It’s Time to Start Preparing an End-of-Google Plan

I don’t write that headline lightly.

Google built one of the most sensational companies in modern history.

It took an internet that was becoming almost impossible to navigate and made the world’s information accessible within seconds. Search became so useful that “Google it” became a verb.

And because it worked so well, we trusted it.

We gave Google our searches.

Then our advertising. Our email. Our documents. Our browsers. Our analytics. Our videos. Our locations.

Many of us built entire businesses around its infrastructure.

Google didn’t force us to become dependent on it.

Convenience did most of the work.

But at some point, evidence has to change behavior.

And I believe Google has now given us enough evidence that dependency on Google has become an enormous business risk.

So Creatiq has already begun to de-Google.

Not recklessly.

Not because Google suddenly stopped making useful products.

And certainly not because of a conspiracy theory.

Because of the documented record.

Something changed along the way

Google famously set out to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

It succeeded beyond what almost anyone could have imagined.

But there is an important difference between organizing access to information and becoming one of its dominant gateways.

The more indispensable Google became, the more power accumulated around that gateway.

And over the last several years, court cases, federal antitrust trials, jury verdicts, settlements, and Google's own policies have given us an increasingly detailed view into what happened behind it.

Some of it should make every founder uncomfortable.

Pay-Per-Click Fraud / Overcharging Advertisers

Let’s start with the people who paid Google for customers.

Google agreed to a $90 million settlement in an earlier class action brought by advertisers who alleged they had been charged for invalid clicks. The settlement resolved the claims rather than establishing a judicial finding that Google itself committed click fraud.

Years later, advertisers again challenged Google's billing practices.

In another case, advertisers alleged that Google charged them for clicks outside their selected geographic areas and failed to apply its Smart Pricing system as represented.

One plaintiff, Rene Cabrera, alleged that he received clicks from states he had specifically excluded from his campaign.

In 2023, a federal judge allowed key claims concerning geographic targeting and Smart Pricing to proceed.

Again, the distinction matters.

An allegation is not a judicial finding. A settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing.

But neither should a documented history of advertiser disputes simply disappear because the legal language surrounding them is complicated.

If businesses are giving a platform control over both access to customers and the measurement and billing of that access, trust in that system matters.

Ad Auction Rigging

Then there is the machinery underneath online advertising.

This is no longer merely a collection of allegations.

In April 2025, a federal district court held that Google violated antitrust law by monopolizing important open-web digital advertising markets.

The case exposed how much control Google had accumulated across the infrastructure used by publishers to sell advertising and advertisers to reach audiences.

Evidence introduced in the case examined mechanisms including First Look, which gave Google's AdX exchange preferential access to publisher inventory, and Last Look, which allowed AdX to see competing bids before making its own final bid.

The case also examined Google's Unified Pricing Rules, which restricted how publishers could set different pricing rules across exchanges.

Internal documents introduced during the litigation described the economics Google was able to extract through AdX in unusually candid terms.

The larger architecture is what matters.

Google was not simply another advertiser.

It was not simply another publisher.

And it was not simply another marketplace.

It had become deeply embedded across the infrastructure through which the market itself operated.

A federal court ultimately concluded that Google had unlawfully acquired or maintained monopoly power in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges and had unlawfully tied those products together.

Think about that for a moment.

The problem isn’t merely that a large company became successful.

The company operating critical parts of the marketplace had accumulated enough control over that marketplace that a federal court found its conduct unlawful.

Search Manipulation / Monopoly Maintenance

Then we arrive at the product most of us associate with Google itself.

Search.

In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta found that Google illegally maintained monopoly power in general search services and general search text advertising.

Google had entered distribution agreements with companies including Apple, Mozilla, and Android distributors that made Google the default search engine at critical access points.

Defaults sound innocuous.

They aren't.

Distribution determines what billions of people encounter before they have even made an active choice.

And scale determines how much data a search engine receives to improve the product that users encounter next.

The court found Google's agreements helped foreclose competitors from obtaining the scale necessary to compete effectively.

Again, look at the architecture.

We tend to assume the best product simply wins.

But defaults matter.

Distribution matters.

Scale matters.

And when one company becomes the dominant gateway through which enormous portions of humanity access information, decisions made inside that gateway carry consequences far beyond one company's balance sheet.

That alone should make us think differently about dependency.

But Search is only one layer.

Surveillance / Unjust Enrichment of User Data

Then there’s our data.

A federal jury found Google liable in litigation involving the collection of user data after users had disabled a tracking setting.

The case concerned approximately 98 million users and 174 million devices.

The plaintiffs alleged that Google continued collecting information from third-party applications even after users turned off the relevant tracking control. Their claims included intrusion upon seclusion and unjust enrichment.

Google argued, among other things, that the information was pseudonymous and that its conduct did not amount to the privacy violations alleged.

The jury nevertheless returned a verdict against Google and awarded approximately $425 million in damages.

As with every case discussed here, the procedural distinction matters. Jury verdicts can be challenged through post-trial motions and appeals, and their current status should be checked when evaluating the case.

But consider the underlying relationship.

People believed they had exercised a choice about tracking.

The system continued collecting information.

A jury was asked to examine that conduct.

And the jury found Google liable.

When our digital lives generate enormous quantities of behavioral data, the controls governing that data cannot merely look like controls.

They have to mean what users reasonably understand them to mean.

Incognito Mode Tracking

And then there is Incognito.

The name itself created a very particular expectation.

Private browsing.

Yet litigation alleged that Google continued collecting browsing information from people using Chrome's Incognito mode and private browsing modes in other browsers.

The proposed class covered profound numbers of internet users and sought billions of dollars in damages.

Google disputed the allegations.

The case ultimately settled rather than producing a judicial finding of liability.

But the resulting agreement was substantial.

Google agreed to destroy or remediate billions of data records covered by the settlement and make changes concerning disclosures and private browsing.

Again:

A settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing.

But that does not make the underlying event irrelevant.

And that’s a distinction I want us to preserve throughout this conversation.

I don’t want Creatiq to tell you what to think about Google.

I want us to show you the record.

Pay-Per-Click Fraud / Overcharging Advertisers.

Ad Auction Rigging.

Search Manipulation / Monopoly Maintenance.

Surveillance / Unjust Enrichment of User Data.

Incognito Mode Tracking.

Each has its own facts.

Each has its own evidentiary status.

Each should be examined on its own merits.

But I no longer think the responsible thing is to examine them only in isolation.

Search.

Advertising.

Auctions.

Tracking.

Private browsing.

Information.

At some point, a pattern becomes something a founder has to respond to.

For me, we’ve reached it.

COVID changed the way I thought about the information layer

There is another part of this conversation that is more difficult.

COVID.

I’m not interested in reopening every argument about the pandemic here.

I am interested in what that period revealed about information architecture.

During a global emergency, platforms such as Google were no longer simply helping us locate information. They were making consequential decisions about which sources their systems considered authoritative, what information received greater prominence, and—in parts of Google's broader ecosystem—what content violated misinformation policies.

There were people who believed those interventions were necessary to protect the public.

There were others who believed powerful institutions were being given far too much authority over legitimate scientific and public debate.

Those arguments continue.

But for me, there is a more fundamental question underneath them:

Should any private corporation become so central to humanity’s access to knowledge that its decisions about what deserves visibility carry that much power?

You don't need to agree with me about COVID to see the architectural problem.

No institution is infallible.

No government is infallible.

No scientist is infallible.

No media organization is infallible.

No technology company is infallible.

Human knowledge advances because ideas can be questioned, tested, challenged, discarded, refined, and sometimes rediscovered.

A healthy information system needs room for that process.

And I no longer believe concentrating so much of our access to information inside a handful of private gateways creates the conditions I want for that future.

The strange tragedy is that Google built something incredible

I think this point matters.

Google is not successful because every product it created was terrible.

Quite the opposite.

Google Search changed how humanity accesses knowledge.

Google Maps changed how we navigate the physical world.

YouTube became an incredible repository of human creativity and knowledge.

Gmail helped redefine email.

Google Docs changed collaboration.

Chrome made the web faster and easier to use for millions of people.

The products were good.

That's precisely how we got here.

Convenience accumulated.

One useful product connected to another useful product.

Then another.

Eventually, an ecosystem became infrastructure.

And infrastructure is easy to ignore until you ask yourself whether you can live without it.

I think it’s time to deliberately leave

I've thought about whether the responsible response is simply to diversify.

Use Google, but use some alternatives too.

That's certainly better than complete dependency.

But I don't think it goes far enough for us.

Creatiq is deliberately working to leave Google.

That doesn't mean deleting everything tomorrow morning.

That would be ideological, not intelligent.

Companies have email histories, documents, analytics, advertising accounts, integrations, authentication systems, videos, data, and workflows built around Google products.

You don't rip infrastructure out of a living organization to make a philosophical point.

You architect your way out.

And that's what we're going to do.

The End-of-Google Plan

I think every founder should at least know what their own End-of-Google Plan would look like.

Ours starts with six steps.

1. Map

First, identify where Google actually exists inside the company.

Search.

Ads.

Analytics.

Gmail.

Workspace.

Drive.

Chrome.

YouTube.

Maps.

Authentication.

Cloud infrastructure.

APIs.

Tracking scripts.

There are probably dependencies you've forgotten are dependencies.

We want to see the entire system.

2. Classify

Not every dependency carries the same risk.

Some products can be replaced this afternoon.

Others contain years of institutional memory.

Some affect only us.

Others affect clients.

Some replacements are straightforward.

Others would create more risk than they remove if we migrated carelessly.

So we classify them.

3. Replace

Then we find alternatives.

But I'm not interested in replacing Google dependency with dependency on another giant technology company.

That misses the point.

We want to evaluate alternatives according to principles.

Privacy.

Portability.

Interoperability.

Ownership.

Open standards where practical.

Exportability.

Business continuity.

And, increasingly, whether the intelligence and data underneath our company can remain under our control.

4. Migrate

Then we move.

Deliberately.

One system at a time.

Without breaking the company we're trying to protect.

5. Rebuild

This is the part that interests me most.

Because sometimes the answer isn't to replace the old product.

It's to question the architecture that made us need it in the first place.

Take Search.

For years, businesses built entire acquisition strategies around ranking in Google.

Then they became terrified every time Google changed an algorithm.

That's dependency disguised as marketing strategy.

We're already rebuilding that architecture inside Creatiq.

Atlas Network scales word-of-mouth in the digital age.

The Journal gives us a first-party home for our intellectual work.

Amplify Social allows that intelligence to travel across networks.

Amplify GEO prepares our authority for a world in which discovery increasingly happens through AI systems, not only ten blue links.

And Solera IQ is becoming an intelligence layer that belongs much closer to the organization itself.

We didn't build all of those things to escape Google.

But together, they're beginning to show us what a different architecture could look like.

6. Verify

Eventually, I want to be able to ask one simple question:

If Google disappeared from Creatiq tomorrow, would the company continue to function?

If the answer is no, we're not finished.

This is bigger than Google

I suspect that's where this conversation ultimately leads.

Because Google is one company.

The deeper subject is dependency.

We have spent the last twenty years moving more and more of our businesses, relationships, knowledge, audiences, identities, and intelligence onto infrastructure controlled by organizations we do not own.

We did it because it was convenient.

In many cases, it was the rational decision at the time.

But systems change.

Incentives change.

Institutions change.

And when the evidence changes, responsible founders should be willing to change their architecture too.

That's what we're doing.

I expect we'll make mistakes.

We'll probably discover that some alternatives are worse than the Google products they replace.

Some migrations will take much longer than expected.

And there may be places where the ecosystem simply isn't ready yet.

That's fine.

This isn't a purity test.

It's a direction of travel.

Perhaps this is what digital sovereignty actually looks like

Not paranoia.

Not outrage.

Not throwing useful technology into the ocean because we dislike the company that made it.

And not pretending we can return to an internet that no longer exists.

Sovereignty requires responsibility.

If we don't want a handful of institutions controlling so much of our digital lives, then we also have to accept the inconvenience of building alternatives.

We have to support them.

Use them.

Improve them.

And sometimes create them ourselves.

Google helped show humanity how powerful organized access to information could be.

It built something extraordinary.

But extraordinary systems can still become extractive systems.

And when they do, we have a choice.

We can complain about the architecture.

Or we can begin building another one.

Google has given us enough evidence that dependency on Google is now an enormous business risk.

Creatiq is acting accordingly.

We're beginning our End-of-Google Plan.

And as we learn what works, what doesn't, and what a genuinely independent technology stack can look like, we'll document the journey here in The Journal.

Because perhaps the next era of the internet isn't about finding another company to organize the world for us.

Perhaps it's about building an internet where no single company ever needs that much power again.

It's time to de-Google.

Grand rising,

Peter Luis Venero
Founder, Creatiq