Here's the question you need to answer. If they are evil, can they cause a lot of harm that will be hard to protect against or correct? If so, then it matters

Here's the question you need to answer. If they are evil, can they cause a lot of harm that will be hard to protect against or correct? If so, then it matters. Google and Facebook both want to be publishers when it suits them, and common carriers when it suits them, and both have shown, I think we can all agree, a propensity to be evil. I think it's telling that Google retired, "Don't be evil." I think Google is worse in that regard since they are so much more pervasive. It's easy enough to permanently opt out of Facebook, but to avoid using Google is difficult, if not impossible. The other question is that do these companies allow for competition, not that they are necessarily explicitly preventing competition (although they may be), but whether or not they are so successful and have so much of a market share that it is literally impossible to compete with them, and again, I think the answer is yes. We see new competitors for Facebook on almost a weekly basis, and none of them ever get anywhere, not because of whether or not they are any good, but the fact that they can't compete because pretty much everyone who isn't actively boycotting Facebook is on Facebook (including me). As far as Google goes, the best we can hope for the is someone to be able to compete with them in one particular area, and even that would be tough because Google, like Microsoft or Apple, can throw so much money at a project that it can succeed as a loss leader by simply outlasting any would-be competitor.