Who's afraid of Google?
The world's internet superpower faces testing times — RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world's most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues …
Context & Ripple Effects
The question in this headline has become a genre: Wired posed "Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone." back in November 2005, and the San Francisco Chronicle ran its own version in May 2007. The Economist's answer arrives as Google's reach stops being arguable — confirmed licensing deals now let it host wire-service stories outright rather than merely link to them, while Google Desktop adds nine more languages for Mac and Google Earth grows Google Sky plus an undocumented flight simulator.
First-order effects
- Wire services that licensed their archives to Google have turned the search engine from a referrer of readers into a host of their product, changing where the audience lands.
- Google's simultaneous pushes across desktop software, geo tools, and media licensing mean rivals in each vertical now compete with one company funded by search economics.
Second-order effects
- Publishers who declined or lost the licensing terms must weigh giving Google content on Google's grounds against watching competitors' material surface instead — dependence on the gateway deepens either way.
- Rumored Gphone plans, flagged as unconfirmed in the run-up to this piece, put carriers and handset makers on notice that if Google enters wireless, it would do so with ad-subsidized economics they cannot match.
Third-order effects
- If Forbes's July 2007 argument holds — that Google crumbles if trust is lost — then the company's real constraint is no longer technical rivals but the political and regulatory patience its own expansion erodes.
- The recurring two-year cadence of the "who's afraid" question points toward a structural shift: a single intermediary becoming infrastructure for information access, the condition that historically invites antitrust scrutiny.
The trend: Search is consolidating into a multi-front platform business, turning the fear-of-Google debate from a publishing dispute into a question about gatekeeper power over information distribution.