What would the web look like if Google suddenly disappeared?

just another stupid human

Google is now in countless ways deeply connected to the underlying structure of the web all of us use every day, many of which we don’t even consciously realize in the moment.
As a matter of fact - there are so many more that even when thinking for hours on end, you wouldn’t be able to come up with all of the ways Google has - slowly and carefully - entangled itself with an internet originally meant not to be controlled by any single entity - a conservative estimate puts the number of Google “users” (in some way or another) at roughly 4.3 billion people.
I want to visualize at least some of the biggest connections between a single, publicly traded, for-profit company and the way billions of people entertain, inform, and talk to each other every hour of every day, just by imagining what would happen if Google suddenly disappeared, shut down not to come back up again:

  • fonts on over 70% of websites would suddenly look weird
  • over 3 million websites and apps, many of them reliant on the Google Display Network (GDN) to keep running, would stop serving advertisements for a brief moment
  • 25% of the digital advertising market would (at least briefly) disappear
  • users wouldn’t be able to log in to millions of websites using reCAPTCHA (“select all squares containing traffic lights”…)
  • 90% of web searches would suddenly just return an error code
  • Bing would be the only major/comprehensive western search index left and be used in some way or another by all remaining search engines (with the exception of Baidu and Yandex, which both also index a lot of non-Chinese/-Russian sites), putting Microsoft in a (nearly) unprecedented position of control over access to information worldwide
  • a fourth of all of the email market would go silent without further notice
  • hundreds of millions of devices from Google’s own brands (Nest home appliances like cameras, Google Pixel phones, Chromecast…) would stop getting support and soon be unusable
  • one billion monthly active users of Google Maps would be without navigation
  • an immense amount of knowledge, entertainment, and internet culture would be gone forever, roughly 14 billion videos, more than one and a half for every human currently alive would be gone at least temporarily, many of them forever, all of this in the blink of an eye
  • roughly 65% of internet users 4 would now be running a completely abandoned, very soon insecure and outdated web browser, and over 75% would be running a browser whose underlying web engine (the thing drawing the actual websites) was abandoned - major other browser vendors using Google’s rendering engine would probably soon be trying to support a version of the software
  • a hundred million Chromebooks would turn into paperweights within months
  • billions and billions of Android devices manufactured by hundreds of companies would suddenly be unable to install apps from the Google Play Store and be without official patches and updates with many Android features turning non-functional in seconds, leading to dozens of different attempts to further develop Android by hard- and software vendors and a big share of devices not getting updates at all
  • …

And there is more, and it’s getting worse every year - just take a look at the List of Google products. It’s completely insane to believe this monopolization of something meant to be so decentralized as the global web would be without consequences, or a good thing for that matter.

Just looking at the list of things that would happen to the more than 90% of internet users that are Google users in some way or another makes it hard to argue that Google should not be split up into many smaller companies. No one, be it government, corporation, or person should have this kind of power - and even if you were to make a list of entities most trustworthy of this kind of responsibility, Google wouldn’t exactly be an obvious pick for first place.