If a company in tech has to give their technology to competitors, what motivation do they have to invest the resources to keep iterating and improving? When I h

If a company in tech has to give their technology to competitors, what motivation do they have to invest the resources to keep iterating and improving? When I hear the "utility" idea I realize that a lot of people, even in tech, don't understand how big a challenge search is. The technical complexity difference between power distribution and internet search is so large that you can't compare the two. Motivation to keep improving is vital in search. It's a decades old arms race between quality results and black hat algo gaming. And it plays out on a dataset that's always growing, and that growth is always accelerating. If iteration slows down even a little, black hat wins and everyone else loses. Your suggestion would effectively kill Google, which is maybe the goal, but unless it applied only to Google it would kill the searchability of the internet along with them. Remember Altavista? It would look like that. Which is not to say there aren't regulatory answers to Google's dominance. Forcing a firewall between their interests (i.e. search and advertising) would be a start.