You certainly don't have to trust or use Google. However, it would certainly be weird to order Google to stop because of its popularity.
The Beatles had the number one position in the billboard charts for almost 60 weeks. That's a lot of popularity for one band to have. Should we have told them to stop making music?
You have to look at this practically instead of ideologically. Everything is a matter of degree. The potential harm a band can do by being too popular is far less than the potential harm done by effectively controlling the internet.
Certainly you'll agree that their is a market where it is possible for a company to be "too popular", i.e., the government should step in with regulation.
Lets look at a very extreme case. What if one company develops a cure for all forms of cancer, and they won't release the secret (let's assume our hypothetical country has no drug regulations), and they charge $100k for treatment. Is it wrong for the government to step in and regulate?
Google is effectively the gateway to the internet, and whether you choose to use them or not you are beholden to that control. If you want to do business a web presence is an absolute necessity, but if Google decides they don't like you, there is no recourse. I'd say that that ability to do harm rises to the level that we should consider potential regulatory remedies.
I don't necessarily support forcing them to make their algorithm public, but I would support some kind of government audit.
Lets look at a very extreme case. What if one company develops a cure for all forms of cancer, and they won't release the secret (let's assume our hypothetical country has no drug regulations), and they charge $100k for treatment. Is it wrong for the government to step in and regulate?
Yes, it is wrong for them to do so (if by regulating you mean setting the company's price for the product that it developed, rather than just the standard regulations that are in place). And the fact that there are people who don't believe it is wrong - probably including politicians - produces a reduction in the amount of money that would be rational to invest to search for such cures, thereby reducing the likelihood of finding them.
In this hypothetical situation, the government could step in and save millions of lives per year with a short term loss of profit to one company.
In this situation you'd let millions of people die because you think it might reduce future medical research outcomes?
So obviously I haven't found a hypothetical situation extreme enough for you yet.
We make policy decisions that limit how much money companies can make from medical breakthroughs all the time. The FDA approval process, for instance. If we stopped requiring FDA approval, developing drugs would be much more profitable, but as a society we agree that drug safety is a good trade off.
What if drug affordability is a good trade off as well? There's no way to know without investigation, but that is why I'm opposed to making policy on purely ideological grounds. What if it turns out that limiting pharmaceutical profits, decreases medical funding by 10%, but increases access to drugs that are developed by 100%? Again it may work out exactly opposite, but if you oppose limiting the price of drugs just because "it's wrong", you'll never know.
What if it turns out that medical funding isn't the bottleneck in medical breakthroughs. What if the number of people capable of becoming researchers is, and what if that amount goes up with more affordable drug access.
Again, I'm not proposing a specific course of action, but I'm saying that there are situations where the free market doesn't work and regulation is necessary.
"Lets look at a very extreme case. What if one company develops a cure for all forms of cancer, and they won't release the secret (let's assume our hypothetical country has no drug regulations), and they charge $100k for treatment. Is it wrong for the government to step in and regulate?"
Twelve different companies which were researching the cure for aging silently shut down...
>Twelve different companies which were researching the cure for aging silently shut down...
Maybe. But is the possibility that one of those companies maybe might someday develop a breakthrough justify the preventable deaths of millions of people right now?
And would they really shut down? Any company that produces a truly miraculous cure has to know that government will step in sooner or later. People aren't going to sit by while a company hands out the cure for aging to only the super wealthy. Surely a company researching the cure for aging would have taken this possibility into account before starting.
Medical breakthroughs aren't a linear function of funding. What if making medicine more available slightly slows new drug development but drastically increases quality of life for most people? Would that be worth it?
"Surely a company researching the cure for aging would have taken this possibility into account before starting."
That only reinforces my point. Several of them never get started, much more silently.
"Medical breakthroughs aren't a linear function of funding. What if making medicine more available slightly slows new drug development but drastically increases quality of life for most people? Would that be worth it?"
That's a very good point, if actually progress is not that much dependant on cash.
The Beatles had the number one position in the billboard charts for almost 60 weeks. That's a lot of popularity for one band to have. Should we have told them to stop making music?