Irish Examiner view: Any alternatives?

Will we be back in the dark ages within hours?

The world had a glimpse of what it would be like without Google when it had an outage yesterday.

For a short while yesterday, the world that relies on internet connectivity and reliability had a glimpse of what a world without Google, today’s cornerstone of commerce, education, social interaction, and, especially this week, Christmas shopping, might be like. 

There was a major but thankfully brief outage that took the firm’s key apps, including YouTube and Gmail, offline.