"When a middleman controls a market, the supplier has no real choice but to work with the middleman"
Google dominates its market, but it doesn't control it in the classic monopolist fashion.
Consider this thought experiment. Suppose the government, for the public good, built a service for searching the web. If they did it really, really well, would it not work just like Google, minus the ads?
The newspapers aren't being destroyed by Google. They're being destroyed by the evolution of technology. Google is just the messenger. And a pretty neutral one, as such messengers go.
(Indeed, that neutrality is one reason Google is so successful. They approach business with the intellectual detachment of scientists.)
Quite right. Take away Google and everything like them and you've killed the technology that's killing the business, not the middleman strictly.
As a thought experiment: Imagine that Google was unnecessary. Every person had a device that found exactly the page on the internet that they were looking for without using any centralized service. It just went out and scanned the whole public web in a snap. Is there a middleman now? Nope. Is it still going to kill people that choose not to participate? Yes sir!
His second point is quite accurate though: A reduction in supply of highly redundant articles will behoove journals of record. Specialization and reduction of repetitive effort will see the day through.
yes, there is still a middle man, it is "a device that found exactly the page"
The issue isn't google, it's newspapers. THey are big and bulky and kill trees and there are millions of them accessible by the web now making all of them less valuable. It has nothing to do with Google and nothing to do with a middle man. Besides, lazy people can't waste time at their desk reading the newspaper, but they can stare at news.google all day.
Google dominates its market, but it doesn't control it in the classic monopolist fashion.
Consider this thought experiment. Suppose the government, for the public good, built a service for searching the web. If they did it really, really well, would it not work just like Google, minus the ads?
The newspapers aren't being destroyed by Google. They're being destroyed by the evolution of technology. Google is just the messenger. And a pretty neutral one, as such messengers go.
(Indeed, that neutrality is one reason Google is so successful. They approach business with the intellectual detachment of scientists.)