Google's users are not customers. Google is exploiting their users precisely because they are not customers, so their only value to Google is as a resource for maximizing their profits due to ads. Which actually makes them worse than, say, cigarette manufacturers, since at least their users were their customers, choosing to purchase a product.
Google needs to keep all members of that eco system content and treat them respectfully, labeled customer or not.
No, it isn't, it's a huge difference. If Google's users were paying customers, Google's incentives for how to treat its users would be very different.
> They are part of the eco system
"Customer" does not mean "part of the eco system". It means something much more specific.
> Google needs to keep all members of that eco system content and treat them respectfully, labeled customer or not.
If you think Google is actually doing this, you're delusional. And to the extent Google's leadership thinks they are doing this, they are delusional as well.
By this logic everyone is a customer of everyone else, since we all buy goods and services part of the payment for which ends up going to all of us. That makes "customer" a useless term. It's much better to stick to the actual economic definition, which is the one I've been using.
> Google operates an eco system that offers value.
Sure, but that doesn't mean everyone who makes use of some of that value is Google's customer. That's a big part of what makes the ad supported business model so dysfunctional.
> A lot of users might have a sort of search or buy addiction, but they are not all addicts that can be / are treated as disposable resources.
Whether or not a particular user is an addict of Google products, as far as Google is concerned, they are a disposable resource. That's a necessary consequence of the ad-supported business model that Google has chosen. And while Google is not going to drop search as a service, Google has certainly discontinued plenty of other services in the past that were providing lots of value to users--but Google didn't care because those services weren't making enough ad revenues. So Google's actual behavior makes clear that, whether or not Google wants to admit it, its users are disposable resources.
When I read this, I see a company effectively gloating about establishing such a firm monopoly, in part through "marketing/distribution investments", that they could effectively ignore their customers, and focus instead on entirely exploiting them. The document voluntarily choosing to parallel their level of control over their users as something normally only obtained by illicit industries, like drug dealers is, to me, just one of those 'wow I can't believe you were stupid enough to put this into text' type things.
In your mind, what would be reasonably viable smoking gun for a monopoly pursuing corporation to write down? The Sherman Antitrust Act is described by Wiki [1] as prohibiting "1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market." It goes on to mention that "[a] monopoly achieved solely by merit, is legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act