It seems to me that all of google's most successful services (search, youtube, gmail and gsuite, maps/earth, android) are next to impossible to monetize profitably and have significant utility to the general public. It feels like these are services that governments should be building and funding themselves.
Youtube specifically has a plethora of useful information made by normal people. You can find hundreds of thousands of videos, in most languages, about doing most basic and complex repairs for almost any model of car made in the last few decades, for example. It is essentially a giant public library.
That is insane. No corporation has the ability to incarcerate you or kill you. No corporation can round up your family.
What, precisely, is the “threat” that Google presents that does not rely on a government to be the muscle. Are they going to cancel your Gmail account? Cut you off from YouTube?
Surely if they actually are as powerful and dangerous as you think they are you wouldn’t use their stuff at all. But then I guess they wouldn’t be all that powerful if you could just stop using them…
(Shrug) Insane, whatever. All I know is, when I call the IRS, I can get a human on the phone who actively wants to help.
Try that with Google, PayPal, Amazon, Apple, or any number of other companies when an error they've made but refuse to even explain, much less fix, threatens to wreck your livelihood.
To redress grievances with my government, I don't need to make the front page of HN or go viral on Twitter. We don't go a week around here without another front-page lamentation to appeal for noblesse oblige from one of these intentionally-faceless megacorps. That's not how you should have to deal with a company you're doing business with... but it is how you deal with a dictator who leaves you no other choice.
That's simple in countries without a Second Amendment, or that don't recognize self-defense as a fundamental human right, but it's not simple in this one.
It is deeper that that, corporations literally are governments. When you form a corporation you are creating the government that your organization will now operate under. usually this will require a license from whatever larger governmental structure you find yourself in.
Sometimes this is a publicly tradable for profit endeavor, sometimes it is private or perhaps non-profit(all profits have to be distributed back into the corporation), or even an actual public corporation(often called a town or a city,
Youtube specifically has a plethora of useful information made by normal people. You can find hundreds of thousands of videos, in most languages, about doing most basic and complex repairs for almost any model of car made in the last few decades, for example. It is essentially a giant public library.