That is a pretty obvious statement with the size of the company and the services it offers, but I did not have enough of an appreciation for that statement until recently. It is easy to dismiss the statement as an obvious one, but it is a little scary to me. No one company should affect the internet to this extent.
What am I taking about? One of the recent projects I worked on required me to simulate being offline by not allowing my machine to talk to Google. While doing this work, I updated my hosts file to point google.com to a dummy IP address and at the end of the day, having finished work and wanting to just read up on the days event, I started browsing the internet. The only issue was that the internet did not work. Almost every page I went to would load halfway and stop.
I started to suspect my internet connection and rebooted the modem, router, and computer but to no avail. Then I remembered the hosts file change that I had made. Surely, blocking Google would not stop 90% of the internet pages?….right? Well it does! And that, is way too power for any one company. Imagine, a hack, a DNS spoof, just by blocking Google, most users on the internet would have a very slow experience.
I’m scared of the Google.
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