[pb7]

I disagree that the network effect in Google is anywhere near as substantial as Facebook. You don’t have a social network without your friends on it. You can definitely crawl the internet and make an index out of the cross references and build a search engine out of it. It may be worse at first but that’s because of the data you mine from users, right? So either this whole privacy thing is overblown and it’s really necessary to collect data to make a really great product or no one should be able to in which case Google holds little monopoly power over a newcomer that doesn’t have any of this data.