Google is God
For something I'm working on, I compiled a bunch of stats on Google (sorry, I didn't intend to blog it and so I didn't capture all the links, but I found the collection so compelling I thought I'd share it): — • Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Jeff Jarvis's stat dump lands at the end of a year when Google anxiety went mainstream: the Economist asked in August 2007 who's afraid of Google, and back in February 2006 CNN's 'Imagining the Google Future' scenario had already floated an unconfirmed projection of antitrust action forcing a breakup by 2010. Jarvis's contribution is arithmetic rather than argument — compiling figures portraying Google as the fastest-growing company in history.
What makes the piece more than cheerleading is the friction it sits next to: Google had just made Gmail's chat box impossible to disable, was quietly building social features on Gmail contacts without asking, and was auto-adding contacts users never consented to — while simultaneously becoming Yahoo's default search provider.
First-order effects
- Users feel Google's scale as lost control: removing the option to disable the Gmail chat box and auto-adding contacts means product defaults change for hundreds of millions with no opt-out.
- Yahoo's adoption of Google as its default search provider hands Google distribution over a rival's own traffic, deepening dependence at exactly the moment its growth stats look unassailable.
Second-order effects
- Competitors building social features now have evidence against Google's design assumptions — user feedback showed people relied on sharing stories with a small circle, not broadcasting — so rivals can differentiate on consent and granular sharing where Google's contact-graph approach reads as tone-deaf.
- Every partner that routes through Google (search defaults, embedded services) accumulates switching costs, which raises the price of any future falling-out between Google and the portals that once treated it as a supplier.
Third-order effects
- If the growth curve holds, the speculative 2010 breakup scenario from CNN's 2006 feature stops looking like science fiction: concentration this visible invites existing antitrust law to be reapplied to a company whose defaults function as public infrastructure.
- The deeper structural shift is that 'default' becomes the unit of power — whoever controls the pre-set option in search, mail, and contacts shapes communication for everyone else without a vote.
The trend: As Google's growth compounds, its product defaults are hardening into de facto standards for how the web communicates, pulling regulators and rivals toward a reckoning with concentrated platform power.