We used to have private bridges and private roads, and that was an expensive travel situation for everyone. Now, internet search is kind of like a bridge that leads clients to businesses and Google is deciding on the tolls. Government-controlled Internet search would definitely be horrible. But I'm thinking if there is a path towards more competitiveness in this landscape, maybe the ISPs could somehow provide free search as part of the Internet service fee? Can we have more specialized, niche search engines? Can governments be asked to break up the Google search monopoly?

Partially, the problem here is that the demand for classic search has been reduced quite a bit with LLM-based search finding wide usage amongst common people.

You could single out Google for it, as the DoJ and some other entities are doing, but even in that case someone else would take that place with the same dynamics, such as OpenAI or Perplexity.

Also, while building search is complex, it’s also not as unfathomable as it’s made out to be, see [1] where a ML engineer made a production-grade search engine in 2 months with their own ingest, indexing and storage infrastructure.

[1] https://blog.wilsonl.in/search-engine/

If end users find Google's bridges good enough, there isn't really much fight to be had unfortunately. Kagi is an example of competition, but the question is how many people actually take issue with how Google picks the results they show.

Anti-trust is needed when a company is interfering with competition.

I think there is no cost to switching Search providers. Android is the one place Google has control over the OS. Two taps gets me to a list of search providers in Chrome, with 5 choices. It's not clear how to add more providers.

I don't think having new search engines would be a challenge. The problem is attracting new users and making them realize there is benefit it diversifying what they use. There are already other search engines but the majority still use Google.

What a strange comment when if anything AI democratizes search. Don’t like google? Don’t use it - use ChatGPT.

Definitely seems to have exacerbated the anti-trust issue. Search was search, but now they can insert AI and short-circuit the route to other products.

Universities or colleges might be the sort of entity that cares a lot about knowledge and has a chance of being able to fund a search engine, maybe?