Google’s grip on reality: monopoly, data, and the failure of regulation

In the 21st century, few companies have achieved the scale of dominance that Google enjoys. What began as a simple search engine has evolved into a sprawling empire that touches nearly every corner of digital life. From the browser you use to the phone in your pocket, from the television in your living room to the e-reader by your bedside, Google’s reach is near total. It has become not only the gatekeeper of information but also the collector of the traces of our private lives.

For years, regulators, especially in Europe, have tried to curb this dominance. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was hailed as a landmark piece of legislation designed to protect user rights and restrict invasive data practices. Yet Google has routinely violated its provisions, collecting and trafficking data at a scale so vast that even billion-euro fines are little more than a rounding error. The company pays, shrugs, and continues. When the profits are measured in hundreds of billions, fines become not deterrents but operating expenses.

Now, pressure on Google is reaching a new level. In Europe, regulators are moving beyond fines and have gone as far as to demand the sale of Chrome, the most widely used browser in the world. On paper, this looks like a historic decision, finally, a meaningful blow against monopoly. But rumors suggest that the buyer could be Perplexity, a rising player in the AI and search space. And already, questions are being raised: would such a sale represent real change, or merely a façade of independence, hiding backroom agreements to keep data pipelines flowing?

This is the essence of the problem: companies like Google are so large, so entrenched, that even when governments force them to divest, the result may be little more than a reshuffling of logos. Behind the scenes, partnerships, licensing agreements, and secret pacts can ensure that the same data continues to move through the same hands. The monopoly is not just in market share; it is in infrastructure, in the very architecture of the internet. Breaking that apart is far more difficult than transferring ownership papers.

Meanwhile, the scale of Google’s data collection is staggering. It is not only your searches or your emails that are monitored. Smart TVs, Android devices, WearOS watches, and even e-readers like Kobo quietly send telemetry back to Google, tracking what you read, what you watch, how long you use your device, when you turn it on or off. The company does not simply know what you search; it knows what you consume, how you live, and what occupies your attention in moments of intimacy. Its empire is not just commercial, it is surveillance as business model.

This poses a profound challenge to democracy and to individual autonomy. The law is supposed to defend citizens against abuse, but when corporations are large enough to treat fines as inconsequential, the law becomes a performance rather than a shield. Google demonstrates this perfectly: it can afford to disobey. And in a world where information is power, the ability to ignore regulation is itself a form of domination.

The sale of Chrome, then, is not just a corporate matter; it is a civilizational test. Can regulators force genuine change in a company that has woven itself into the fabric of everyday life? Or will the outcome be what we have seen so many times before, a symbolic victory for lawmakers, a brief headline for the press, and a quiet continuation of business as usual behind the curtain?

This is the story we must tell: the story of a company whose tentacles extend into every digital crevice, whose fines are meaningless, whose compliance is often performative, and whose monopoly endures not by accident but by design. To understand the danger of Google is to understand how the modern internet has been privatized by one corporation, and how weak our defenses are against it.

How Google turns fines into business expenses

When the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, it was celebrated as a landmark in the defense of digital rights. At last, it seemed, tech giants would be held accountable for their data practices. Heavy fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover were designed to hurt even the largest corporations. Yet in practice, the story has been very different. For Google, GDPR fines have become less a punishment than a predictable cost of doing business.

Consider the numbers. In 2019, Google was fined €50 million by France’s data protection authority for lack of transparency in how it collected user data. In 2021, Ireland imposed fines exceeding €200 million for failures in data processing related to advertising. Other penalties have followed in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. Individually, these numbers sound impressive, but when measured against Google’s annual revenue, over $280 billion in 2023 alone, they are drops in the ocean. A fine of €200 million represents less than a single day’s income.

This imbalance creates a perverse incentive. Why invest billions in restructuring business models to fully comply with GDPR when the cheaper option is simply to pay the fines and move on? Compliance would mean limiting data collection, reducing the granularity of tracking, and ultimately cutting into the very business model that makes Google profitable. Paying penalties, by contrast, leaves the model intact. From a corporate perspective, the choice is rational: the fine becomes just another line item on the balance sheet.

The strategy is not even hidden. In financial reports, Google accounts for “legal and regulatory expenses” just as it does for salaries or office space. To shareholders, this sends a clear message: nothing in GDPR enforcement endangers the company’s growth trajectory. The fines demonstrate regulatory activity, but in practice they change little. The data continues to flow, the advertisements continue to target, and the profits continue to rise.

What this reveals is the power asymmetry between regulators and corporations. For national governments, a €200 million fine is a significant act. For a multinational giant, it is a minor inconvenience. Even if the EU were to impose its maximum penalty, 4% of global turnover, the company could still absorb the loss without dismantling its data machinery. This imbalance erodes public confidence: citizens see fines announced with fanfare, but they do not see their rights meaningfully defended.

The problem is compounded by Google’s legal arsenal. Every fine is met with appeals, legal challenges, and procedural delays. Cases drag on for years, during which the company continues to operate largely unchanged. Even when rulings are upheld, by the time enforcement arrives, the damage to privacy has already been done. Regulation, in this model, always trails behind violation. Google acts first, profits second, and pays last, a cycle in which the law never truly catches up.

This turns GDPR into something it was never meant to be: a theater of compliance. On paper, the EU defends privacy. In practice, Google exploits the gap between law and enforcement to continue business as usual. For the company, fines are not deterrents but receipts, proof that it has successfully monetized user data at a scale so vast that penalties cannot keep pace. The message to smaller players is clear: those without Google’s resources must comply or perish, while the giant itself can bend or ignore the rules with impunity.

In this sense, Google has transformed GDPR from a weapon into a ritual. Governments fine, headlines celebrate, citizens are reassured, and Google moves forward unscathed. The law remains on the books, but its power is hollowed out. And as long as regulators are limited to financial penalties, the cycle will continue, because for Google, the price of breaking the rules is still far cheaper than the price of changing them.

The Chrome dilemma, breaking up the monopoly or reshuffling the pieces

If GDPR fines have proven toothless, regulators are now reaching for heavier weapons. In Europe, Google is being pressured to divest its Chrome browser, a product that has become not only the world’s dominant gateway to the internet but also a critical pillar of Google’s data-collection empire. On the surface, this looks like a monumental step: regulators finally moving beyond financial penalties and demanding structural change. But whether this will break the monopoly or merely reshuffle the pieces is far from certain.

Chrome today controls more than 60% of the global browser market. Its dominance is not just about speed or convenience, it is about integration. Chrome connects seamlessly with Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, and Android, creating a feedback loop that keeps users locked inside Google’s ecosystem. Every search, every click, every autofill suggestion generates more data. Unlike Firefox or Safari, Chrome is not just a tool; it is a data-harvesting machine embedded in everyday browsing. Forcing Google to sell it would, in theory, strike at the heart of that machine.

But there is reason to doubt that such a sale would change much. Rumors suggest that Perplexity, a rising AI-driven search company, may be a potential buyer. On paper, this would diversify the market. In practice, however, there is widespread suspicion that the sale could be little more than a façade of independence. Through partnerships, licensing deals, or secret agreements, Google could continue to access user data flowing through Chrome while shedding formal ownership. The monopoly might persist, only under a different label.

History offers plenty of precedent for this kind of maneuver. Large corporations often respond to antitrust rulings not by dismantling their power, but by repackaging it. Assets are sold to friendly players, joint ventures are established, or long-term agreements ensure that the underlying control remains unchanged. The company appears to comply, regulators declare victory, and the public assumes progress, while the actual dynamics of power remain intact.

There is also the question of how effective any buyer could be at breaking Google’s hold. Chrome’s dominance is not only about technology but about network effects. Developers design websites to work best in Chrome. Users default to it because it syncs with their Google accounts. Advertisers rely on its deep integration with Google Ads. Stripping Chrome from Google would not erase these dependencies overnight. The new owner would inherit a product bound by invisible threads that still lead back to Mountain View.

Meanwhile, Google retains control of the underlying infrastructure. The Chromium open-source project, which powers Chrome, is still developed primarily by Google engineers. Competing browsers like Microsoft Edge and Opera already rely on it. Even if Chrome were sold, Google’s influence over web standards, performance benchmarks, and core technologies would remain. Selling the browser might change ownership, but not the deeper reality that Google continues to shape the web’s architecture.

This is the paradox of the Chrome dilemma: forcing a sale looks bold, but the outcome may be cosmetic rather than structural. Unless regulators go further, imposing restrictions on data sharing, severing technical dependencies, and ensuring real independence, the divestment may end up being a symbolic gesture, more about headlines than real reform. Google’s monopoly is not tied to a single product; it is tied to the ecosystem it has built.

For users, the risk is clear. They may wake up one day to find Chrome branded under a new company, perhaps even marketed as a “privacy-first” alternative. But behind the scenes, the same pipelines of data could still flow toward Google. The monopoly, repackaged and disguised, would continue to thrive. And regulators, once again, would have won the battle of appearances while losing the war of substance.

A façade of change, how corporate deals disguise continuity

When governments move against monopolies, corporations rarely fight with open defiance. Instead, they adapt in appearance while maintaining continuity in practice. For Google, this strategy is second nature. Forced divestments, public concessions, or partnerships are often presented as breakthroughs in regulation, yet beneath the surface, the same data pipelines continue to operate. The company knows that power in the digital economy is not about labels or ownership documents; it is about control of flows, of traffic, of attention, of data.

One of the clearest examples is Google’s default search engine agreements. Every year, Google pays tens of billions of dollars to manufacturers and platforms, Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, and others, to ensure that Google Search remains the default option. In 2021, Apple alone received an estimated $15 billion from Google for this privilege, and reports suggest that number has since climbed to nearly $20 billion annually. These payments do not reflect technical superiority; they reflect the raw purchase of dominance. For users, the choice of search engine is made before they ever open a browser.

This system reveals how continuity is disguised. Regulators may force Google to sell Chrome, but as long as Google can buy its way into being the default search engine on Safari, Samsung’s Internet Browser, or countless Android devices, its control over the search market remains intact. Ownership changes hands, headlines declare victory, yet the same queries flow into the same servers. A façade of change conceals the persistence of monopoly.

The sheer scale of these payments demonstrates how untouchable Google’s position has become. Few companies in history could afford to spend $20 billion annually simply to maintain their default status. But for Google, this is less an expense than an investment. In 2023, Google’s advertising revenues surpassed $230 billion, driven overwhelmingly by its search engine dominance. Spending billions to guarantee default placement is trivial when the returns are measured in hundreds of billions.

This raises uncomfortable questions about regulatory effectiveness. How can any antitrust measure succeed if the very mechanisms of monopoly are legal and contractual? Regulators may dismantle one product line, but as long as Google can funnel users back to its core search engine through default agreements, the result will be superficial. The monopoly is not in Chrome alone, nor in Android alone, it is in the network of defaults that quietly directs the flow of billions of searches every day.

The public rarely notices this arrangement. When you purchase an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy, you assume Google Search is the default because it is the “best”. You do not see the billions exchanged behind the scenes to create that reality. In this way, Google’s dominance is naturalized. It feels like a fact of life rather than a purchased advantage. By the time regulators question the practice, the damage has already been done, users are conditioned, and alternatives remain marginal.

This is the essence of Google’s façade: compliance on the surface, continuity beneath. Whether through paying fines, divesting assets, or signing multibillion-dollar agreements, the outcome is the same. Data continues to flow into Google’s servers, and the company’s grip on search remains intact. To dismantle this structure would require more than forcing a sale of Chrome; it would demand confronting the financial and contractual scaffolding that holds the monopoly together.

And that is where regulators hesitate. Forcing the sale of a browser is headline-worthy. Confronting the billions exchanged in backroom agreements with Apple and Samsung risks destabilizing not only Google but also its partners. The façade, then, persists because it is convenient for everyone, except the users, whose choices are quietly erased in the name of profit.

Google’s invisible empire, data collection beyond search

Most people think of Google as a search engine. They may also associate it with Gmail, Maps, or YouTube. But the company’s empire extends far beyond what is visible on the screen. It is not only about queries typed into a browser; it is about the continuous capture of user behavior across a vast constellation of devices, services, and applications. In truth, Google does not simply process searches, it monitors lives.

The reach begins with Android, the operating system that powers the majority of smartphones worldwide. Every swipe, every app installation, every location ping feeds into Google’s ecosystem. Even when location services are “off”, investigations have revealed that Google can still collect background location data. For billions of people, the phone in their pocket is less a tool of independence than a sensor feeding data into a corporate archive.

But Android is only one part of the puzzle. Google has extended its surveillance tentacles into the living room through smart TVs, Chromecast, and Google TV, which quietly log what is watched, how long, and at what times. Through WearOS smartwatches, the company gains access to biometric data, heart rates, exercise routines, even sleep patterns. The promise of convenience is in reality a pipeline of intimate, bodily information.

Even devices not branded by Google can fall under its reach. A striking example came when reports revealed that Kobo e-readers, manufactured by Rakuten, not Google, were sending telemetry back to Google servers. Page turns, reading times, and book progress were quietly shared, providing insights into what people read, when, and for how long. The idea that your quiet moment with a novel could feed into an advertising profile shows just how deep and subtle the surveillance has become.

Then there is the advertising ecosystem itself. Google’s dominance in ad tech means that even websites and apps not owned by Google often contain Google trackers, scripts, and analytics. In practice, this means the company can follow users across the open web, reconstructing journeys across thousands of sites. Even those who try to avoid Google services find themselves shadowed by its advertising infrastructure. Escape, if not impossible, is close to it.

The key to this empire is aggregation. A single data point, a page turn on an e-reader, a heart rate spike on a smartwatch, a search query in Chrome, may seem trivial. But aggregated across billions of users and trillions of interactions, it becomes a map of human behavior at unprecedented scale. This is why Google’s business is not simply about ads. It is about creating the most complete behavioral dossier ever assembled in human history.

What makes this empire invisible is that it hides behind convenience. Users accept Android because it is free and familiar, smart TVs because they are cheap and efficient, smartwatches because they are trendy and useful. The cost is rarely explained: not euros or dollars, but data surrendered in silence. For many, the bargain remains invisible until moments of scandal, a leaked report, a lawsuit, or a rare investigation that shows how much has been collected. By then, the pipeline is so entrenched that opting out feels like opting out of modern life itself.

In this sense, Google has achieved what regulators fear most: a monopoly not just in products but in data infrastructure. Even if Chrome were sold, even if fines were increased, even if lawsuits were won, the empire would endure, because the surveillance runs deeper than any single device or service. Google does not merely dominate the web; it dominates the very act of being connected.

Monopolies as policy or when disobedience becomes strategy

For most companies, compliance with regulation is a legal obligation. For Google, it has become a strategic choice. The company operates on a scale so vast that it can calculate the costs of obedience versus disobedience and then select whichever path maximizes profit. In practice, this has meant that breaking the rules is often more lucrative than following them. What looks like lawbreaking is in reality policy by design.

This is why fines under GDPR, or rulings from antitrust courts, rarely change behavior. Google has the resources to absorb them, appeal them, and delay them. Each penalty becomes part of a calculus: how much revenue can be extracted by violating the law, how long enforcement can be postponed, how small the ultimate financial hit will look against annual earnings. As long as the returns outweigh the costs, disobedience is not a risk but a business strategy.

The numbers illustrate this perfectly. Google earns more than $280 billion annually, with advertising making up the vast majority. When Ireland fined the company €225 million in 2021 for breaches of GDPR related to ad personalization, that represented less than 0.1% of yearly revenue. Why overhaul an entire advertising infrastructure, the foundation of the business, for a fraction of a percent? Far easier to pay, appeal, and continue extracting data.

This dynamic undermines the very premise of regulation. Laws are supposed to impose limits that cannot be ignored, but for corporations of Google’s size, limits are negotiable. The company can lobby policymakers, hire armies of lawyers, and fund endless litigation. Time itself becomes a weapon: by the time rulings are enforced, technologies and markets may already have shifted. Regulation is always running behind, while Google advances unchecked.

The danger is that this turns monopoly into normality. If laws cannot be enforced, if violations carry no meaningful consequence, then monopoly is not only tolerated but effectively sanctioned. Google is allowed to keep breaking rules because the system is incapable of imposing costs large enough to matter. In this environment, obedience becomes optional, and the concept of corporate accountability becomes hollow.

Even when regulators escalate, as with the push to divest Chrome, the same principle applies. Google can comply cosmetically, reshaping its empire just enough to meet legal requirements while keeping its core dominance untouched. It is not that regulators never win battles; it is that they never win the war for structure. The monopoly adapts, repackages, and persists.

This is why Google is not just a company but a case study in systemic failure. It has proven that in the digital age, the largest corporations are effectively above the law, not by defying it outright but by rendering it irrelevant. For smaller players, rules remain rigid. For Google, they are flexible, malleable, and ultimately negotiable. And until regulators develop tools that impose real costs, structural, not financial, the company will continue to treat disobedience not as a mistake, but as business policy.

The political and social cost, when user rights are sidelined

The cost of Google’s monopoly is not only measured in euros or dollars. It is measured in the erosion of user rights, political sovereignty, and public trust. When corporations become powerful enough to treat regulation as optional, citizens are left exposed. Privacy, transparency, and freedom of choice become bargaining chips in a game played between regulators and multinational giants, and more often than not, users lose.

At the core is the question of privacy. GDPR was meant to guarantee that individuals could control their personal data, understand how it was collected, and demand its deletion. Yet Google’s ecosystem makes this almost impossible in practice. Turning off “location history” does not stop location tracking. Disabling ad personalization does not prevent profiling. Even Kobo e-readers, devices ostensibly dedicated to books, were discovered sending reading statistics back to Google servers. The message is clear: user consent is less a right than a checkbox in a system designed to ignore it.

The political consequences are equally severe. When Google pays billions to Apple or Samsung to remain the default search engine, it is not just purchasing visibility, it is buying influence. It creates an economy where tech giants collude to reinforce each other’s dominance, effectively privatizing the structure of the internet. Regulators may speak of protecting competition, but users are funneled into the same monopolistic ecosystem regardless of their choices. In this system, corporate contracts trump consumer autonomy.

Social trust also erodes in the face of such dominance. Users see headlines about record fines and antitrust cases, but they see little change in their daily lives. Search remains Google. Ads remain targeted. Data continues to flow. Over time, this disconnect fosters cynicism: laws feel performative, institutions feel weak, and corporations feel untouchable. The danger is not only monopoly itself but the sense that democracy is powerless to restrain it.

There is also a cultural cost. By centralizing control of search, video, advertising, and even hardware infrastructure, Google has positioned itself as the arbiter of information. It decides which results are visible, which ads dominate attention, and which voices are amplified. This is not a neutral function. Even subtle algorithmic changes shape public discourse, tilt markets, and influence elections. The monopoly does not simply collect data; it reshapes reality according to its opaque priorities.

On a societal level, this dynamic normalizes surveillance. Younger generations grow up assuming that every device, app, and service inevitably collects data. Privacy becomes not a right but a nostalgic ideal. This acceptance is itself a victory for Google and its peers, because it lowers resistance to further encroachments. What once would have been scandalous, an e-reader tracking page turns, a smartwatch logging sleep, is now greeted with a shrug. The monopoly does not only dominate; it conditions acceptance.

Finally, there is the global cost. Google’s dominance in Europe highlights the limitations of regional regulation in the face of multinational power. While the EU imposes GDPR, Google’s headquarters remain in the United States, where privacy protections are weaker and lobbying power immense. This creates a geopolitical imbalance: European citizens rely on foreign corporations that answer primarily to American courts and shareholders. In such a system, sovereignty itself becomes diluted.

Thus, the political and social cost of Google’s monopoly extends far beyond search rankings or advertising markets. It strikes at the heart of democratic legitimacy, cultural autonomy, and personal dignity. It is not simply a story of one company breaking rules. It is a story of how a single corporation has managed to bend rules, governments, and entire societies around its model of surveillance capitalism.

The uncertain future of Google’s empire

The pressure on Google is growing. Between antitrust investigations, GDPR fines, and mounting political scrutiny, the company faces challenges that would cripple almost any other business. Yet the question remains: will these challenges lead to genuine transformation, or will they end in yet another cycle of cosmetic concessions and deeper entrenchment? The future of Google’s empire is not only uncertain, it is a test case for the future of digital regulation itself.

The most immediate development is the proposed divestment of Chrome. If regulators force Google to sell its browser, it would mark the first major structural intervention in the company’s history. But as we have seen, ownership changes do not necessarily mean behavioral changes. Chrome’s market dominance is tied not only to Google branding but also to its deep integration with the company’s infrastructure: search defaults, ad networks, and the Chromium codebase. A sale could weaken Google’s grip, or it could merely rebrand the monopoly.

Beyond Chrome, there is speculation about whether regulators might target other pillars of Google’s ecosystem. Could Android be next, given its near-total control of the smartphone market outside of Apple? Could Google Ads be split off, breaking the link between search and advertising that drives the company’s profits? Each of these moves would represent a direct challenge to the business model of surveillance capitalism. Yet the political will for such measures is uncertain, and the company’s lobbying machine is formidable.

The rumored involvement of Perplexity as a buyer for Chrome adds further uncertainty. On one hand, the rise of AI-driven search competitors could fragment Google’s dominance. On the other, if acquisitions come with quiet agreements to share data or maintain interoperability, then the monopoly may persist in a new form. The future may not be a Google monopoly, but a cartel of giants exchanging user data in ways that preserve their collective power.

At the same time, Google is not standing still. The company is aggressively moving into artificial intelligence, cloud services, and hardware. Its Gemini AI project is designed to compete directly with OpenAI, while its dominance in cloud computing and enterprise software continues to grow. Even if regulators weaken its grip on search, Google is already building new empires. The danger is not that Google collapses, but that it simply shifts its monopoly into new domains.

For users, the implications are sobering. If regulators succeed only in symbolic victories, little will change in practice. Search may look different, browsers may carry new logos, but the data will still flow into corporate silos. The question is whether governments can find the courage to go beyond fines and cosmetic divestments, to impose real structural reforms that challenge the foundations of Google’s business model. Without that, the future will look much like the present: surveillance as default, privacy as fiction.

And yet, there is also an opening. Public awareness of digital rights is higher than ever. Scandals about tracking, profiling, and manipulation have eroded the once-glowing image of Silicon Valley. If pressure builds from below, from citizens demanding change, regulators may find the legitimacy they need to confront giants like Google more forcefully. The company’s future, then, is not written solely in boardrooms or courts. It is written in whether societies decide that their rights are worth more than corporate convenience.

The uncertain future of Google is, in truth, the uncertain future of the internet itself. Will it remain a privatized space dominated by a handful of corporations, or can it be reclaimed as a public good? The answer will determine not only what happens to Google but what happens to the very idea of a free and open web.

The privatization of the web

The story of Google is not only the story of a company. It is the story of how the internet itself has been privatized, transformed from a network of open exchange into a machine of surveillance and profit. What began as a search engine has become a structure of power that spans browsers, operating systems, devices, and even the invisible infrastructure of advertising. The danger is not only that Google dominates, but that it has made its dominance feel natural, inevitable, and unquestionable.

At every stage, the company has shown an ability to evade true accountability. GDPR fines become operating costs. Antitrust rulings become cosmetic divestments. Default search engine deals buy market share in ways regulators struggle to contest. Even when forced to sell, Google ensures continuity through secretive agreements, licensing arrangements, and technical dependencies. The façade of compliance hides a deeper continuity: the data still flows, the ads still target, the monopoly still holds.

For users, this reality erodes fundamental rights. Privacy becomes theoretical, consent becomes meaningless, and freedom of choice becomes a performance. Whether through Android’s constant background tracking, smart TVs’ invisible telemetry, or e-readers leaking reading habits, people are turned into sources of behavioral data without real alternatives. Opting out often feels impossible. The internet, once imagined as a space of liberation, becomes a system of corporate surveillance.

The political consequences are equally severe. Regulators can no longer credibly claim that fines or rulings defend citizens. Every time Google pays and continues, public trust in institutions weakens. Every time a monopoly is tolerated in practice, democracy looks less capable of defending its people. The imbalance of power between corporations and governments becomes not a technical detail but a civilizational problem.

And yet, the greatest danger lies not in Google’s defiance but in society’s resignation. The longer people accept surveillance as inevitable, the harder it becomes to challenge. Each generation grows more accustomed to devices that watch, listen, and record. The outrage fades, replaced by convenience. What should be scandal becomes ordinary. This normalization is Google’s greatest victory: not simply to collect data, but to make us believe that surrendering it is the price of modern life.

But history shows that monopolies do not last forever. Public pressure, political will, and cultural shifts can topple even the most entrenched powers. The question is whether societies will awaken to the cost of allowing Google, and its peers, to dominate the digital sphere unchecked. If not, the web will remain privatized, not as a commons for humanity but as a marketplace where attention and behavior are bought and sold.

In the end, Google is not only a threat because it breaks rules. It is a threat because it rewrites the rules around itself. Its empire is not only technological but cultural, shaping what we accept as normal, what we expect from devices, what we imagine the internet to be. To challenge it will require more than fines or divestments. It will require reclaiming the idea that the web belongs to its users, not to the corporations that profit from them. Until then, Google’s grip on reality will remain firm, and our freedom within the digital world will remain fragile.