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Justice Department considering push for historic break up of Google after landmark antitrust ruling: report (nypost.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution.

This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.

The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we've got to something like this. It's a non-profit but AFAIK they don't get any government funding. They've got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They're spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Running a search engine is very expensive though.

The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.

And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I'm willing to bet we'd see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.

The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this.

Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.