Image Credits: AFP
Just for a minute, as we digest the information that Google has been found to operate an illegal monopoly, can you imagine a web without Google? An internet without Google Search, Chrome, Gmail, Maps and so on would — very obviously — be a different place. But would such a change have implications for utility — or something else? Something bigger?
Alternatives to Google’s popular freemium products exist. You can use DuckDuckGo for search, for example, Brave to browse the web and Proton Mail for webmail to name a few of the non-Google options for key digital tools out there. There’s even a web beta of Apple Maps these days. Or — hey — why not switch straight to the community mapping open data project OpenStreetMap? All of these are also services that can be accessed for free, too.
What would be different in a web without Google is absolutely much bigger than mere utility.
The real issue here is about the business model underpinning service delivery. And the opportunity, if we can imagine for a minute a web that’s not dominated by Google, for different models of service delivery — ones that prioritize the interests of web users and the public infosphere — to achieve scale and thrive.
Such alternatives do already exist, as the list above shows. But on a web dominated by Google’s model of tracking-based advertising it’s extremely hard for pro-user approaches to thrive. That’s the real harm flowing from Google’s monopoly.
Google likes to paint its company “mission” as “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” as its marketing puts it. But this grandiose claim has always been a fig-leaf atop a business model that makes vast amounts of money by organizing data — most especially information about people — so it can make money from microtargeted advertising.
Tracking web users’ activity feeds Google’s ability to profile the online population and profit from services related to selling highly targeted advertising. And it makes truly staggering amounts of money from this business: Alphabet, the brand Google devised almost a decade ago to pop a corporate wrapper around Google, reported full-year revenue of $307.39 billion for 2023. The vast majority of which is earned from ads.
Whether from pay-per-click ads displayed on Google search or YouTube; or through ads Google displays elsewhere on publishers’ websites; or other programmatic ad services it offers, including via its AdX exchange; or its mobile advertising platform for app developers; or through Google’s ad campaign management, marketing and analytics tools, that’s all revenue flowing to Google.
The simple truth is Google is making your information “useful” so it can feed Google’s bottom line because it’s in the advertising business. Put another way, its “mission” is chain-linked to a business model that’s based on tracking and profiling web users. Organizing the world’s information doesn’t sound so benign now does it?
Consider how Google’s incentives to structure data to mesh with its commercial priorities extend to making user-hostile changes to how it displays information. See, for example, endless dark pattern design tricks it’s used to make it harder for users of Google Search to distinguish between organic search results and ads.
Every confused user clicking an ad thinking it’s genuine information drives Google’s revenue engine. Useful to Google, obviously, but frustrating (at best) to web users trying to find a particular piece of information (tl;dr: your time being wasted is precious to Google’s profits).
Consider, also, a more recent example: Just last month Google was accused by Italy’s competition and consumer watchdog of “misleading and aggressive” commercial practices. Including providing users with “inadequate, incomplete and misleading information” (emphasis ours) about decisions they should be able to exercise — thanks to a variety of EU laws — over the company’s ability to track and profile them by denying its ability to link their activity across different Google-owned accounts.
Organizing this type of “information” — about the legal rights European users have to choose not to be tracked and profiled for Google’s profit — and making this info about how you can avoid being tracked “universally accessible and useful” does not appear to be a priority for Google, the adtech giant. Quite the opposite: Google stands accused of impeding users’ legal right to information that could help them protect themselves from Google’s surveillance. Oh.
Google’s market power
Google’s market power is linked to its ownership of so much information about user intention which flows from its dominance of online search.
Its market share of search in Europe is consistently above 90%. In the U.S., Google tends to hold a slightly lower but still dominant share. And — critically — on mobile it’s been able to ensure its search engine (or, from an ads perspective, its user intention data funnel) remains the default on Apple’s rival mobile platform because it pays the iPhone maker billions for the placement every year.
A New York Times report last fall suggested Google pays Apple $18 billion a year. During the antitrust trial Google also disclosed it shares a whopping 36% — more than a third! — of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple.
This is a core grievance of the U.S. antitrust ruling finding Google operates an illegal monopoly, as we reported earlier. By paying Apple to be the default search on iOS, the judge decided Google had blocked competitors from being able to build up their own search engines to a scale that would enable them to access enough data and reach to compete with Google Search.
Such placement is important to Google because Apple’s iOS holds a dominant share of the mobile device market in the U.S. versus Google’s own Android platform (where Google typically gets to set all its own services as the default). Add to that, iOS users are generally more valuable targets for advertisers — so being able to keep accessing information about iPhone users’ intentions is strategically important to Google’s ad business.
No surprise, then, that Google is willing to fork over such a major chunk of revenue to Apple so it can keep squatting on iOS as the default search choice. But buying this spot is also about shielding its tracking-based business model.
Because Google pays Apple so much, Apple has little incentive to develop its own search engine to rival Google’s — meaning web users have missed out on the chance to try a web search product made in Cupertino. Given Apple puts such a premium on marketing privacy as a core brand value, you could at least imagine an Apple-designed search engine would do things differently and wouldn’t have to concern itself with perpetuating the mass tracking and profiling of web users as Google Search does.
It’s true Apple does have an advertising business of its own. But the device maker is not, as Google is, also the owner and operator of core adtech infrastructure that’s been used to bake tracking and profiling into the mainstream web for decades.
Add to that, if other search engines had the chance to gain more users because Google didn’t own the default iOS placement, there would be an opportunity for pro-privacy competitors, such as DuckDuckGo, to get in front of more humans and build greater momentum for alternative non-tracking-based business models.
Instead, we have a web that’s locked to tracking as the default because it’s in Google’s business interests.
Google’s ownership of Chrome gives it another key piece of infrastructure. Google’s browser holds a majority share of the market worldwide (currently around 65% per Statista). Its Chromium browser engine also underpins multiple rival browsers — such as Microsoft’s Edge browser, for example — meaning even lots of rival browsers to Google’s Chrome still use an engine that’s developed by Google. And the decisions it makes about browser infrastructure determine the business models that can fly.
In recent years, Google has been working on reformulating its adtech stack under a project it dubbed “Privacy Sandbox.” The effort is intended to shift the current adtech model that Chrome supports from cookie-based microtargeting of web users, so individual-level tracking and profiling, to a new form of browser-level interest-based targeting that Google claims would be less bad for privacy.
We can debate whether Privacy Sandbox would actually be a positive evolution of the tracking ads business model — the technical solution Google has devised may, technically, be less harmful to individual privacy, if it ends the mass insecure sharing of data about web users that currently takes place via real-time programmatic ad auctions. But the alternative infrastructure it’s devised is still designed to allow targeted manipulation of web users at scale — just based on organizing browser users’ into interest-based buckets for targeting. Regardless, one thing is crystal clear: It’s Google’s dominance that’s driving decisions about the future of web business models.
Other mainstream browsers have already blocked tracking cookies. Google hasn’t, as yet, not only because of its commercial interests over the years but because its browser is also dominant. Which means all sorts of other players (publishers, advertisers, smaller adtechs etc.) are attached to the tracking data flows involved — dependent on Google’s infrastructure continuing to allow this spice through. This is why Google’s Privacy Sandbox has been closely supervised by regulators in Europe.
Principally, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stepped in. In early 2022, it accepted a series of commitments on how Google would undertake the planned migration from tracking-cookie-based adtech to the reformulated interest-based targeting alternative, following complaints that the end of support for tracking cookies would be harmful to online publishers and advertisers reliant on the tracking ads business model.
What’s happened as a result of this close regulatory scrutiny led by a competition authority? Google’s timeline to deprecate cookies got delayed. And then, just last month, it announced it was abandoning the move — saying it was instead proposing that regulators accept an alternative whereby Chrome users would be shown some form of a choice screen. (Presumably this would let them decide whether to accept cookie-based tracking or choose Google’s interest-based alternative but Google hasn’t shared further details yet.)
Google’s self-interested approach to displaying information might be one reason not to trust the design of any such consent pop-up it devised. But the wider point here is that Google’s dominance of web infrastructure is so trenchant — the company’s model is so utterly baked into the mainstream web — that even Google can’t just make a change which might allow web users to get slightly more privacy. Because in flicking such levers the knock-on impact on other businesses that are dependent on its adtech infrastructure risks being a competition harm in itself.
An alternative approach
If there’s ever a definition of a company that got too big — so big it basically owns and operates the web — then surely it’s Google.
We can dream what a web without Google would look like. But it’s not easy to imagine, given how thoroughly it’s ingrained in web infrastructure. Not so much Mountain View as the whole mountain.
Writing in the wake of the Google antitrust decision, Matt Stoller, author of the antitrust-focused newsletter Big, has a go at imagining a post-Google web in the latest edition of his publication.
“I think there’s a vision tucked in an April speech by Federal Trade Commission consumer protection chief Sam Levine on how the internet didn’t have to become the cesspool that it is today,” Stoller writes. “He sketched out what the internet could become if well-regulated, a place where we have zones of privacy, where not everything operates like a casino, and where AI works for us. This [Google antitrust] case brings us a step closer to Levine’s vision, because it means that people who want to build better safer products now have the chance to compete.”
I think you can also see glimpses of the better web that’s possible in some of the great alternative products of our age. The private messaging provided by Signal, for example. Or the strongly encrypted email, calendar, collaborative documents and other privacy-safe productivity tools being developed by Proton. Though it’s notable that both have had to be structured as nonprofit foundations in a bid to ensure they can keep providing free access to pro-user products that don’t generate revenue by data-mining their users.
In an age of monopoly power driving wall-to-wall digital surveillance that unpleasant reality remains the mainstream web rule.
“I believe our digital economy can get better,” wrote Levine. “Not because our tech giants will voluntarily change their ways, or because markets will magically fix themselves. But because, at long last, there is momentum across government — state and federal, Republicans and Democrats — to push back against unchecked surveillance.”
The decision Monday by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to find Google a monopolist could be the first brick ripped out of the surveillance wall. If Google’s appeal fails, and remedies are imposed — just imagine! — a corporate break-up that forces the fig-leaf Alphabet to divest key Google infrastructure. Such an outcome could finally upend Google’s decades-long grip on web data flows and reboot the default model, setting this place free for users, startups and communities to reimagine and rebuild anew.
