Thread · 14 tweets · 27 Aug 2020

You're 100% right. There are many hypothetical ways in which this could be good. The problem is that based on empirical reality, it won't be. It's a lot to detail over Twitter, but I'll try to summarise some notes.

Platforms in two-sided markets like this can create a lot of value. That certainly used to be true of Search. But they also get a lot of power from gating, lock-in effects inherent in two-sided markets.

This needs checks and balances, but here there is no CPNI or separation of banking & commerce. Google has massive leverage from this. Rarely, it can be used for good (HTTPS), but mostly it's used to tilt the balance unfairly in Google's favour.

That frictionless marketplace of content that @KenjiBaheux describes is a great example. Hypothetically, it could be nice. But what happens if the platform cheats to its own benefit? That's not hypothetical, we know: themarkup.org/google-the-gia…

There's nothing special about Search — building a two-sided market and then cheating in it is classic Google. That's also how the ad market works: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

None of this is weird or new. Google is pretty much a textbook bad actor. Regulators could easily have caught this (a little has been done in EU & Russia), but Google was the Dems' Halliburton, and there wasn't much government after that.

Things get more interesting in digital, though! The first thing to note is that there isn't a "search" market anymore. The closest thing inside of which there is competition is a "discovery" market that covers search, social, & store.

That's important to note because if you can somehow merge a market you dominate with one you don't, you can leverage dominance in the former to overtake the latter. We can think of it as some sort of salami approach to market dominance.

That's where bundles come in handy. Publishers will want to be in Search, but maybe not in things that compete with them (News) or that they don't care about (Google's next social thing). Bundles mean that content can move from one to the other without publisher permission.

If you don't think that's a thing, read the terms that publishers "agree to" by "opting in" to AMP. (I don't have large enough scare quotes.)

Essentially, this helps create a cohesive discovery market. Not on its own, but it's one more (large) paper cut. From the pub side it's that or be out of Search. Basically the whole Web just gets forklifted inside Google's walled garden.

One of the Web's core strengths has been that it's messy. You can't that easily take someone's content and use your power to shuffle it around like some fungible commodity. This creates decentralised power. That power is now being taken away.

Bundles basically make the Web fungible the way that music and video are: just files. We know what that world looks like: it's Spotify, it's Netflix. There's nothing open about that Web.

But what can we do? Probably not much. The people most able to save the Web right now are Googlers. They could make their company honest, or they could leave. Judging from the denial in this thread, I won't hold my breath. Personally, I'm looking for what to do after the Web.