What would happen if Google died tomorrow?

[Sergeant Politeness]

We've never let internet companies get as big as they've gotten. With all the consolidations and whatnot, corporations like Google own our data, own our tools, and to some extent, own us. My high school made the jump to Google Classroom, Drive, and Gmail just a few years before I graduated. I doubt it's the only one, given how it's far less expensive to outsource all that shit to Google than to run proprietary solutions and train staff to maintain it.

What would happen if it all died tomorrow, though? It'd be stupidly optimistic to say Google's gonna go away any time soon, but fortunes can change pretty rapidly. Archive Team has a giant list of services that have shut down, taking gigabytes and terabytes of data with them. More are on the way. (Kiwi Farms is on that watchlist, by the way.) Rarely is there a backup, some way of exporting data, and after it shuts down, that's usually it.

What would be the effects of a corporation the size of Google suddenly dying and taking everyone's data with it? Would we see companies and people's faith in it suddenly disintegrate? Would people take up more secure, involved alternatives (Like Bitchute vs YouTube) or would no one learn?

 

[AnOminous]

If they went bankrupt, there would be a feeding frenzy as people tried to buy up all that juicy data in the bankruptcy. Then it would be used for massive identity theft and other kinds of fraud.

They're probably "too big to fail" for that reason alone.

 

[NIGGO KILLA]

yahoo would still be a thing

 

[hotcheetospuffs]

i would use bing and get gift cards for searching

 

[polonium]

It's almost impossible for something as complex and large as Google to "suddenly" fail. Only in really specific, narrow examples, such as massive malfeasance or criminal activity on their behalf, or a catastrophe of such epic proportions that Google not existing is the least of your worries.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Possible economic strangulation, there's a reason smaller online businesses last as long as they have and achieved any kind of expansion. Google seems to be that pulmonary chamber smaller online businesses need in order to survive on the long term.

Regardless of how much you could rely on DuckDuckGo or Bing, it wouldn't have the same impact of exposure.

 

[m0rnutz]

Android wouldn't require you to get a Pixel.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

It's almost impossible for something as complex and large as Google to "suddenly" fail. Only in really specific, narrow examples, such as massive malfeasance or criminal activity on their behalf, or a catastrophe of such epic proportions that Google not existing is the least of your worries.

It's a theoretical question, but the idea of these companies in decline and not existing one day isn't a question of if, it's a question of when. I linked two lists of tons of examples of companies circling the drain and dying off, taking shittons of photos and other misc. user data with it. It's pretty fucking common. If something like that were to happen with Google, what would be the effects of it?

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

What Politeness said, also, the anti-trust litigation towards Microsoft and the following damage has smoothed out over time, but they're back to doing shitty anticompetitive things (Win10 upgrade debacle) to turn others off from leaving window 7, giving Google more of and advantage to distribute Chromebooks throughout school districts. Whatever's left of cardboard IT support/SysAdmin is being alienated by all these worthless changes that are way too ahead and several steps behind. Tell me this; would you rather use a very basic OS for productivity with fewer learning curves but drastically different to conventional Linux, or would you have a version of Windows where you have to install special software to give it basic features, and then deal with the myriad of compatibility and stability issues over a period of time?

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

What Politeness said, also, the anti-trust litigation towards Microsoft and the following damage has smoothed out over time, but they're back to doing shitty anticompetitive things (Win10 upgrade debacle) to turn others off from leaving window 7, giving Google more of and advantage to distribute Chromebooks throughout school districts. Whatever's left of cardboard IT support is being alienated by all these worthless changes that are way too ahead and several steps behind. Tell me this; would you rather use a very basic OS for productivity with fewer learning curves but drastically different to conventional Linux, or would you have a version of Windows where you have to install special software to give it basic features, and then deal with the myriad of compatibility and stability issues over a period of time?

Shit, a Chromebook looked like a good deal for me at some point as a second machine. Given how heavily it relies on the Chrome Web Store and Chrome Sync and Google's proprietary nonsense, aside from getting rooted or running another distro entirely, they'll be useless.

Some people would probably argue that they'd date too much before that would be an issue (hardware does age like that), but really, how much juice do you need for web browsing? There's a reason a popular use for older computers is to make them guest machines for email and YouTube; you really don't need a supercomputer to do it. I know Chromebook use was strong when I graduated, and I don't see them getting rid of it any time soon. If Google were to go and pull everyone's email, schoolwork, and lesson plans into the memory hole, that district would be fucked.

I think people think of Google as just search when it's a fuck of a lot bigger than that.

 

[polonium]

It's a theoretical question, but the idea of these companies in decline and not existing one day isn't a question of if, it's a question of when. I linked two lists of tons of examples of companies circling the drain and dying off, taking shittons of photos and other misc. user data with it. It's pretty fucking common. If something like that were to happen with Google, what would be the effects of it?

Fair enough. I think hypotheticals tend to work best when they have at least some way of coming true and aren't just "What if the air turned to marmalade" type stuff.

If we all woke up tomorrow and Google had shit the bed, then yeah, people/companies/government departments that have been relying on those services without taking local backups are going to be in a world of pain. The fallout would be pretty hilarious.

Google have shuttered products before, though they obviously usually give you a warning period, so people who aren't taking local backups of their data like photos are probably asking for it anyway. Sometimes life lessons need to be painful for the message to stick.

The flip side of this, which I find really interesting personally, is that we went from the original model of computing being one monolithic computer serving dozens or hundreds of terminals with little or no processing power or storage of their own.
That gave way to a fragmented model, where everyone had local processor and storage resources and things were loosely connected together.
That then gave way to a kind of hybridised model, people have relatively powerful computers for doing processor intensive tasks like gaming, some people have low-power computers that rely heavily on remote resouces. Some storage is centralised in data warehouses, some is kept local. I wonder if we'll ever see a really distributed version like was shown in sci-fi stories like The Diamond Age or "the matrix" (not that one) in William Gibson's stuff, where everything is distributed, you might use your computer to do a job for someone else, and they pay to get someone else to do something for you, or rent time on someone else's hardware and remotely dial in. A bit like Uber for computer resource.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

Google have shuttered products before, though they obviously usually give you a warning period, so people who aren't taking local backups of their data like photos are probably asking for it anyway. Sometimes life lessons need to be painful for the message to stick.

I'm gonna spoiler a quote from Jason Scott, probably the premiere archivist walking the planet today, on why the piddling warning period they give usually isn't enough:

Spoiler: Jason Scott

There was a weblog posting on this same site, informally, on August 4th, letting people know AOL Hometown was being shut down, and maybe you should make an effort to get it. Officially, though, notification was sent out (how? In what way?) on September 30th, giving people essentially 4 weeks to figure out how to get their data off the servers, find a new place to send the data, get that arranged, and then do the transfer.

Of course, many people may not have been checking their e-mail. Some people might have had un-working e-mail and not been notified. Some people might have not understood how to make things run.

Go ahead and read these comments. They’re heartbreaking.

2. Is there not a way to obtain the blogs anymore. I was unable to transfer them before oct 31. Please let me know if there is anyway to get them. Thank you Sandra

5. My question is like those above. Is there anyway still to retrieve my hournals and homepages? I tried before the deadline but nothing happened. These are my memories. Things I wanted to remember about my kids. And when I tried to access them before the deadline I was unable to. Otherwise I would have printed it all out. Please help.

12. WHERE IS THE HOME PAGE IT TOOK MONTHS FOR ME TO BILL. I DID NOT RECEIVE ANY NOTICE VIA THE MAIL OR E-MAIL. PLEASE HELP ME FIND MY WEB PAGE SO I CAN COPY IT AND MOVE IT SOME WHERE ELSE.

17. What happened to my web page on my husband, Bob Champine, that took me many years to put together on his career and which meant a lot to me and to the aviation community. I noticed with 9.0 I lost the left margin and the picture of him exiting the X-1. I need to restore it to the internet as it is history. Please tell me what to do. I will be glad to retype it, I just don’t want it lost to the world. I need help. Gloria Champine

It’s all fine and good, those readers who sneer and say “you get what you pay for” and “ha ha, losers”. But the fact is, these people were brought online and given a place for themselves. Like a turkey drawn with a child’s hand or a collection of snow globes collected from a life well-lived, these sites were hand-made, done by real people, with no agenda or business plan or knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked. They were paying for their accounts, make no mistake – this was often provided to them as a tool combined with their AOL accounts. Some were absorbed from other companies as AOL purchased them. Some of these websites had existed for a decade.

Some people didn’t back things up. Some had moved on. The data, however, stayed where it was, for years on end, and if someone happened to not be online for 4 weeks and be prepared on short notice to retrieve their stuff, then they were well and truly fucked.

Full thing here, dude makes a seriously good point about how, while authorities and landlords have to give you time to figure out your next move when you get evicted, companies don't have to do jack or shit. The private sector argument doesn't apply here, given that most rented homes are private property anyway. I don't think he's even that alarmist. I know people whose entire online presence is Facebook.

The flip side of this, which I find really interesting personally, is that we went from the original model of computing being one monolithic computer serving dozens or hundreds of terminals with little or no processing power or storage of their own.
That gave way to a fragmented model, where everyone had local processor and storage resources and things were loosely connected together.
That then gave way to a kind of hybridised model, people have relatively powerful computers for doing processor intensive tasks like gaming, some people have low-power computers that rely heavily on remote resouces. Some storage is centralised in data warehouses, some is kept local.

In a way, I think us returning to the thin client model has reframed data into being just that: data. There really is something to be said about having a physical copy of something, whether that's music or a photo, and the fact that 90% of the world's media is available exclusively in some datacenter I've never even seen has given rise to it being essentially disposable. It's certainly disposable to the company who hosts it and it's treated as disposable while it's around, but, at least for some of it, it's really not.

It's not that hard to believe that we'll lose a majority of the content available to us right now. It's easy to look at it all and go "it's just a drawing" or "it's just some family photos" or "it's just people bullshitting on a forum", but really, it's a snapshot in time. Everything is a curiosity that some historian will probably pour over. If bowls and paintings recovered from, say, an ancient tomb are historically significant, the world's data now is significant. It just doesn't seem it to us because this is our life.

 

[Kyria the Great]

We've never let internet companies get as big as they've gotten. With all the consolidations and whatnot, corporations like Google own our data, own our tools, and to some extent, own us. My high school made the jump to Google Classroom, Drive, and Gmail just a few years before I graduated. I doubt it's the only one, given how it's far less expensive to outsource all that shit to Google than to run proprietary solutions and train staff to maintain it.

What would happen if it all died tomorrow, though? It'd be stupidly optimistic to say Google's gonna go away any time soon, but fortunes can change pretty rapidly. Archive Team has a giant list of services that have shut down, taking gigabytes and terabytes of data with them. More are on the way. (Kiwi Farms is on that watchlist, by the way.) Rarely is there a backup, some way of exporting data, and after it shuts down, that's usually it.

What would be the effects of a corporation the size of Google suddenly dying and taking everyone's data with it? Would we see companies and people's faith in it suddenly disintegrate? Would people take up more secure, involved alternatives (Like Bitchute vs YouTube) or would no one learn?

Well if investment bubbles and shaky markets has taught me is that you can be on top one day and be the sick man the next. I feel that if Google would get to the stage of being on the decline, it would have the effect like a pack of hyenas into the wounded elephant to get that juicy meat.

 

[polonium]

@Sergeant Politeness Yeah he makes some interesting points.
I was amused beyond measure by something I read (online lol) a few years ago where digital information degrades a lot quicker than physical writing. Not just in terms of stuff like the physical media it's on being unusable like tape losing it's magnetism, but formats becoming obsolete and unreadable. So the data is good and clean, but you have no way to read it.

There's a good example of this where the BBC in the UK tried to make a new version of the Domesday Book for the 20th century, and ended up making a really cool product for it's time, with a searchable map of the country and videos, pictures and stories from the areas, it was all really interesting stuff. Unfortunately, they were really pushing the envelope for Current Year -20 technology, so they ended up with a weird specific version of a BBC Master microcomputer with a dedicated laserdisc reader, and the discs themselves are in a strange format they invented for storing both digital and analogue data on the same disc. Now, unless you have one of those specific machines in good working order, the whole thing is unusable, even if you had the discs. But the original Domesday book is totally accessible to anyone who can read the language.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

I was amused beyond measure by something I read (online lol) a few years ago where digital information degrades a lot quicker than physical writing. Not just in terms of stuff like the physical media it's on being unusable like tape losing it's magnetism, but formats becoming obsolete and unreadable. So the data is good and clean, but you have no way to read it.

Shit, even punch cards are better suited to long-term storage than something like tape or hard drives. That's the crazy part, and honestly, it makes me a bit paranoid. I'm starting to keep physical copies of shit I wanna make sure is still around.

It's a really stupid but common situation that the business way of doing things (proprietary formats, vendor lock-in, encryption, security through obscurity) is completely antithetical to the archivist/sustainable way of doing things (interoperability, open formats, simplicity). Digital preservation and making sure that data stays uncorrupted and in readable formats is so underrated and important, and really, it stretches into every major market that's gone digital. Games, photography, movies, old and new software, business management, embedded infrastructure in ATMs and the like, etc. are all affected by it.

 

[polonium]

Nah, punch cards are a terrible way to store data. Not only do you need exotic hardware but you also need to know how the cards are encoded before you can even get the data off, and that's before you deal with the data itself being obsolete, like strange binary formats.

I think the best way to store data for a really long time would be printing out XML onto something that will last a long time like archival quality paper or something and just reading it back in with an OCR scanner when you want to use it.

 

[Mysterious Capitalist]

Kiwi Farms is on that watchlist, by the way

They're right for the wrong reason: the Farms went down on January because Vordrak attacked @Null 's family, so it was due to particular circumstances. But I guess they're still right because Vordrak keeps shutting down any attempt to monetize the Farms, which are a financial sinkhole atm.

Anyway, I think it would be something like when Megaupload was shut down suddenly in 2012: there would be an enormous power vacuum in all the services that Google provides, people would scramble to find what currently would be sub-par or short lived (because it would be financially unfeasible to those that try and don't have Google's money) alternatives. A lot of stuff would be lost forever and I mean a good chunk of global private user data. Petabyte of digital memories and files, lost forever. Without a backup period before shutdown, small to mid offices that used Drive around the world would be obliterated overnight.

Then the alternatives would slowly catch up in the years to come, while the former Google's userbase is permanently fractured across the net. Some Google spiritual successor might come up and meet mild success (like Mega), but it wouldn't count as a shadow of its former self. Eventually either a big name that had money to spare like Facebook or a brand new name would become the, if not as bloated with money, "next Google" (news sites will call it that in those slow days articles). Here, I'm specifically referring to the search engine and ad reach capabilities.

For everything else (reminder that YouTube, among others, would go down with Google), it's possible that there'll be slightly sub-par alternatives until one of them will completely randomly conglomerate enough of an userbase to allow it to become the "new X", especially a video provider ("new YouTube"), and start to offer a good enough content monetization to attract content creator and YouTube's history will repeat itself. But I'm generally less sure about this last paragraph.

 

[Joan Nyan]

My collection of anime avatars on Google Drive would be gone.

 

[kylie]

The recent wave of Google right-think and censorship got me thinking about precisely this. Not just Google failing, but what if they suddenly shut my account like they did to Jordan Peterson, simply because of something I said that unpredictably triggered some faceless special snowflake in their employ?

I've started diversifying and using multiple service providers, based on my separate topics and interests: Thus I'll never lose everything all at once. I'm just wondering if anyone else here has started taking measures to hedge their bets and protect themselves?

 

[Omni]

Personally, I couldn't live without YouTube. Not going to powerlevel, but my life is pretty garbage ATM and YouTube creators just disappearing would make me commit suicide.

Now, all those rich ass motherfuckers like Markiplier and Pewdiepie losing their fat stacks? They'd probably kill themselves too, because I doubt their collecting any interest in the bank with how fast they put that shit out.

The fallout would be both hilarious and painful for a FUCK TON of people from YouTube alone. Google going down would, needless to say, suck ass.