NewYorkRushWhat would be the long-term impact on the internet and society if Google were to completely fail?
Meow.tar.gzThere would be some initial shock but we would quickly get over it. Personally, I would be delighted if Google were to do a complete epic fail and close down.
Onii-ChanI dream of a world that again exists without big tech, but you know, it's a dream.
Yes, I feel you on that one!
BigMotherTruckerI think you're under estimating the importance of Google on the internet. Sure if search were to fail we'd find a way, in a probably worse off over all internet.
Google also provides gdocs. The only good competitor to Microsoft office. Tons of businesses are extremely reliant on gdocs. It's cloud base infra would make it's loss more painful than the loss of ms office. We'd also lose drive, which is heavily integrated into a lot of web apps.
We'd lose their support on android. While android would survive it would he a detriment to the software. Especially future features. As well as it's tight integration with non phone devices.
Google is a major funder of a long list of FOSS applications. It would seriously damage FOSS software.
Google runs YouTube.
Google reaps a more than simply healthy profit compared to what it outlays to help open source projects. Alphabet is not doing this out of altruism so it’s definitely profit motivated. Google’s cash outlay to benefit FOSS is mere peanuts when compared to the lucrative value it gets in return.
I'd prefer not to leave Apple with pretty much no competition in mobile OS if Android were to fail, unless we're just referring to Google the search engine, and not the parent company Alphabet.
Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we’re seeing with Twitter right now).
Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.
Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we’re seeing with Twitter right now).
Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.
dedaleI don't see a scenario where google or the likes would be allowed to fail. So moot point.
Hypothetically it would open a window for open source services to sneak in.
Frog-BrawlerI’d have to get a new email account for junk.
Minimal. You might see a few arms races to fill the vacuum but the end result of that competition would probably be better than what we have now.
AnActualFossilI like your optimism. Even though I'm far from sharing it.
Right now? Bad. Other Big Tech would swoop in and tech their place and try and take their proprietary market share, but a lot of the open source work would be left to die on the vine, including Firefox. It would be a loss of paid talent in the FOSS world and a massive consolidation of big tech.
It'd be very very bad for schools in the US in rural areas. There's no way they'd be able to afford equivalent services to what Google offers them for basically free, ever again. Many children would lose their assignments to Google Drive and others would be sad from losing what's basically a time capsule of their entire life that was stored in there.
Another loss would be Android, and the Google Play Store. So many phones would basically become waste overnight. It'd be absolutely tragic. At least that's the way I see it.
Most less technically literate folks would lose their ability to use their computers overnight. They'd go to Chrome to make a google search to go to their favorite website, and when they see the page showing that Google cannot be found, they'd just assume their computer is broken. Microsoft would be the 'saviour' in this. I'm sure they'd happily push out an update for Windows that resets your default browser to Microsoft Edge (again) and your default search engine to Bing.
Later down the road, whoever buys the old Google domains would likely be able to spread some sick malware and steal a lot of data from people who didn't prepare properly.
That's just what I can immediately think of. I'm sure there's more, or something worse I forgot about. Haha.
The Android Open Source Project and all of its resources wouldn’t go anywhere, it would just lose its biggest parasite.
techviatorAt this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.
Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.
They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).
PeachManlook at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid
To your point, those all took like a decade to become obsolete and go out of business.
It would be worse than the burning of the library of Alexandria. So much data stored on Youtube, Gdrive, Google Photos, Gmail etc etc etc would be lost forever, without backups for probably most of it.
The Internet Archive and some US agency (I think it was the NSA) have backups for a lot of the public-facing data. But lots of data would simply be lost media forever as well.
I wonder tho, if some artworks that have been saved only on Google servers, will live on solely through AI algorithms, that have included these in their datasets.
Google will never die, at least not all at once. If Google were to die sometime in the future, it would die a very slow death, with all there side-businesses being slowly sold off one by one. Plenty of time to switch to alternatives and to save all your important data (which you should probably do always regardless)
It really depends on how much time people would have to migrate data and swap email accounts. If it’s years, we would probably be fine although the financial and data loss would be still be incalculable.
If we didn’t have much or any time to migrate… I don’t even want to think about it. If email accounts suddenly got shut down many people would lose banking access, among many other things. It would probably cause a global recession if I had to guess (talking out my ass on this one but I wouldn’t be surprised).
Big PThink of how many companies use gsuite for their entire operation, or how many services are hosted entirely in Google cloud, too
A significant amount of trade skill knowledge and examples are tied up in YouTube. Does anyone remember building a deck before YT? You would go to the library, make copies of books or magazines that had a general idea on how to do it, then you would try to do it yourself and things would go wrong constantly.
There’s a lot of this type of stuff that would simply be lost. It’s not unusual to find videos from 15 years ago that are still relevant today.
Mustafa AlbazyAs of today it wouldn’t be that hard, alternatives are available and some of them are as good but don’t have the same market share.