Although it's kind of silly trying to make these judgements, I'd say Google has been a net-positive, Facebook is a little murkier.
Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either.
Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things.
It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?
Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either.
Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things.
It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?