> Google seems more passive and delivers more utility.
Google delivers no utility beyond the companies that it acquired, and its monopolies due to size and control over so many handsets allowed it to push out the competition that would force it to improve what it does offer.
Youtube and Maps, at least, have a worse, more intrusive interface than they did 10 years ago. It's completely a subjective statement, but for me their search results are far worse in comparison to 10 years ago, and in obvious ways, like every link on the first 5 pages of any search trying to sell me something or repeating the same wikipedia copy.
To estimate the utility of Google, you have to compare it to the ecosystem that you would expect to have existed if Google didn't exist, not to the ecosystem you would expect if search engines, streaming video lockers, and an alternative to iOS on mobile didn't exist.
The only two nice things that google ever did for me was 1) count backlinks to give me better search results, and 2) create a culture of less intrusive ads through their monopoly power. The SEO people killed innovation 1), and google pretended that they were going to use magic AI to beat them but secretly gave up. 2) would have been done anyway by the rise of the adblockers, and google ruined all goodwill by innovating on a culture of intrusive tracking and behavior monitoring and profiling on the internet that has become a threat to its very existence.
Facebook is just filling a need that governments should be filling: providing an organized way for individuals to communicate with each other over the internet. Extracting rents is what companies do when they take over functions for absentee governments. Facebook doesn't seem to care much about what is outside facebook, other than how it helps them extract more rent from the people inside facebook.
Google is actively spreading over everything, and making it worse.