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.