Google makes $150+ billion from Google Search per year. Running Google Search could be operated for likely (much less than) $10 billion per year. So, Google is

Google makes $150+ billion from Google Search per year. Running Google Search could be operated for likely (much less than) $10 billion per year. So, Google is in effect taxing us all $140 billion per year. It's not dissimilar from how Wall Street effectively taxes us all for an even larger amount. In both cases, we could use some kind of non-profit open system to facilitate web search and stock trading. The Great Lie that Google is doing a good thing by charging money to insert "relevant ads" above the search results is totally wrong. If those ads are the most relevant, they should just be the top organic results, obviously. Google mostly solved search 20 years ago. There's really nothing that impressive about Google Search in 2021. It should be relatively easy to replace it with something open, leveraging the massive improvements in hardware and software. It could operate like Wikipedia or Archive.org. The hard part is probably getting the right team and funding assembled.