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What would be the long-term impact on the internet and society if Google were to completely fail?
(lemmy.ca)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Long term? Minimal. All the niches it fills, have alternatives that would just grow to fill them in.
Short term? Catastrophic. Losing GMail and "login with Google" would leave a lot of people with no email, no way to login to other services, and no way to recover their passwords (through email). The loss of Photo backups would also upset many, Drive and Docs would leave a lot of people and businesses without their daily tools. Search would likely be the less affected, with plenty of alternatives already to pick from.
When I read the post I was initially focused on google search but man….if gmail were to die, the pile-on effects would be seriously catastrophic and it would take a very long time for things to stabilize again. It’s not just personal emails that are handled by gmail - their corporate offerings are used by a ton of companies, and there are plenty of school districts as well that rely on it for their email (and thus associated logins). If you’ve ever worked near education, you know what a cluster that would be as all the IT departments scrambled to figure out who would be responsible for a migration.
I don’t really see it happening, but it’s very scary to think about what would happen if gmail were to fall.