How Google Got So Powerful And Why It's A Huge Problem

Cory Doctorow joins Sam Seder to discuss how Google got so powerful.

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Matt Binder DOOMED

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Check out more from the MR crew:

Matt Binder DOOMED

Brandon Sutton THE DISCOURSE

Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

Image Credit, Robert Scoble

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Let's talk about YouTube in terms of choke points there. Yeah well, YouTube you know is an example of how going to sleep on antitrust law for 40 years allowed companies to grow not by being great but by being rich. So Google is a company that has only made three successful products right? They made a really good search engine, a pretty good Hotmail clone, and a browser that's great to use except that it spies on you like crazy. and everything else that they tried to build in-house failed. Including things like Google video. and all their successes including their whole mobile stack, their ad Tech stack, and their server management tools, all of which are companies that they bought from someone else including YouTube. Which is a service that they couldn't compete with and so they bought it. As Mark Zuckerberg notoriously once said in a memo that has come back to haunt him, it is better to buy than to compete. and YouTube has got this incredible lock-in as well it has the same kind of aggregated audience that it gets by self-referencing within the Google ecosystem. so you know Google puts YouTube Links at the top of its search results and so on. And it also has a lock on the advertising Market. Google and Facebook together control about 80 percent of the display advertising and search advertising market. and they've rigged that market. The Texas Attorney General's case against Facebook includes the public or rather against Google includes the publication of the infamous Jedi blue memos. Where Google and Facebook got together to rig the ad Market. This means it's very hard to sell ads or buy ads without buying them from them. And they skim off 50 or more once all the fees and so on are calculated in. so if you're a Creator you really have to be on YouTube. It's very hard to be anywhere else. and in the early days of YouTube, the studios and the labels really went nuts on YouTube and sued them like crazy in lots of different ways. The most notorious one was a Viacom lawsuit where they were seeking to put YouTube out of business and then assimilate it as a division of Viacom. There were a bunch of internal emails published as part of that lawsuit where all these little princelings within Viacom were arguing among themselves about which one we got to run YouTube once they'd broken its back.