Searching for answers

When I googled “Is google good or bad?,” it first took me to a Wikipedia entry “Criticism of Google,” with a rather extensive list of misdemeanours. If it was bad, it would hide this page surely, so I can't decide yet.

However, the matter has been addressed in court with a US judge deciding Google had spent a fortune designing its search engine so that it became the only search engine to use and thus the one to put your ads on.

A dominant search engine can effectively become a monopoly and thus without competition the options are reduced and Google could decide what to promote or downgrade but the responses would no longer be accurate.

Too many internet enterprises, Google, Facebook and X have become too big and as they operate internationally, too hard for any single government to manage.

The internet was meant to be the greatest boon to humankind but there is still a long way to go and maybe these enterprises will recognise the concerns and start to develop solutions to manage their use.

Dennis Fitzgerald,

Melbourne, Australia