Are we, though? It sounds like you're saying why go after google when there are so many other companies with similar levels of control over their own markets who we also don't go after. That's not a reasonable objection, unless you can find somebody who thinks that we should go after google, but not go after these other companies.
>Ah, but you don't understand where the monopoly is. It's on the other side: Businesses must support Google Search and run Google Ads to stay in business. It is effectively impossible to operate any business in the US without a Google presence.
Citation? For one, I don't think Facebook uses Google ads.
> Beyond targeted drug advertisement, medical devices, and the like, you know which people are sedentary, which play sports, who probably smokes, and I'd bet good money there are correlations between certain conditions and shopping habits, religious preference, and even political preferences.
Well, I can tell you that Google's advertising profile for me would already have a pretty good idea for all of those attributes you listed based on my search history, location history, google maps usage, youtube usage, etc.
The healthcare market is an ~8.5 Trillion market globally [1]. Advertising is ~ 1 trillion [2,3]. I admit that I don't know the exact quality of the data cited in these - but they do clearly demonstrate that healthcare is a huge industry. Given that Google wants another profit source besides advertising I think it just conspiratorial to suggest they would throw away the medical opportunity for some marginal advertising gains. Dragonfly leaked, employees are otherwise frustrated with certain things. If employees are talking about what you say then I'll listen to them. But you are just making senseless accusations.
A competitive business model. You can create tech that is easier to use and more powerful than Google's services, but you won't last unless you actually make money.
> As you rightly pointed out, there is a significant amount of B2B adtech that gets done at Google
B2B adtech is the overwhelming source of revenue. The consumer services you mention exist either a) to entrench the ad business by commoditizing its complements, or b) as a side-effect of Google’s strategy to secure all the best R&D talent even if it means inventing fun projects to keep them busy.
Neither of those things make Google a consumer services business that happens to sell ads. It makes Google the largest ad business in history, which happens to build free consumer products as a means to protecting and expanding its business.
Google Cloud or Waymo could, perhaps one day, become a source of revenue large enough to truly change the nature of Google’s business. But at this time their revenue is not large enough, and Google’s leadership has not shown the desire to shift their strategic focus decisively.
> You do realize Google does more than sell ads, right? Search and Maps alone are tremendously useful...
Proftable? Not so much.
Google is a surveillance company that currently makes money off ads, and gathers data through Maps, Search, Drive, Docs, Photos... Think about what happens when the current ad bubble pops.
> So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
> It seems completely ridiculous to call those two different markets. Finding the most relevant X on the web is fundamentally part of the same market no matter what X is.
Yet in one case (general search) Google has a very large market share, whereas in the other case (e.g. product search), there is still plenty of competition with for example Amazon holding some share of that market. The idea is now that while it’s ok for Google to have such a large market share, it’s not ok for them to use that share in order to get another large market share which they don’t have at the moment. I.e. it’s acceptable for them to have a near-monopoly, but not to use that monopoly to build a second one.
> I vastly prefer Google/Facebook working on medical progress than working on improving ad targeting.
Google's primary mission if surgically precise ad targeting (pun intended). Facebook has the same mission, that's their primary revenue stream, the difference is where their user data comes from. Any effort they do is somehow/has potential to improve their primary mission. This is just another brick in their wall.
This is how (a bit educated part of) public sees G/F. Maybe the image is not 100% precise, but they do very little to correct it and be the properly honest good guys.
Could you explain exactly how paid web services that do not embed advertising that Google provides (paid Google Apps, and backend services like App Engine, Computer Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Datastore, etc.) are "about ad sales" rather than about leveraging Google's core technical competencies in search, cloud storage, and web services to generate non-advertising revenue streams?
> They're sitting comfortably in their search advertising castle, and playing guerrilla warfare everywhere else.
Don't ever think Google is playing guerrilla warfare just to poke fun at the other guys while sitting on a pile of cash. The reason Google is attacking these companies is simple: they have become clear threats to Google's core business - not search, but targeted advertising on the web. Apple's race to dominance to the mobile space with its walled-garden approach and app- and vertical-search-based model were threatening the whole open, web-based and ads-driven model; Microsoft's stronghold on browser market with an ancient browser was holding the web hostage and killing the potential of web as a service serving platform; Facebook keeps valuable information that is not accessible to Google bot and may even be able to develop the next big thing to replace search, not to mention that it is sucking the best talent; and it has been very clear that local advertising is where the future growth of targeted advertising will be from.
Google is being offensive and aggressive, and they are not comfortable about it when their core business - not search but serving ads - is being threatened.
> I fail to see how Google is a competitor to an online Wallmart-like shopping portal.
Because Google operated an online shopping portal, which is also Walmart-like (perhaps moreso than Amazon, since you can actually buy from Walmart on it.)
>Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads.
Sure. But ads are the reason how Google can support and pamper their workforce. It's what allowed them to bow to internal activists to give up on multi-billion dollar contracts with the Pentagon and maybe even other federal agencies (like ICE and CBP - though I'm not sure they would be crazy enough to do that).
>>Google’s effort to keep its search engine relevant in a world of mobile apps just got a boost from a big rival.
I see this as facebook leveraging mobile search more than google leveraging facebook to keep search relevant. But I guess that is a matter of perspective.
Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.
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