Does everyone hate Google now?

Google's story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth. The once-beloved startup—with its unofficial "Don't Be Evil" motto—has instead become a major Internet monopolist, as a federal judge ruled on Monday, dominating the market for online search. Google is also well-known for its data-harvesting practices, for constantly killing off products, and for facilitating the rise of brain-cell-destroying YouTubers who make me Fear for Today's Youth. (Maybe that last one is just me?) Google's rapid rise from "scrappy search engine with doodles" to "dystopic mega-corporation" has been remarkable in many ways, especially when you consider just how much goodwill the company squandered so quickly. Along the way, though, Google has achieved one unexpected result: In a divided America, it offers just about everyone something to hate. Here are just a few of the players hating Google today. Conservative attorneys general. Google used to be considered a left-wing darling, especially among the technocrats staffing the Obama administration. Conservatives, watching the liberal lovefest, soured on Google (and many other Big Tech firms), making lots of noise about "censorship" and bias. Attorneys general, often from more conservative states, began aggressively going after Google on everything from movie piracy to Mississippi student data to "lying to Texans." All attorneys general. But as discomfort with Google's size and tactics spread, so did opposition to the company. Soon it was all state AGs suing Google for running its Android Play Store as a monopoly. Last year, Google agreed to pay $700 million to end that case. Epic Games. Private companies like Epic Games got in on the antitrust action, too. Last year, lawyers for Epic Games convinced a federal jury that Google had an illegal monopoly on Android app distribution and in-app charges. (Epic has gone after Apple for similar issues with its App Store.) Conservative state legislatures. Under the Trump administration, complaints about the "censorship" of conservative content ramped up, especially around YouTube. Conservative state legislatures, including Texas and Florida, soon started passing laws designed to prevent Google and the big social media companies from exercising viewpoint discrimination. The laws were immediately caught up in litigation that continues to this day, but in July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled against them. Singling out the Texas law, the Supreme Court majority agreed that "it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to 'un-bias' what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others." Donald Trump, personally. Trump appears to harbor a more personal antipathy toward Google, convinced that the company is somehow screwing him when it comes to search results. Last week, Trump went on TV and launched into a rant against Google, saying:

Google, nobody called from Google. One of the things like doing a show like yours, your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but when you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you're doing right now with me and if I do a good job, they're gonna vote for me, they're gonna vote for me because it's not just on Fox, it's on Fox is a smaller part of it. You're on all over this, those little beautiful cell phones you're on, you're all over the place. You have a product, you have a great product. You have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out, you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad. They've been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google is gonna be close to shut down.

The Kamala Harris campaign called this an "unintelligible rant," but the point is clear enough: Google bad! Trump also appears convinced that Google is purposely messing with its search autocomplete to block news about his assassination attempt. On July 30, an AP article fact-checked his claim that "attempted assassination of tr" did not bring up Trump's name but did bring up Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and "president donald duck." According to the AP, "Multiple high-profile figures, including Trump and sitting members of Congress, promoted the claim across social media platforms, collectively amassing more than 1 million likes and shares." Google denied that any "manual action" was taken and said that the results were caused by protections against political violence. On August 5, 2024, Trump asked his supporters to stop using Google. The Trump + Biden Departments of Justice. As Trump's presidential term came to an end, the Department of Justice filed a major antitrust suit against Google, claiming the company had a monopoly in search. The complaint opened this way:

Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet, and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet, with a market value of $1 trillion and annual revenue exceeding $160 billion. For many years, Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising—the cornerstones of its empire.

At the time, Democratic skepticism of Big Tech was rising due to specific issues (the hellscape that social media had become, online disinformation after COVID-19, screen time concerns, etc.) but also to a broader feeling that pro-worker policies and old-fashioned trustbusting were just the thing after many years of corporate consolidation. So when the Biden administration took power, it maintained the case against Google and won it yesterday. The media. While many countries have had antagonistic attitudes toward Google when it comes to news content—some demanding that Google pay media companies to provide links to news articles and show headlines—the US has been somewhat different. Google was recognized by most publications as a potential firehouse of traffic; even if it did tend to bring one-article-reading newcomers rather than repeat readers, at least traffic was up and new readers saw one's site. Whatever grumbling there might have been about Google News and headlines and article snippets was generally buried beneath the reality of US "fair use" law that allowed Google to do this without compensation. But Google's recent haphazard lurch into commercialized AI products like Gemini—the company has for years been a leader in non-commercial AI research—has changed the thinking. Google now offers AI Overviews directly in some search results. These are direct answers to search queries that were of course trained completely on other people's content and are much longer and more thorough than information on previous search results pages. (When these AI answers first appeared, they were sometimes hilariously, terrifying wrong, such as one suggestion to use "1/8 cup of non-toxic glue" to stop cheese from sliding off pizza.) Trade groups like the News/Media Alliance are deeply unhappy about these moves, and they are trying to interest the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission in the issue. In May, a News/Media Alliance letter to the DOJ and FTC said:

Google has a history of flagrantly misappropriating publishers' content on its search results pages, as illustrated by the FTC's 2012 investigation into Google's scraping practices. It has steadily introduced more and more detailed "snippets" of publishers' content, until it reached the point of misappropriation. Not only has this misappropriation protected Google's monopoly in search, it has also starved publishers of traffic by eliminating consumers' incentive to click-through to view publishers' content… Google has now announced plans to deploy its [generative AI] products nationwide. The prominent placement of AI Overviews at the top of Google's search results page will reduce click through to publishers' websites even further and thus further strengthen Google's monopoly. Google's AI Overviews will significantly reduce publishers' ability to monetize their content through advertising, subscriptions, and affiliate links, and instead drive that monetization directly to Google.

Publishers can opt out of these AI Overviews, but this requires them to "effectively opt out of search distribution, which is not a viable option for publishers," News/Media complained. And, unlike OpenAI, which has been doing content deals with major publishers to feed ChatGPT's training data, Google is not keen to pay. AI critics. AI has plenty of critics these days, and given Google's size and reach, the company's AI efforts are highly visible; when they go wrong, people pounce. During the first week of the Paris Olympics, Google ran (and ran and ran) a "Dear Sydney" ad in which a father told his young daughter that she should use Google's Gemini AI to write a fan letter to an athlete. The ad was met with widespread derision, including critical commentary in The Washington Post and here at Ars. Google eventually pulled the ad. Alpha geeks. While my mom shows no apparent objection to the blizzard of crap beneath which Facebook buries any information she actually wants to read, hardcore nerds are a little different. Data collection, location tracking, and invasive ad tech generally cause them to break out in allergic reactions, and Google has made clear for years that its business model is fundamentally built upon this sort of tracking and categorization. Despite the convenience of some of its tools, the hardcore tech set increasingly prefers tech companies like Signal or even Apple, which is currently running expensive TV ads about how other browsers (read: Google's Chrome) spy on you.

Enemies everywhere

Worldwide, we are seeing similar Google backlashes related to antitrust abuse; the European Union famously dinged Google $4 billion and change for antitrust action related to Android and search, and tacked on a couple billion more for abusing its position when it came to price comparison shopping. Google has also been under heavy pressure around the world to pay local media companies for the use of headlines and snippets. France, for instance, is famously protective of its publishers and cultural industries and has forced Google to sign deals with many local outlets. Earlier this year, French regulators also hit Google with a $250 million fine for not informing these local outlets that it was using their content to train its AI systems. This kind of scrutiny is only going to intensify in the wake of concerted global findings of monopoly behavior. Don't cry for the Big G—Google is one of the wealthiest companies and still has massive resources to lobby, litigate, and advertise. Still, it's remarkable how quickly the "cool tech sheen" around the company has faded. Not all the criticism has been fair or even in good faith, but that's almost immaterial: Google has enemies now on all sides of the political and social spectra. While Trump's hope that "Google is gonna be close to shut down" by the US Congress seems deeply unlikely, it's no longer so hard to imagine the company being heavily fined, forced to make deals, or even broken up by regulators.