Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of Google's search algorithms. Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) posts one article per week publically and charged $100 a year for his newsletter. The only time he gave numbers, he has over 2000 subscribers.

There are other ways to build a business that don't depend on search.

Whats the viable alternative to Adsense? Especially when it comes to many Geo's that are hard to monetize.

If you are in a certain niche, find a publication or a podcast that serves that niche and make a direct connection to them. Marco Arment - a one man development shop - created his own podcast based advertising platform that is doing well.

What's the viable alternative to Android

The viable alternative to Android is...Android. Many companies are forking the AOSP version of Android and running their own services, including Amazon in the U.S. and a few companies in developing markets.

The danger Google faces is not that a company will come up with a better search engine, it's that people will start using search engines less as mobile takes over along with digital assistants that give you the information you want.

Facebook is already seen as a place for old people and young people may have a FB page but they aren't posting to it because their parents are on it.

There are also other ways to run a household that don't depend on running water. (Heck, my great-grandpa never complained about having an outhouse.) Are you saying your local water utility should be an unregulated monopoly?

I cannot even begin to explain the insidious local politics surrounding the local water utility in the city where my folks used to live and the way they forced homeowners to hook up to the ever-expanding sewer at cost to the homeowners, regardless of whether their existing septic systems were adequate or not, to pad the pockets of the contractors paid by the city and to aid in further annexation of the area outside the city.

A water utility run by the local government as a monopoly is only regulated by local politics, and if you have any experience with local politics you know that's mostly just figuring out who's the biggest good ol' boy.

(The flip side would be "Are you saying Google should be a nationalized, government-regulated search engine?")

Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites.

Answer this: Are you sure that Google updates their search algorithm independent of revenue impact? I remember reading from FTC's investigation that Google kept changing their "independent" SE rater's criteria until it eventually met Google's own goals. You think Singhal didn't know what changes hurt Google's revenue (ad clicks plus sites forced to advertise)?

Business 101 is that you're always in trouble if you depend on one supplier for the majority of your business. The second example I have is John Gruber (daringfireball.com). He never sold ads based on the number of active visitors.

He sells one RSS sponsorship at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week. His revenue wasn't affected when he lost half his readership.

You're making the point. It's hard to build an online business without appeasing Google and that they need to is bad for small and fledgling businesses.

It's possible to build an online business without Google, of course. There are usually alternatives to monopolies, just ones that cost a lot more or are much riskier or much lower quality, etc. I don't agree that it's just as easy to build an online business without Google.

In Gruber's case, he built a reputation strong enough that he routinesly gets Apple's SVPs to come on his podcast. He doesn't depend on an ad network. He sells ads directly - one per week.

Ben Thompson built a strong enough following just based on reputation to get over 2000 people to pay him $100 a year for a newsletter.

How "risky" is it to start a blog on the side until you get enough readership to figure out a business model?

A bunch of them were complaining that Uber is being bad, requiring camera permissions, etc. The newer androids have nicer permissions systems, requested at runtime. But they are running Android 5* because the shiny turd of a phone they got supports only that, but looks awesome. AOSP is good and all, but I'll never buy anything that is not a Google device unless I magically have free time to root it and run an OS I trust (which might or might not exist).

The devices that google had and weren't using Qualcomm CPU got updates for a lot longer (e.g Nexus Player).

It gets very, very annoying for Google to try to support phones that use CPUs that don't update or release anything anymore.

Apple uses some third party chips but they haven't had that problem. Currently, iOS 10.3 supports the iPhone 5 - released in 2012. I suspect that iOS 11 when it comes out in September will keep support for all 64 bit iPhones. That would mean the iPhone 5s introduced in 2013 will be supported until September 2018.

Also, what does it mean to 'abuse' a monopoly position. I don't think its practical to argue that Google doesn't have a monopoly on internet search[1]. When your product name becomes a replacement term for what your product does/is, that just shows how widely used your product is (another example: Q-Tips vs cotton swabs). But how do you prove or argue that Google hasn't abused its position?

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.as... (though I don't know how credible this source is)

IANAL, but there is a legally precise meaning. (Of course, lawyers will still argue over whether a particular behavior meets the definition.) But it's basically, you have a monopoly in X, and you try to use that monopoly to gain you market share in Y.

For example, let's say Microsoft has a monopoly in operating systems. That's OK, nothing wrong with it, because Microsoft came by that monopoly more or less honestly. But let's say that Microsoft uses that monopoly to try to give it a leg up in office apps (maybe by its own office app people learning about OS changes well before release of the new OS, but competitors not learning about them in time, so that there's a period of time when Microsoft has the only office apps that work with the new OS). That's not OK.

Or let's say that Google has a monopoly on search. That's OK, so far. But let's say that Google manipulates the search results to promote Android (say, by making Android phones come up at the top of the list whenever someone searches for a phone). That's monopoly abuse.

Now, what I'm hearing people complain about is that Google uses Chrome to maintain its monopoly in search. As I said, IANAL, but I'm not sure that counts. That's taking something Google doesn't have a monopoly on (browsers) and using it to try to maintain Google's monopoly in search. That's not the same as monopoly abuse. (It's still sleazy.)

> Now, what I'm hearing people complain about is that Google uses Chrome to maintain its monopoly in search.

I think this isn't any different than IE or Edge promoting MSN or Bing. I wouldn't say its sleazy, just that they (Microsoft, Google, whoever) is trying to tie their products together to make an ecosystem. Like how iPhones come shipped with Safari (another Apple product). But then again, IANAL either.

For public policy, the existence of a monopoly is neither here nor there. Monopolies are problem ONLY IF their operations causes negative economic effects to consumers - typically by raising prices. Indeed in many cases (eg. Transport, Infrastructure) a monopoly is actively granted in return for guaranteed availability and pricing.

In Google's case, it would be very very difficult for any lawyer to show how their actions actively hurt consumers - note consumers, not businesses.

Google clearly has a monopoly. Eventually they will abuse it, even if they're not doing so already (which is open to debate). The stronger their control, the more damage they will do and the harder it will be to release ourselves from it.

Monopolies are bad, although sometimes they are the least bad choice. I see plenty of good alternatives to Google's monopoly.

The more I think about it, the more it seems as thought we need to put a price tag on the data companies collect about users. Google may be raising prices all the time by tracking more and more data about you, but this is completely opaque because even though information is "the new oil" no one puts a real price tag on it.

Couldn't it be argued that Google's featured snippets and accelerated mobile pages will lower the revenue of content creators and thus decrease consumer surplus in the long term?

Google lawyers have undoubtedly analysed the case with a fine toothed comb and would likely use the permissive open source licenses under which it provides Android and Chrome sources (and allows manufacturers to roll their own versions) to argue they don't restrict anyone.

iOS.