoly. For background, here's what we reported earlier. Paying Apple to be the default search on iOS settled for the judge the question of whether Google had blocked its competitors from even being in a position to build up their search engines to enough scale, where they could collect enough data and reach to really compete with Google Search.

To Google, that kind of placement is important because Apple's iOS holds a dominant share of the mobile device market in the U.S. versus Google's own Android platform(where Google typically gets to set all its own services as default). Add to that iOS users are typically more valuable targets for advertisers — so being able to keep accessing information about iPhone users' intentions is strategically important to Google's ad business.

No surprise, then, that Google is willing to give Apple such a huge percentage of revenue so it can continue squatting on iOS as the default search choice. But buying this spot is also about protecting its tracking-based business model.

Because Google is so generous to Apple with revenue, Cupertino has little motivation to make its own search product to compete with Google-meaning that web users have missed an opportunity to try a web search product from Cupertino. In fact, given how much Apple sings the importance of marketing privacy as a core brand value, you might at least expect an Apple-built search engine would differ and could not be expected to continue the mass tracking and profiling of web users that Google Search does.

Technically, Apple does have an advertising business of its own. But the company that makes the device is not, as Google is, also the owner and operator of core adtech infrastructure that has been used to bake tracking and profiling into the mainstream web for decades.

Add to that, if other search engines had the chance to grow more users because Google didn't own the default iOS placement, there is an opportunity for pro-privacy competitors, such as DuckDuckGo, to get in front of more humans and build greater momentum for alternative non-tracking-based business models.

Instead, we have a web that's locked to tracking as the default because it's in Google's business interests.

Of course, ownership of Chrome gives Google another critical infrastructural asset. Google's browser dominates the global market for such tools-now running around 65% according to Statista. Its browser engine, Chromium, also supports multiple rival browsers, including Microsoft's Edge browser-meaning that even many competing browsers to Google's Chrome use an engine developed by Google. And strategic decisions on browser infrastructure determine which of the business models may fly.

In the last few years, Google reconfigured its adtech stack under a project called "Privacy Sandbox." That effort would move from cookie-based microtargeting of web users-underlying the current adtech model that Chrome supports-to a new form of browser-level interest-based targeting that Google says would be less bad for privacy.

We may quibble whether Privacy Sandbox would actually be a healthy evolution of the tracking ads business model-but the technical solution Google has concocted may, technically be less damaging to individual privacy if it ends the mass insecure sharing of data about web users that currently takes place via real-time programmatic ad auctions. But the alternative infrastructure it's supposed to provide is still designed to enable mass targeting of web users — this time based on organizing browser users into interest-based buckets to target. Regardless, one thing is crystal clear: It's Google's dominance that's driving decisions about the future of web business models.

Other commercial browsers have already turned off tracking cookies. Google hasn't, partly because of its commercial interest in allowing this over the years — and partly because its browser also has a dominant market share. Which means all sorts of other players (publishers, advertisers, smaller adtechs etc) are attached to the tracking data flows involved — dependent on Google's infrastructure continuing to allow this spice through. Which is why Google's Privacy Sandbox has been so closely supervised by regulators in Europe.

First and foremost, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority intervened. It allowed in the first quarter of 2022 a package of commitments concerning how Google would implement the proposed transition from tracking-cookie-based adtech to the reformed interest-based targeting alternative following complaints that the change would harm online publishers and advertisers reliant on the tracking ads business model with the end of support for tracking cookies.

This very close regulatory scrutiny led by a competition authority? Resulted in pushing back Google's timeline to deprecate cookies. And then, just last month, it announced that it was abandoning the move, saying it was instead proposing that regulators accept an alternative whereby Chrome users would be shown some form of a choice screen. (Apparently this would allow them to opt out of cookie-based tracking and take Google's interest-based alternative, but Google hasn't elaborated any further yet.)

Google's self-interested approach to presenting information might have another reason not to trust the design of any such consent pop-up it came up with. But the bigger point here is that Google's dominance of web infrastructure is so trenchant-the company's model is so utterly baked into the mainstream web-that even Google can't just make a change which might allow web users to get slightly more privacy. Because in flicking such levers the knock-on impact on other businesses that are dependent upon its adtech infrastructure risks being a competition harm in itself.

An alternative approach
If ever there was a definition of a company that got too big-so big it basically owns and operates the web-then surely it's Google.

We can dream what a web without Google might look like. But it's impossible to really imagine, so deeply it is embedded in the web's infrastructure. Less Mountain View than all of the mountain.

Writing in the wake of the Google antitrust decision, Big newsletter author Matt Stoller has a go at imagining a post-Google web in the latest edition of his newsletter.

"I think there's a vision tucked in an April speech by Federal Trade Commission consumer protection chief Sam Levine on how the internet didn't have to become the cesspool that it is today," Stoller writes. "He sketched out what the internet could become if well-regulated, a place where we have zones of privacy, where not everything operates like a casino, and where AI works for us.". This [Google antitrust] case brings us a step closer to Levine's vision because it means that people who want to build better safer products now have the chance to compete.

You can also catch a glimpse of the better web possible in some of the great alternative products of our age. The private messaging provided by Signal, for instance. Or the highly encrypted email, calendar, collaborative documents and other privacy-safe productivity tools that Proton is working on. Although worth noting both have been structured as nonprofit foundations in a bid to ensure they can keep providing free access to pro-user products that don't generate revenue by data-mining their users.

In an age of monopoly power driving wall-to-wall digital surveillance that unpleasant reality remains the mainstream web rule.

"I believe our digital economy can get better," wrote Levine. "Not because our tech giants will voluntarily change their ways, or because markets will magically fix themselves. But because, at long last, there is momentum across government — state and federal, Republicans and Democrats — to push back against unchecked surveillance."

The ruling Monday by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. That would give the District Court for the District of Columbia the opportunity to declare Google a monopolist, and possibly have pulled the first brick out of the wall of surveillance. If the appeal does not succeed and remedies are imposed-just think of it-a corporate break-up that forces the fig-leaf Alphabet to divest key Google infrastructure. Such an outcome could finally break the grip Google has held on web data flows for so long, rebooting the default model, freeing this place up for users, startups, and communities to reimagine and rebuild anew.