From an opinion piece in the New York Times about Google's search engine:

This is a perilous moment to be granting one company this much control over global access to knowledge. The Trump administration is conducting an assault on free speech, distributing lists of banned words, detaining and imprisoning students for speech it disagrees with and persecuting the news media and comedians for being insufficiently sycophantic.

Given that, I think there’s a possible future in which the administration starts pressuring Google to shape search results in its favor, just as it has used lawsuits and regulatory pressure against other media outlets whose content it dislikes. Think most recently of how CBS pushed out top news executives as part of a bid to appease President Trump, who had sued the network for what he claimed was deceptive editing of an interview with Kamala Harris.

As the world’s dominant information gatekeeper, Google has the power to suppress or make inaccessible any information it wants — something it already does around the world, including in Thailand, where it blocks content critical of the king, and in Vietnam, where it takes down videos that oppose the government. On its maps, the company has already changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, Mr. Trump’s preferred nomenclature.

Google Wins, We Lose, guest essay by Julia Angwin.