Hi,

Great article. This has been happening for quite some time .

The difference between the travel industry analogy and search engines (aka google) is that no one company had, or still has a monopoly within that industry. The model simply changed.

In the case of Google, it is clearly one company entering into these industries, changing the model and following the current mantra:

1) Provide services for free that were previously paid for (or the business itself made money from ad revenue) - analytics, thereby devaluing the industry as a whole
2) Give your own businesses premium position in your search engine - e.g. all other video sites vs youtube
3) Use your engine to provide yourself free advertising, whereas everyone else has to pay - e.g. adwords/adsense
4) Flood the market with your own ads - e.g. nexus one taking adwords impressions away from other advertisers, showing through adsense on sites where nexus one is not relevant to the site

Quite unbelievable really. Im not sure why if theyre getting away with all this now, that they dont just buy all the websites on the internet. Then it would be game over. However, that wouldnt be much fun would it? There would be no more internet businesses to compete with!

TBH Im all for a non-profit search engine - pls pls pls Tim Berners Lee create one - We trust you!