> it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages

This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)

The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.

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shadowgovt 2 days ago | parent [-]

it feels like there's some lack of equivalence that makes this analogy invalid.

Unless junkies have started a new service to help me find the nearest hospital that I'm not familiar with. Otherwise, spontaneously blocking Google could cause material harm to people reliant upon it. You'd be surprised how many users are so net-ignorant that they wouldn't even know how to get to Bing if their default page stopped resolving.

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BrenBarn 2 days ago | parent [-]

If the junkies are providing a service, then they are Google in this analogy. Taking away drugs from junkies does cause material harm, but perhaps long-term good.

Certainly I acknowledge that Google provides useful and maybe even essential services to people. But just because we want those services doesn't mean we necessarily need to allow Google to continue providing them. A parallel in the drug world might be shady pharmacists who get people hooked on painkillers. Yes, maybe it's good to have Vicodin, but that doesn't mean we need to let this particular person control it. Similarly it might be good to have maps, but that doesn't mean it's good to have some megacorp controlling them --- even less so if they try to use that as leverage to prevent regulation of other harmful aspects of their business.

	▲	shadowgovt a day ago \| parent [-]
		"Material harm now for maybe long-term good later" has been the goal of many a soul-saver throughout history... And they tend to go down in history as the problem, not the solution. Regarding loci of control: I've been using mapping tools built on OpenStreetMap as of late, and they're good, but they're no replacement for Google Maps. Things Google makes simple like "restaurants near me" are just fall-flat-on-your-face bad in most of the OSM clients I've seen. So I'm loathe to declare we need to kill the working thing when the alternative is worse. My preferred approach to ending a Google map monopoly would be to invest in making the alternatives better (particularly the open alternatives). Give people a better option, and we won't have to "kill" Google; the market will do it for us.