The anti-Google torpedoes are now in the water, what damage will we see?

The biggest and hungriest beast in the internet ocean is facing an end to its voracious ways.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:02, 24 April 2025

Search and advertising, the twin intertwined arteries through which Google has pumped almost incomprehensible wealth through its system, are now facing near-certain legal surgery after two separate antitrust cases progressed in the past few days in their prosecution of the business.

The specifics of each case are here and here if you've somehow managed to avoid looking at a screen recently.

Whatever remedies are proposed by the courts, and however long the appeals process takes, Google have already lost, with the scale and detail of that loss being the main uncertainty. As such, the share price of parent company Alphabet is holding fairly steady, as the market currently believes it has any setbacks factored in. A fickle creature is the stock market, though, and its view short in distance.

Some part of all of this, some part to the most penetrating detriment of Google, is the fact that they screwed the little guy. The NYTs and BBCs and other large media players could take the battle to them to an extent, their power as organisations giving them some parity, even against an opponent constructed purely of money, and largely of other peoples' work.

Yet it was the little lasses and fellows that have suffered most as Google has progressed inexorably with the entirely logical business process of corralling users within the confines of its own proprietary borders. 

A case study I read in the past month illustrated this perfectly, perfectly in that it matched the accidental malice defined by the phrase "collateral damage", the kind of damage Google causes far too often to those that place any trust in it. A small family business owner in the US explained how she'd been the face of a Google campaign to attract similar business owners to utilise Google's products. The endorsement she gave was based upon her own commercial venture showing strong search performance, with all the benefits such visibility provided. Fast forward a few years later, and here she was telling the case study reporter how Google had pretty much wiped her from the rankings, with the usual lack of clarity as to why this had happened that they are famed for. She felt like she'd been made a fool of.

It's like a tail flick from a Blue Whale that sends a hapless little fish on a journey it won't forget, because it won't be able to. How many publishers have been in the same situation? I'm guessing the majority.

Attaching any blame to this is pointless, or to anything else Google has done. They have filled a vacuum, they have made some excellent products, they have scaled beyond the wildest dreams of scaling. Their inexorable progression of corralling users within the confines of their own proprietary borders, is, in most business theory terms, the only path they could take as a commercial entity. That is to say, it's just where the internal growth logic of a business goes, if left unchallenged. That would be fine if there were a half dozen Googles, or even just another one. There isn't though, and that's where the internal growth logic runs up against competition issues.

It's a similar competition situation with Meta, now facing the possible forced divestment of two of its big properties, WhatsApp and Instagram. If you haven't read the testimony of Instagram's Kevin Systrom at Meta's antitrust hearing, you should. It's pretty damning about Facebook's behaviour post-acquisition. There can be little doubt Instagram's further development was forestalled by Zuckerberg.

As to the publishing future, a future without the supplicant relationship we've been forced to have with Big Tech these past years, there's no doubt that publishers will need to get back all the powerful marketing and advertising skills that were once a natural domain of our businesses.

It is possible that, in a much more fragmented platform world, it is those platforms who will be forced to solicit publishers for content? Rather than publishers being forced to beg embarrassingly for whatever traffic crumbs are thrown their way. In the near-words of that famed tech critic, Sting, will their "face turn to alabaster, as they find their servant is their master"? 

By way of example to show how much our thinking must change, we could use nearly the entire SEO industry as a lesson. I saw an advertising post on X this week from an SEO saying something like "make search engines work for you". How is it that such a fiction can be maintained? There is still only one dominant search engine, everything else is lesser by an order of magnitude, and every SEO operator knows this. Yet these are the people who could, if a multi-polar, multi-platform world does emerge, go genuinely plural and learn how to game one platform against another, to the benefit of their publisher paymasters. 

The exciting prospect of this rather reminds me of the story about two guys discussing dreams they've had the night before. "I dreamt I was walking down the road naked, and everyone could see me," says the first man. "It was horrible." "Yes" replies the second, "I've had that dream too, it was fantastic."