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Imagine things being so bad that your best solution is to cut yourself off from Google Search traffic. I don't think that people realise just how much of a bad actor Google has been, for year. No other company has damaged the web nearly as much. 🧵 www.adweek.com/media/publis...

But as Google began capturing search, the pattern shifted. The more it monopolised search, the less it had to care about publishers. AI is only the most recent step in a trajectory that has been constant for almost twenty years. How did Google break competition in search?

The supracompetitive ad pricing point matches what we see in-channel: search CPCs keep climbing while organic clicks fall, so brands end up buying back traffic they used to earn. It's pushing a lot of teams toward newsletters and communities — the only channels left that Google can't tax.

The tool is defaults and its implementation is through a cartel mechanism. People don't change their search engine (often because they don't even see it as a separate product from browsers), especially if you make it hard. Being the default search in browsers and mobile OS means owning the market.

People claim that usage data is key, and it certainly helps, but it doesn't help enough to tilt the market. It's a convenient story that doesn't work. Just consider behaviour: Google isn't paying Apple $20bn/year for usage data — they're paying to be the default.