Web by Google (TM)

"Consumer computing devices" is such a vague market. If you study markets at such a big scope something like Texas Instruments wouldn't even make a blip while if you're paying more careful attention you'll find they absolutely dominate the scientific calculator market.

"The web is open!" they would say. It's a key part of the web. It's part of our core values! We're going to change the world!

Yet 95% of these people are now at Facebook or Google actively trying to rip apart what made the web good, stable, and open.

It's repugnant. Every person you know working at Facebook should be ashamed of themselves and they should be socially ostracized.

Every non-Google service I log into that allows external auth supports at least Facebook and plain old e-mail in addition to Google. Maybe your experience is different, but I use a lot of very mainstream services both free and paid.

I know people who don't have Google accounts. I only use Gmail as a throwaway address for when I expect spam (e.g. signing up for dodgy-looking web sites). I happily admit I'm a huge fan of Google Maps and would not at all mind paying for it, and I actually do pay for YouTube, but everything else from Google has pretty good alternatives as far as I can see. (And even Maps has acceptable alternatives, it's just that much better.)

AMP is like putting all the non-Gmail mail you receive on your Gmail account into a separate folder, and only including Gmail senders in your Inbox.

Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.

The OP - perhaps without realizing it explicitly - makes an important distinction between the kinds of information-sharing systems that are in place on the modern web. Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan's distinctions between oral and literate cultures [0] we can see that Google and Facebook have a similar relationship. Both engage our hunter-gatherer mindsets in novel ways, but only one clearly does so with utility.

Google's usefulness as a search engine provider is in how it provides relevant information to users who are querying for something specific. Google search users are not sitting and waiting - they're searching and exploring. Google, therefore, plays to our hunter-gatherer mindset by directly aiding us in our searches.

Facebook's usefulness as a social network is in its ability to facilitate individual communications within a vast, centralized ecosystem. Users of Facebook are often searching for something - connections, information, relationships, etc., - but the way it engages its users' hunter-gatherer mindsets is very different. Instead of delivering targeted answers relevant to queries, Facebook forces its users to search through seemingly endless threads of often low-quality conversations, not really doing much of anything to aid in the search. Its users are simply sitting and waiting for the correct information to scroll into view. The search function on Facebook is not like Google's - it doesn't look for information, it simply takes you to a new part of the social square to which you want to go. Facebook, in essence, attaches a hunter-gatherer mindset to the very antithetical gossip found in the social square.

IMO, it is perfectly fine to have this conversation right here. Facebook has added a new dimension to the modern web: the expectation for there to be a well-regulated, always-available social square online. If the outcome of Google's actions are as inevitable as the article states, it would be proper to discuss where Facebook's unique "contributions" to the web fit into this article's analysis.

[0] https://youtu.be/ULI3x8WIxus?t=165