Most people know Google as just Google, but the actual parent company is called Alphabet. Google, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Google Cloud, the Play Store, all of it falls under the Alphabet umbrella. It’s a massive corporate structure that most regular users never really think about, they just open their browser and search for something.
And speaking of history, Google wasn’t even called Google when it started. It was originally called Backrub. Yes, really. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started it in 1996 under that name before very quickly renaming it to Google, presumably because Backrub is one of the worst names for anything ever. They became so dominant that their name literally turned into a verb. You don’t Yahoo something or Bing something, you Google it. Getting to verb status in the english language is honestly one of the clearest signs that a company has completely taken over its category.
Now about that monopoly situation. In 2024 the Department of Justice ran an antitrust case against Google and a federal judge officially ruled that yes, Google is a monopoly. That ruling was two years ago and pretty much nothing has changed, which tells you alot about how slowly these things actually move even when the government wins.
The DOJ was pushing for some kind of major restructuring but the judge landed on a more limited set of remedies. The main thing Google can’t do going forward is enter into new contracts that pay companies to make Google the default search engine. That’s actually the core of how they built and maintained this monopoly in the first place. Google pays Apple billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on iPhones and Safari. Billions. Just to be the thing that’s already there when you open your browser.
When you look at everything Google owns it really does start to feel like monopoly all the way down. Android is one of the two dominant smartphone operating systems on the planet. The default browser on Android is Chrome. The default search engine on Chrome is Google. So if you buy an Android phone you are essentially handed Google at every single layer of the experience before you’ve made a single choice yourself. YouTube is the dominant video platform. Google Cloud competes directly with AWS for cloud infrastructure. Google Docs, Google Drive, Gmail, all of it feeding back into the same ecosystem.
The argument for breaking that up is pretty straightforward. When one company controls this much of how people access information, find businesses, watch videos, and use their phones, it creates an environment where competition basically can’t breathe. A small business trying to get found online has no real alternative to Google. You either play by their rules or you don’t get found. That’s an enormous amount of power for one company to have over the economy.
For SEO specifically the monopoly means that whatever Google decides matters, matters. They can change their algorithm, update their policies, or shift what types of results they show, and millions of websites feel it immediately with no real recourse. That’s the environment everyone doing SEO is operating in and its not going to change overnight even with a court ruling on the books.
