Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Considered Too Big To Fail

Posted by kdawson on from the advertising-bubble dept.

theodp writes "Doc Searls is worried about the way Google makes money. 'Nearly all of it comes from advertising,' he frets. 'That's what pays for all the infrastructure Google is giving to the rest of us. As our dependency on Google verges on the absolute, this should be a concern.' Have we reched Peak Advertising? Blogger Dave Winer says amen, asking if Google is already 'too big to fail.'"

1 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What a doorknob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This I fundamentaly agree with. In my view "too big to fail" actually means "too wedded into the rest of economy to be alowed to fail". The banking system (certainly here in the UK and as I understand it in most of the world) was just that. Not only were individual banks so big that if they collapsed they would bring down vast sections of the economy but they few huge banks there were all made the same stupid mistakes so the same conditions meant they were all about to fail at the same time (the 1930s would have looked like nothing if the governments hadn't stepped in).

    By comparison Google provide:
    - web searching services; but if they disapeared then most of us would just move to Bing or Yahoo.
    - maps and GPS navigation; most of us would get by without it, thouse that wouldn't are probably using TomTom anyway
    - email; this could cause more of a problem for people as email accounts take a while to mature. That said, not many businesses use Google mail so it would people's personal mail boxes that would be effected and people can probably manage their lives without them.
    - other web tools (e.g. blogging, Google Health, YouTube etc) OK; a few people might be a bit upseat and Google Health might have to be sold off but, big deal.

    My gut feeling is if Google disapeared overnight a lot of us would be confused for a few days an then get over it. Hardly too big to fail.

    But... supposing they DID control significant parts of Business communications; or DID manage 50% digital health records; or DID run the most successful micro-payment scheme in the world; etc. Not unlikely scenarios and then I think they might be too big to fail.

    - Christopher