I've said it a couple of times. Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
It's not just that they can penalize other companies, and competitors (wheter they have a "legitimate" reason or not). They can make people's ideas, political positions, etc. essentially disappear.
A stupid example: If they wanted to oppress trade unions, they could penalize every page with information about unions when someone searches for "workers' rights". More likely, they could work with oppressive governments to remove certain unpleasant historical events from people's sight.
I wonder why the European Union doesn't do anything... they used to be very strict about antitrust laws, privacy, etc.. Probably someone has to step up and sue Google for them to get active. I could think of a few things they could do here.
- One is to force Google to make their rankings more transparent.
- Google could have offer a kind of appeals process if a manual penalty is applied.
- The EU could put a special tax on the market leader, which would fund a subsidy for promising competitors. (Google's European office is currently registered in a low tax haven in Ireland.)
None of this is without precedent, but there would have to be the right political intent to get something like this started.
And before someone says Google is not in the EU's jurisdiction: Europe is a huge market. They have already fought antitrust trials with Microsoft, and MS could have said "screw you guys" and stopped doing business here, but instead they paid their penalties, because anything else would have been crazy. And if the EU is not going to do it, there are very self-conscious governments in Brazil, China, and India that might put pressure on Google & co..
(OTOH, we know that Governments like monopolists like Google when they help them censor and surpress information, but that's a different topic.)
its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
What? That's silly. Then a competitor offering not that would start to take a foothold the way Google took its foothold from the existing giants....In fact, it is happening right now with things like http://leap2.com/ or https://duckduckgo.com/. If you're concerned about the size of that competition, then I'd remind you that Google didn't exist even 16 years ago. Which means there is plenty of chance for a small company to come up and start eating Google's lunch in areas they've lost their way. (I think search is actually one of the big ones)
I'm sorry but this is what bothers me the most about unregulated capitalism. You are discounting the massive advantage Google and other corporations have which they have accumulated over the years in the form of:
* IP and patents
* Actual employees and knowledge capital
* Actual working designs and infrastructure
* Brand recognition
* Amount of businesses that rely on them
If you say that a new startup can just start building a computer to rival the iMac, for example, you're missing the 1000 little things that go into it. Sure, your competitor might have a more open operating system, say. But it won't have the agreements with chip manufacturers. It won't have the "retina" displays, or other technology that Apple has accumulated over the years.
At some point, the giant corporations just have too much for a startup to defeat. That's why most startups are basically picking off one little part and then the corporations buy them. It used to be that NEW technology was where startups were able to expand while old players couldn't adapt fast enough. For example, Microsoft was still small when the PC software revolution came about. However, now with "moonshots" and ambitious VC activity, the corporations have set up quite a few obstacles to that happening anymore.
* IP and patents
* Actual employees and knowledge capital
* Actual working designs and infrastructure
* Brand recognition
* Amount of businesses that rely on them
All of those things competitors like Microsoft had. There was still room for Google to rise. Microsoft is playing catch up with search and now IE. Google is trying to catch up with social, and even in the social place, there was a hashtag for Twitter overlayed on A Christmas Story yesterday.
there's also behavioral patterns people develop "I'll just google it" and the simplicity of picking the biggest entity for people who arn't interested in technology.
People arn't rational, and even if google is filtering out political sites performing propaganda through omission, there will be a huge population of people that either wouldn't hear about it, or wouldn't care.
Using Google as a verb (ie. "just google it") is actually behavior the company discourages, or at least used too. It severely devalues the brand by generalizing the term. For example, do you really go shopping for Kleenex or do you just go buy the facial tissue you prefer, or is on sale, while referring to it as Kleenex?
The fear is "just google it" becoming synonymous with search - even if that search occurs on Bing, etc.
duckduckgo is an aggregate search engine.
They do index certain crowdsourced sites but the rest of
their results come from partnerships with other search engines
from wiki
" and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing and WolframAlpha.[3]"
I have tried to search for where leap2 are getting their results from without finding anything substantial. There is
fluff about "living search engine", "social search engine"
and a few others. I find no evidence for (or against) that
they have their own full Internet search engine.
The problem for new companies trying to take on Google is the immenseness of their infrastructure. Lets say you want to start your own search engine.
You have a great idea, some idea for your crawler, etc.
Given that you dont have 10 000s of servers to store and
run distributed searches etc you are at a great disadvantage.
Can you do it with 5 servers in the cloud? How much space does one complete index of the entire internet take now?
Back when Google started, their hardware was modest.
Google [...] is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
Not sure I agree, but let's see why you think it's necessary:
More likely, they could work with oppressive governments to remove certain unpleasant historical events from people's sight.
...um, that's an example of government regulation of Google. You can't use preventing X as a reason for implementing X. That's like saying you should smoke cigarettes to make sure you don't get cancer. >.<
What you seem to be saying is "I trust the EU, and I wish they would regulate Google AND their regulations would trump the regulations of all the other governments I don't trust". Unfortunately, that's not how the world works.
I've said it a couple of times. Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
That's been obvious for the better part of a decade now. People will scream bloody murder, and not without good cause, but it's either going to happen, or there's no point in even pretending to regulate public utility monopolies.
Google is neither a public utility, nor a monopoly. You can always use one of dozens of other search engines. In fact, if you felt that Google was so bad, you can simply suggest others do so as well. Why does the government need to get in there and make Google the exact search engine you want, rather than the search engine that, clearly, the bulk of their customers want?
I'm not making the case for regulation. I'm just saying that it will be made, and when it is, it will be hard to argue against because of actions like this one.
You can always use one of dozens of other search engines.
That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
I'd love to see the comparison as to how Microsoft's strong-arming of VARs to sell only their products and Google's penalizing RG for attempting to subvert their search engine rankings relate.
I'm pretty sure the EU is itching to start regulating Google in Europe, but to do that they'll need to find a point of leverage somewhere and so far that's been hard to find.
Put another way: exactly what about Google could they (practically) regulate and will have sufficient public support?
In essence the problem tis about Google being able to wield disproportionate power through it's rankings and our common sense telling us that they will eventually abuse this if left unchecked; but that they aren't abusing this too blatantly just yet.
Not that that's of any help for people like my friend who ran a (handwritten) long tail content generation company which worked hard to stay within Google's guidelines yet had the company he and 3 friends had worked on for 4 years destroyed overnight just months ago when someone at Google decided they didn't like the content and penalized every single one of his clients.
Actually, one could argue they already are abusing it and are doing so with increasing frequency.
They've been tailoring search results to cut out the specialized aggregators, like including their own shopping results above other stores.
The obvious one you've probably seen recently is movies. They now show the actors, related films and rankings, depriving views and ad space from the sites that offered that information.
They've also been doing it with maps for years for search terms like 'x in y city' as well as entering the ratings business. This content is often poor, but I imagine every click into an aggregator is a loss to google as the ad spend potentially goes on that aggregator instead of google.
You could see all of these are attempting to circumvent other businesses and abusing their monopoly. But I imagine none of these businesses want to complain as to be shut out of Google on the internet is death. You can't tell google to not steal your content, without telling them to not list your content.
They seem to justify it with claims that they're just giving searchers what they want, but in the end they own the highways, and now they seem to be putting their own facades up in front of a significant number of the businesses along the highway too which means they have to advertise on google just to get above google's own internal adverts.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but actual search results often seem to appear a very, very long way down the page on a lot of terms these days.
I like the customized search results. They're more often than not helpful to me.
If I want the weather in a city I'm visiting, why wouldn't I want it on the google page, instead of another click away?
The rest of the Internet has no natural right to views and clicks sent their way from google. If google gives users the best search results (among the more than half-dozen credible search engines), users will use them. Do enough hostile things to users and users will go elsewhere. If their competition improves while they stay stagnant, they will also start to lose market share.
Google is improving Google's offering. That's laudable, because it helps Google's users and Google's financials.
You can bet anything that Google is A/B testing revenue each time it does an index/penguin/panda update. All you need to do is compare Adwords revenue from Google owned sites versus partner sites to see what is happening.
Not going into all the regulation talk (partly because don't believe that Google needs regulation as another search engine is just an address bar/couple of clicks away) but with regards to:
"One is to force Google to make their rankings more transparent."
Google does not care about SEO; they care about bad SEO. You can see this from their Webmaster Help Videos[1] to saying how they 'serve' the results[2] to explaining how their search engine works[3].
It also becomes more apparent within their Webmaster Guidelines[4] that, they do not like bad SEO.
You can easily use all of that knowledge to figure it out.
"Google could have offer a kind of appeals process if a manual penalty is applied"
They do. It's called a reconsideration request[5]
"The EU could put a special tax on the market leader, which would fund a subsidy for promising competitors. (Google's European office is currently registered in a low tax haven in Ireland.)"
That would actually discourage anyone from making a decent product. Why? Well if you make a good one people will use it, you will become market leader and you will receive a special tax.
Google does not care about SEO; they care about bad SEO.
They should care about delivering the best quality search results to their users, and nothing else. As a user, I don't give a crap about SEO or link farming ethics or anything else. That stuff is Google's problem. By penalizing what is (reportedly) the best lyrics site, Google has made their problem my problem.
A fair page ranking system would be entirely transparent, rigidly enforced, and not "punitive." Should they delist RapGenius for breaking the rules? Sure, if the rules themselves provide for that outcome. But the second the infraction is corrected, the penalty should end, and the site should be restored to its proper rank.
Google is not a government agency. The more they act like one, the more people will treat them like one. Believe me, they aren't going to like where that road goes.
"They should care about delivering the best quality search results to their users, and nothing else"
That's why they focus on Bad SEO because it means that they won't be showing the best results to their users. Bad SEO means manipulating the results to rank instead of, showing the best results to users.
"A fair page ranking system would be entirely transparent, rigidly enforced"
They penalised RapGenius for breaking their Webmaster Guideines[1] which are both transparent and enforced.
"But the second the infraction is corrected, the penalty should end, and the site should be restored to its proper rank."
That's actually how it works. As I tweeted to Josh on Twitter[2] this actually happens to all sites once they've got themselves out of a penalty and the Google Algorithms trust the site again.
The people who are claiming that do not know anything about SEO. They're pulling figures from fresh air. For instance, in the case of JC Penney[1] it took them 90 days to recover from their penalty but it took Interflora[2] 11 days etc.
The penalty is applied until, the site fall backs into the Google Guidelines[3]. Google actually helps Webmasters to get their site back in line with their guidelines through informing them what type of penalty[4] it is. For instance, if it is a link penalty like Rap Genius has, Google shows example links within Webmaster Tools (usually 3 of them) to provide insight, on links which Google considers to be falling outside of those guidelines.
However, the links which are going to be affecting Rap Genius were predominantly because of the "tweet-for-links" system, the identification and removal of links should be relatively quick and straightforward.
Am I missing something basic or are comments like this reflective of a level of trust in government that borders on religious faith? Let me get this straight: Google search has risen to the level of infrastructure and, because of the ability for them to "make people's ideas, political positions, etc. essentially disappear.", we should have the government regulate internet search. Did I get that right? Yeah, 'cuz the government has no motivation in silencing unwanted political speech. Oh, and it also has a great track record of ensuring the free exchange of ideas, etc.
Apple does not have anywhere near 50%+ market share in any business that they're in (more like 5-20%, depending on the product category), so I don't think they belong in the "regulated infrastructure" category. They're not the biggest player in any market, and therefore have no monopoly power to abuse.
One big reason why they're so successful is that they don't try to be everything to everyone, but this has a side effect of ensuring that they can never attain even majority market share in any one product category (in the long term, at least), which appears to be fine by them.
The one exception may be dedicated MP3 players but I'm not sure that that market has been really meaningful for the last 5 years at least.
There's precedent for forcing companies to speak with the government's voice? Does it come from democratic countries, and if so, has it survived confrontation with courts, revolution, or war?
Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
Maybe I'm out in left field here, but I thought that one of the hallmarks of infrastructure was a monopoly due to geographical concerns - it wouldn't make sense to run twelve different parallel power grids all over town. There is no such constraint here. Google, Facebook, etc are all big, but there's no lack of place to run power lines in play to stop a competitor from competing in their space (See DuckDuckGo, for example).
The EU (and individual member states) is doing something, both on the privacy and the anti-trust front. In fact, several agencies have already given Google a "final" warning.
If Google persists in it's arrogant "fuck you, we are the great untouchable Google" attitude, the gloves are going to come off soon enough. It will still be slow process that could take many years though.
Comments
I've said it a couple of times. Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
It's not just that they can penalize other companies, and competitors (wheter they have a "legitimate" reason or not). They can make people's ideas, political positions, etc. essentially disappear.
A stupid example: If they wanted to oppress trade unions, they could penalize every page with information about unions when someone searches for "workers' rights". More likely, they could work with oppressive governments to remove certain unpleasant historical events from people's sight.
I wonder why the European Union doesn't do anything... they used to be very strict about antitrust laws, privacy, etc.. Probably someone has to step up and sue Google for them to get active. I could think of a few things they could do here.
- One is to force Google to make their rankings more transparent.
- Google could have offer a kind of appeals process if a manual penalty is applied.
- The EU could put a special tax on the market leader, which would fund a subsidy for promising competitors. (Google's European office is currently registered in a low tax haven in Ireland.)
None of this is without precedent, but there would have to be the right political intent to get something like this started.
And before someone says Google is not in the EU's jurisdiction: Europe is a huge market. They have already fought antitrust trials with Microsoft, and MS could have said "screw you guys" and stopped doing business here, but instead they paid their penalties, because anything else would have been crazy. And if the EU is not going to do it, there are very self-conscious governments in Brazil, China, and India that might put pressure on Google & co..
(OTOH, we know that Governments like monopolists like Google when they help them censor and surpress information, but that's a different topic.)
What? That's silly. Then a competitor offering not that would start to take a foothold the way Google took its foothold from the existing giants....In fact, it is happening right now with things like http://leap2.com/ or https://duckduckgo.com/. If you're concerned about the size of that competition, then I'd remind you that Google didn't exist even 16 years ago. Which means there is plenty of chance for a small company to come up and start eating Google's lunch in areas they've lost their way. (I think search is actually one of the big ones)
I'm sorry but this is what bothers me the most about unregulated capitalism. You are discounting the massive advantage Google and other corporations have which they have accumulated over the years in the form of:
If you say that a new startup can just start building a computer to rival the iMac, for example, you're missing the 1000 little things that go into it. Sure, your competitor might have a more open operating system, say. But it won't have the agreements with chip manufacturers. It won't have the "retina" displays, or other technology that Apple has accumulated over the years.At some point, the giant corporations just have too much for a startup to defeat. That's why most startups are basically picking off one little part and then the corporations buy them. It used to be that NEW technology was where startups were able to expand while old players couldn't adapt fast enough. For example, Microsoft was still small when the PC software revolution came about. However, now with "moonshots" and ambitious VC activity, the corporations have set up quite a few obstacles to that happening anymore.
IP and patents are not "unregulated capitalism" they are actually political creations enforced by a legal regime.
ok, but even without these things the corporation has a massive head start and exclusive connections
even if it's not with governments, it's with other corporations
don't forget giant legal teams
there's also behavioral patterns people develop "I'll just google it" and the simplicity of picking the biggest entity for people who arn't interested in technology.
People arn't rational, and even if google is filtering out political sites performing propaganda through omission, there will be a huge population of people that either wouldn't hear about it, or wouldn't care.
The free market doesn't fix everything.
Using Google as a verb (ie. "just google it") is actually behavior the company discourages, or at least used too. It severely devalues the brand by generalizing the term. For example, do you really go shopping for Kleenex or do you just go buy the facial tissue you prefer, or is on sale, while referring to it as Kleenex?
The fear is "just google it" becoming synonymous with search - even if that search occurs on Bing, etc.
You changed my opinion on this. Google needs to fix the page rank algorithm.
duckduckgo is an aggregate search engine. They do index certain crowdsourced sites but the rest of their results come from partnerships with other search engines from wiki " and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing and WolframAlpha.[3]"
I have tried to search for where leap2 are getting their results from without finding anything substantial. There is fluff about "living search engine", "social search engine" and a few others. I find no evidence for (or against) that they have their own full Internet search engine.
The problem for new companies trying to take on Google is the immenseness of their infrastructure. Lets say you want to start your own search engine.
You have a great idea, some idea for your crawler, etc. Given that you dont have 10 000s of servers to store and run distributed searches etc you are at a great disadvantage. Can you do it with 5 servers in the cloud? How much space does one complete index of the entire internet take now?
Back when Google started, their hardware was modest.
Not sure I agree, but let's see why you think it's necessary:
...um, that's an example of government regulation of Google. You can't use preventing X as a reason for implementing X. That's like saying you should smoke cigarettes to make sure you don't get cancer. >.<
What you seem to be saying is "I trust the EU, and I wish they would regulate Google AND their regulations would trump the regulations of all the other governments I don't trust". Unfortunately, that's not how the world works.
I've said it a couple of times. Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
That's been obvious for the better part of a decade now. People will scream bloody murder, and not without good cause, but it's either going to happen, or there's no point in even pretending to regulate public utility monopolies.
Google is neither a public utility, nor a monopoly. You can always use one of dozens of other search engines. In fact, if you felt that Google was so bad, you can simply suggest others do so as well. Why does the government need to get in there and make Google the exact search engine you want, rather than the search engine that, clearly, the bulk of their customers want?
I'm not making the case for regulation. I'm just saying that it will be made, and when it is, it will be hard to argue against because of actions like this one.
You can always use one of dozens of other search engines.
That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
I'd love to see the comparison as to how Microsoft's strong-arming of VARs to sell only their products and Google's penalizing RG for attempting to subvert their search engine rankings relate.
The issues you're raising around Google don't seem at all the ones that ultimately got Microsoft smacked down.
I'm pretty sure the EU is itching to start regulating Google in Europe, but to do that they'll need to find a point of leverage somewhere and so far that's been hard to find.
Put another way: exactly what about Google could they (practically) regulate and will have sufficient public support?
In essence the problem tis about Google being able to wield disproportionate power through it's rankings and our common sense telling us that they will eventually abuse this if left unchecked; but that they aren't abusing this too blatantly just yet.
Not that that's of any help for people like my friend who ran a (handwritten) long tail content generation company which worked hard to stay within Google's guidelines yet had the company he and 3 friends had worked on for 4 years destroyed overnight just months ago when someone at Google decided they didn't like the content and penalized every single one of his clients.
Did your friend write about what happened to him anywhere?
Actually, one could argue they already are abusing it and are doing so with increasing frequency.
They've been tailoring search results to cut out the specialized aggregators, like including their own shopping results above other stores.
The obvious one you've probably seen recently is movies. They now show the actors, related films and rankings, depriving views and ad space from the sites that offered that information.
They've also been doing it with maps for years for search terms like 'x in y city' as well as entering the ratings business. This content is often poor, but I imagine every click into an aggregator is a loss to google as the ad spend potentially goes on that aggregator instead of google.
You could see all of these are attempting to circumvent other businesses and abusing their monopoly. But I imagine none of these businesses want to complain as to be shut out of Google on the internet is death. You can't tell google to not steal your content, without telling them to not list your content.
They seem to justify it with claims that they're just giving searchers what they want, but in the end they own the highways, and now they seem to be putting their own facades up in front of a significant number of the businesses along the highway too which means they have to advertise on google just to get above google's own internal adverts.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but actual search results often seem to appear a very, very long way down the page on a lot of terms these days.
I like the customized search results. They're more often than not helpful to me.
If I want the weather in a city I'm visiting, why wouldn't I want it on the google page, instead of another click away?
The rest of the Internet has no natural right to views and clicks sent their way from google. If google gives users the best search results (among the more than half-dozen credible search engines), users will use them. Do enough hostile things to users and users will go elsewhere. If their competition improves while they stay stagnant, they will also start to lose market share.
Google is improving Google's offering. That's laudable, because it helps Google's users and Google's financials.
You can bet anything that Google is A/B testing revenue each time it does an index/penguin/panda update. All you need to do is compare Adwords revenue from Google owned sites versus partner sites to see what is happening.
As a member of Google's algorithmic search quality team, I wish I could take that bet against you. :-)
Not going into all the regulation talk (partly because don't believe that Google needs regulation as another search engine is just an address bar/couple of clicks away) but with regards to:
Google does not care about SEO; they care about bad SEO. You can see this from their Webmaster Help Videos[1] to saying how they 'serve' the results[2] to explaining how their search engine works[3].It also becomes more apparent within their Webmaster Guidelines[4] that, they do not like bad SEO.
You can easily use all of that knowledge to figure it out.
They do. It's called a reconsideration request[5] That would actually discourage anyone from making a decent product. Why? Well if you make a good one people will use it, you will become market leader and you will receive a special tax.[1] http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp
[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en#3
[3] https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/howsearchwork...
[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[5] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en
Google does not care about SEO; they care about bad SEO.
They should care about delivering the best quality search results to their users, and nothing else. As a user, I don't give a crap about SEO or link farming ethics or anything else. That stuff is Google's problem. By penalizing what is (reportedly) the best lyrics site, Google has made their problem my problem.
A fair page ranking system would be entirely transparent, rigidly enforced, and not "punitive." Should they delist RapGenius for breaking the rules? Sure, if the rules themselves provide for that outcome. But the second the infraction is corrected, the penalty should end, and the site should be restored to its proper rank.
Google is not a government agency. The more they act like one, the more people will treat them like one. Believe me, they aren't going to like where that road goes.
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[2] https://twitter.com/profitbaron/status/415918373575213056
So it's not the case that a 30-day penalty period is being enforced against them, as several other posts have claimed? If so, I stand corrected.
The people who are claiming that do not know anything about SEO. They're pulling figures from fresh air. For instance, in the case of JC Penney[1] it took them 90 days to recover from their penalty but it took Interflora[2] 11 days etc.
The penalty is applied until, the site fall backs into the Google Guidelines[3]. Google actually helps Webmasters to get their site back in line with their guidelines through informing them what type of penalty[4] it is. For instance, if it is a link penalty like Rap Genius has, Google shows example links within Webmaster Tools (usually 3 of them) to provide insight, on links which Google considers to be falling outside of those guidelines.
However, the links which are going to be affecting Rap Genius were predominantly because of the "tweet-for-links" system, the identification and removal of links should be relatively quick and straightforward.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe...
[2] http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-...
[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re...
Am I missing something basic or are comments like this reflective of a level of trust in government that borders on religious faith? Let me get this straight: Google search has risen to the level of infrastructure and, because of the ability for them to "make people's ideas, political positions, etc. essentially disappear.", we should have the government regulate internet search. Did I get that right? Yeah, 'cuz the government has no motivation in silencing unwanted political speech. Oh, and it also has a great track record of ensuring the free exchange of ideas, etc.
Apple does not have anywhere near 50%+ market share in any business that they're in (more like 5-20%, depending on the product category), so I don't think they belong in the "regulated infrastructure" category. They're not the biggest player in any market, and therefore have no monopoly power to abuse.
One big reason why they're so successful is that they don't try to be everything to everyone, but this has a side effect of ensuring that they can never attain even majority market share in any one product category (in the long term, at least), which appears to be fine by them.
The one exception may be dedicated MP3 players but I'm not sure that that market has been really meaningful for the last 5 years at least.
Size alone doesn't make something "essential infrastructure". A lack of alternatives does.
Right. Anything that would materially affect your life if it were closed or shut off on Christmas is "essential infrastructure."
Anything... like HN? Should this be regulated?
So... Walmart? (I'm a last minute kind of guy!)
Plenty of things materially affect my life that are not essential infrastructure.
There's precedent for forcing companies to speak with the government's voice? Does it come from democratic countries, and if so, has it survived confrontation with courts, revolution, or war?
Maybe I'm out in left field here, but I thought that one of the hallmarks of infrastructure was a monopoly due to geographical concerns - it wouldn't make sense to run twelve different parallel power grids all over town. There is no such constraint here. Google, Facebook, etc are all big, but there's no lack of place to run power lines in play to stop a competitor from competing in their space (See DuckDuckGo, for example).
The EU (and individual member states) is doing something, both on the privacy and the anti-trust front. In fact, several agencies have already given Google a "final" warning.
If Google persists in it's arrogant "fuck you, we are the great untouchable Google" attitude, the gloves are going to come off soon enough. It will still be slow process that could take many years though.
I don't find Larry Page or Sergey Brin likable but I've certainly never gotten that vibe from them.