Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered, and every path taken (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the key stuff). I’ve tracked this extraordinary artifact since 2003, and have come to believe that Google’s control over it has become a inhibitor to innovation and flourishing in our society.
The US government – yes, even this one – agrees with me. In the nearly three decades since Google first launched, the company has gone from champion of the open Internet to established monopolist whose principle business is protecting its profits. With the advent of consumer AI, that principle business is imperiled. Google is protecting a revenue stream that it must understand is no longer defensible, either by law or by practice.
Instead of innovating in its approach and business model, Google is digging in its heels and hoping it can exhaust the government through years of appeals, half measures, and delay. It’s a well worn playbook, and it’s bad for everyone, including Google.
But there’s another way, one that would re-establish Google as the innovator it once was. It’s bold and crazy by most traditional business standards, but it’s most likely the only way the company avoids a fate of gradual decline and irrelevance. And it has the added benefit of getting the government off the company’s back.
Google should make the database of intentions freely available to anyone who wishes to license it.
The tech industry is in the midst of yet another great turn of the wheel. The old interface to knowledge and compute that has served Google so well – command-line queries and a list of blue links – is in the process of being ceded to natural language, multi-modal conversations driven by generative AI. Google knows this, which is why the company has cautiously integrated its Gemini technology into its core search results. Sooner than it would like, search as we know it will become a commodity, a critical but largely forgotten layer of complexity that will be buried – like DOS with Windows or Unix with iOS – under layers of new services in the process of being invented.
These services could be wondrous, they could be precise and accurate, they could be dizzyingly profitable, and they could change how we understand the world. But without high-quality search to enable them, they will never exist.
Google could not only insure these new services thrive, it could take credit for establishing a platform that once again changes the world. And along the way, it could loose the chains of government oversight, be paid handsomely for its service, and even build its own applications on top – but only if the company has the courage to change.
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Two separate courts have found Google to be a monopolist in both its search and its advertising businesses. In search, the company is now in what is called the “remedies” portion of the trial. Remedies are a strange beast – now that the court has labeled the company a monopolist, the two sides spend the better part of a year arguing what to do about it.
If Google were a recalcitrant and unruly child and the government an exasperated parent, we’re in the awkward part of the family debate where appropriate punishment is being discussed. Google wants to be sent to its room without dinner. The government wants to send Google to a military reform school for the rest of its natural life.
You’ve probably seen the headlines: The government is asking Google to:
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- Divest its Chrome browser and possibly its Android business
- End its practice of inking exclusive distribution search agreements with partners like Apple and Mozilla
- License its core search data (what I call the database of intentions) to competitors
Like a kid hoping for a slap on the wrist, Google rejects each of the governments proposals, suggesting instead that it simply modify its current practices to allow for more competition in what previously were exclusive deals for search distribution. Divestiture is a non-starter, Google argues. And licensing its search data to others would be a mortal blow to the company, making further investment in the business “inviable,” in CEO Sundar Pichai’s words.
The Times further reports that Pichai called “forced data sharing a ‘de facto divestiture’ of the company’s intellectual property that would ‘allow anyone to completely reverse engineer, end to end, every aspect of our technology stack.'”
Pichai is almost certainly right. Search is a notoriously difficult and expensive enterprise to establish and maintain – Microsoft has spent hundreds of billions attempting to compete with Google, and it’s largely failed to take share. That’s because Google’s control over a real-time database of intentions allows it to keep its advertisers, consumers, and partners locked into a closed-loop business ecosystem where it can reap the lion’s share of profits.
Barring settlement, which seems unlikely, the smart money is betting that the judge in the case will not force Google to divest either Chrome or Android, but will force the company to both cease its exclusive distribution deals, as well as license its core search data to competitors.
Given Google has already signaled a willingness to modify its distribution deals, the most interesting aspect of this ongoing drama now centers on the database of intentions.
The government wants to break Google’s grip over this critical asset. Google is signaling it will fight to the death to avoid sharing it. But what might happen if Google stops fighting the future, and instead embraces it?
That’s a question worth at least one more post. I’ll link to it here once it’s finished. UPDATE: Here’s that second post.
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