> Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company’s monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its “index”—the mammoth and ever-g

> Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company’s monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its “index”—the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content—into a kind of public commons. Partially bull__it - even forgetting about the $ that anybody would have to pay to Google for I/O traffic to scan its index (on which Google would put its % of fair earnings for at least the I/O generated plus maybe the "discovery" service for new URLs) that way any competing search engine would only have access to what Google decides that is worth indexing => OK from the point of view of the competing market (more search engines can rely on the same source data and potentially extrapolate different results) but in many cases NOK for the end-users as in all search engines that would use such service only the data that Google would decide that is worth to be indexed could be used (therefore a "closed bubble" set by Google). If I were Google this proposal would probably be OK (more $ earned to cover the fixed costs of indexing by selling I/O to outsiders and at the same time it would lower the pressure/attention from regulators). On the other hand non-indexed informations like all what comes from the Android OS (e.g. position of users, apps used by whom&when&etc), usage and actions on web-pages tracked by g-analytics, DNS access (e.g. 8.8.8.8), and etc... would be excluded - these are nowadays probably the most lucrative sources of infos of "what's happening now" + "what are people doing now where" which in turn generate the best answers to what "most" users want to know, which is mostly about "now" and their regional area.