This all got attention last week that it hadn't really received before because Proton published a blog post about it, which raised the specter that it might be related to issues of competition. This incident, however, highlights a previously unrecognized danger that we now call Search Risk. The Industry Email List danger is that any service like ProtonMail can be easily taken down by research companies or the governments that control those research companies. The only reason Industry Email List we survived to tell this story is that the majority of ProtonMail's growth comes from word of mouth and our community is too loud to ignore. Many other companies will not be so lucky. This episode illustrates that search risk is serious, which is why we now agree with the European Commission that, given Google's dominance in search, more transparency and oversight is essential. Could that really have Industry Email List been the case here? Unlikely Industry Email List competitive reasons were to blame It's unlikely. Google has over a billion daily active Gmail users. ProtonMail has just over a million, according to its recent article. It shows no growth trajectory that will see it rival Google even in years to come. Given all of this, would Google really have been actively working to remove it without worrying about doing the same for real email rivals? For example, Outlook ranks high on Google for a popular term like email. That does not make sense. Not even Proton says the problem was due to Industry Email List competitive reasons, with co-founder Andy Yen telling Search Engine Land via email: From the data we have, it is impossible to draw a concrete conclusion. We're willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt here and in our blog post we don't draw any conclusions in this regard. We are grateful to Industry Email List Google employees who stepped in to resolve the issue, but overall this was a very difficult and costly situation for us. We're software developers ourselves, so we know software bugs happen, and Google isn't infallible either, but when Google misbehaves, the stakes can be very high. At the end of the day,