I think you missed the part where they have a near monopoly in search and that currently there is no real competition for that crown. There is absolutely nothing that is going to run Google into the ground in a few short years.
Once a company becomes as large and critical as Google, it becomes an integral national service provider (think Boeing or Ford or Walmart or Goldman) and gets special protection via all the lobbying they do and all the friends they have in DC. Particularly once a company like Google lets the government in to regulate them, as Microsoft and Intel and IBM and others have done, that seals the deal. Which is why the Feds just backed completely away from their anti-trust interest; they could have just as easily pursued Google forever, but they got what they wanted. Any idea the value that organizations like the NSA derive from Google? With that partnership established, any idea the lengths they'll go to in order to protect that treasure trove?
Your time horizon is way too short. Nothing is going to touch Google this decade. You don't understand how the US economy actually works.
I am very afraid indeed of people claiming to do things for my benefit.
Evil is banal, it is every day, and more than likely it happens right in front of your eyes.
People need to shed this comic book villain version of evil, where anybody that acts evil is clearly just a bad person, and starts out with a goal of wanting to hurt everybody else.
If they had focused on "Be Good", perhaps they would have fully instituted good service from the beginning and embraced personal customer contact.
ditto, my pet peeve: pages are now almost all ads, barely disclosed ones to boot. What's next and for how long will they get away with pay-to-play?
They allow a patent troll to potentially set a legal precedent for what constitutes a big part of their app infrastructure. They probably figured that its cheaper to build around the patent and let this one developer eat shit.
They are killing net neutrality by saying mobile networks are somehow special and don't need it, a very obvious move to bolster Android and their telco relationships. They are now apparently paying Orange in France for mobile traffic related to services like YouTube [1], again trading short term business sense for eventually losing the net neutrality fight and turning the whole internet into many walled gardens at the hands of ISPs.
They have settled with news websites in France [2] to avert legal repercussions by a government that is essentially being blackmailed by press. 60 millions is pocket change for them, but the precedent this sets will endanger their business in many countries where press is dying and abusing their power to force governments to pass laws that will benefit their old business models very much to the detriment of Google. They are facing the same thing in Germany right now. News websites by the old printing press garde are the antithesis to the web. They do not understand hyperlinks, they do not understand the importance of giving access to raw material in a Wikileaks era. This move by Google perpetuates their dying business model and damages its own products like News or YouTube, which is thriving as an alternative to the old publisher model in media and music.
They let media companies patrol their data (and search rankings) and remove content by automatically generated requests, no questions asked, at exponentially growing scale [3]. They pretend to be under legal obligations to do so, but intentionally muddle the process to the point where if your content is contended, they give you no recourse under DMCA [4].
Sorry, I'm somewhat consumed by rage after reading the comments of the UniLoc persona non grata.
1: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ipkAQJJNg...
2: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ipwetvKBf...
3: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/
4: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/youtube-universal-m...