The alliance against Google
What today's internet firms can learn from 19th-century history — PRINCE KLEMENS VON METTERNICH, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google.
Context & Ripple Effects
Within a few weeks of this piece, Google was expanding on every front at once: launching Accessible Search for visually impaired users in July 2006, testing GDrive internally under the codename Platypus, and wiring up a free Mountain View wireless network with more than 100 testers already online and the whole city expected within two months. The Economist reads that multi-front expansion through Prince Metternich's Europe — a power whose breadth, not any single product, is what alarms its neighbours.
The confirmed core of the story is the analogy itself: internet firms banding together against Google the way nineteenth-century powers coalised against Napoleon, and Google cast in the Austrian Empire's role as the hegemon others must balance against. With no rival commentary or wider pickup recorded, the piece stands as an early statement of the balance-of-power frame for search — one that treats dominance in web services as a diplomatic problem, not merely a competitive one.
First-order effects
- Rival internet firms coordinating their opposition means Google now faces a single political bloc rather than a series of separate single-product competitors, raising the cost of each new market it enters.
- Google's simultaneous pushes — free city-wide wireless in Mountain View, cloud-storage tests, accessible search — supply the alliance with its central exhibit: a company competing everywhere at once.
Second-order effects
- The contest shifts from features to policy: a coalition's cheapest weapon is regulatory attention, so Google must divert resources into government relations alongside its engineering agenda.
- Smaller web firms and advertisers gain bargaining leverage they lacked individually, because the alliance recasts Google's terms as collective grievances rather than prices to accept.
Third-order effects
- If the balance-of-power logic holds, dominant platforms will be checked less by direct market rivals than by competitor coalitions appealing to regulators — the mechanism that disciplined hegemons in Metternich's Europe.
- Search risks hardening into infrastructure whose governance is negotiated diplomatically between large firms and states, with consumer choice playing a shrinking role in how the market is structured.
The trend: Internet markets are reproducing nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics: when one firm's reach spans too many fronts, rivals respond through coalitions aimed at regulators rather than through products alone.