My friend Josh is an Economics major. In the course of a conversation about websites he suggested, “What if Google started charging for their services?” I’m imagine huge public outcry. There would be a drop in stock, or maybe a surge upwards; people would eventually agree to pay for the awesomely high quality service they are getting now. Google search is the best. Google Calendar is great. Google Docs has Microsoft scared silly. There may even be riots in the streets, but people would eventually settle down and pay $10 a month for Google Maps. Josh would, anyway.
That’s why the website of the day is again Google. Maybe you’ve read Scroogled, a sci-fi short story set in the rather near future about Google working for counter-terrorism. In the story, any deviation in a person’s Internet traffic is considered a sign that he is a terrorist. Google could freeze our accounts while an officer examined our trail. The Goog could also hold our Docs hostage until we ponied up. However, there are subtler ways of being evil. What if Google started offering “Pro” service plans like Yahoo? They could pull back storage space, POP3, and filters, saving them time and money. Gradually, all the new stuff (they’re rolling out Mail 2.0) would be in the pro accounts and the free ones could be left to die.
If Google choose, it could visually tear down its sponsored links and have them be the first ten results for every search. We really do depend on those PhD’s in Mountain View, California. New York. Michigan. Georgia. Colorado. Massachusetts. Hong Kong. Bangalore. Mumbai. Dublin. Milan. Tokyo. Seoul. Zurich. You get the idea. The world isn’t run by Jews, little gnomes, or the CIA. And it’s not run by Google. Yet. Instead of sounding the alarm for every Google user (200 million hits per day), I’m simply calling for the time-worn act of competing. Sometime, Google will be forced apart for being a monopoly. It shouldn’t be allowed to buy YouTube, Urchin, Feedburner, Jaiku, or Pyra (Blogger). YouTube and Pyra could have made money on their own. Urchin could have simply licensed its tracking services to other companies. Jaiku, I don’t want to talk right now. I’m rooting for Twitter anyway.
