[tlb]

Why? The article gives convincing reasons that an iPhone monopoly was a threat (because Apple could gatekeep everyone's mobile experience) but those don't apply to cloud services. If Amazon and Microsoft had a monopoly on cloud services, how would that hurt Google's core businesses?

[bobajeff]

Because of scales of industry. They have to keep investing into their own data centers to keep their services (Google, YouTube etc.) competitive. Because Amazon has the largest cloud business they can afford to spend the most on theirs. Half the reason Google search is so hard to compete with is because of their investment into those data centers. YouTube has also long been the fastest most reliable video hosting site which makes it attractive to viewers and publishers thanks largely to Google investments in CDNs. Also, right now much of the features of things like Google Assistant, Lens and Translate rely on powerful server infrastructure.

If anyone has an edge on them in the cloud they can possibly come out with competitive offerings to theirs similar to how companies using TSMC has done to Intel.