Operation

Some short thoughts on recent antitrust and the future of the web platform...

Last week, in a 115 page US Antitrust ruling a federal judge in Virginia found that Google had two more monopolies, this time with relation to advertising technolgies. Previously, you'll recall that we had rulings related to search. There are still more open cases related to Android. And it's not only in the US that similar actions are playing out.

All of these cases kind of mention one another because the problems themselves are all deeply intertwined - but this one is really at the heart of it: That sweet, sweet ad money. I think that you could argue, reasonably, that pretty much everything else was somehow in service of that.

Initially, they made a ton of money showing ads every time someone searches, and pretty quickly signed a default search deal with Mozilla to drive the number of searches way up.

Why make a browser of your own? To drive the searches that show the ads, but also keep more of the money.

Why make OSes of your own, and deals around things that need to be installed? To guarantee that all of those devices drive the searches to show the ads.

And so on...

For a long time now, I've been trying to discuss what, to me, is a rather worrying problem: That those default search dollars are, in the end, what funds the whole web ecosystem. Don't forget that it's not just about the web itself, it's about the platform which provides the underlying technology for just about everything else at this point too.

Between years of blog posts, a podcast series, several talks, experiments like Open Prioritization I have been thinking about this a lot. Untangling it all is going to be quite complex.

In the US, the governments proposed remedies touch just about every part of this. I've been trying to think about how I could sum up my feelings and concerns, but it's quite complex. Then, the other day an article on arstechnica contained an illustration which seemed pretty perfect..

This image (credited to Aurich Lawson) kind of hit the nail on its head for me: I deeply hope they will be absoltely surgical about this intervention, because the patient I'm worried about isn't Google, it's the whole Web Platform.

If this is interesting to you, my colleague Eric Meyer and I will be posting a podcast episode on the topic early next week... stay tuned.