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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Long ago, another company tried to control global connectivity—it had an unhappy ending [honest-broker.com]

Can you imagine a company so powerful that it controls half of the world’s trade?

It actually happened. But only one time in history. It’s a remarkable story filled with lessons for those willing to learn them.

No business ever matched the power of the East India Company. It dominated global trade routes, and used that power to control entire nations. Yet it eventually collapsed—ruined by the consequences of its own extreme ambitions.

Anybody who wants to understand how big businesses destroy themselves through greed and overreaching needs to know this case study. And that’s especially true right now—because huge web platforms are trying to do the exact same thing in the digital economy that the East India Company did in the real world.

Google is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the East India Company. And it will encounter the exact same problems, and perhaps meet the same fate.

[...] When you consider all the brutal, terrible things this company did, you ‘re dumbfounded that they dared adopt that slogan—much like the “Don’t Be Evil” that once served as Google’s motto.

But their real god was profit maximization. Of course it was—when your return on investment is so high, you try to grow as fast as possible.

[...] Just like a shipping company that controls the port, Google’s search engine is the port of departure for digital voyages today. And like the East India Company, Google decided that it can exploit anybody who uses its port—and destroy them if they want.

So Google destroyed the journalism business. That’s why your neighborhood newspaper went broke—the folks in Palo Alto siphoned off all the advertising revenues. And they have killed off thousands of other businesses and jobs [zdnet.com].

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