Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’

I wanted to share a small observation about the interweaving worlds of AI, oligarchy, monopoly and – more distantly, but only a bit – autocracy. Over the years I’ve written regularly about the intersection of technology and journalism and the business models which underlie journalism. Because of TPM I had a front row seat to many key events, trends, dead ends and more in the evolution of the business of models of digital journalism over more than two decades. I’m not sure I knew more than anyone else, certainly lots of people knew more than me about the details of particular areas of knowledge. But I was up close and had a good view of the big picture. What set me apart somewhat was that there were very few people working so closely and obsessively with these evolving business models (a matter of pure necessity) who was also a full time writer. In any case, those of you who’ve been TPM Readers for many years will know a lot of that writing. (I have a post coming in the next few days which will add a new chapter to that, TPM’s place in those evolving or declining business models, and I hope you’ll take a moment to read it.)

About a decade ago I wrote a lot about Google’s evolving monopoly role in the advertising business. But what I always worked to keep front and center in that writing was that Google was significantly different from the other emerging platform monopolies in that its DNA and profit centers were built around the open internet. Facebook is a walled garden. It always was. Ideally it wanted you to spend every minute on Facebook. Apple was and is also a walled garden, albeit a more lovely one. Google’s DNA was different. Its wealth and power began with search. And search requires things you want to search for, which is to say other places to go besides Google websites. Now, in practice not everything Google did was just like this. But, big picture, this made Google a very different operation than Facebook, to cite one very big example. Its profound monopoly power in the digital advertising world grew directly out of its power in search. And even after that monopoly power was firmly entrenched its advertising business was heavily weighted toward non-Google websites subcontracting to Google the right to run its digital ads on those websites.