[tareqak]

I would argue that even the appearance of taking someone else's work should be a damning blow to Google internally. Google prides itself of having some of the world's best academic researchers under their roof, and plagiarism in an academic context is usually a career-ending affair.

I finally understand what people meant when they would say "for some people, the Internet is Google". Google started off as a search engine, and many people were able to search for answers to their questions such that Google's search engine became the de facto platform for question-answering for this group of people. Over time, Google developed capabilities or acquired capabilities in answering questions in growing number of niches e.g. scraping websites for snippets like in this article or acquiring companies that had developed this sort of capabilities like ITA for flights [0]. As a result, the Google platform that is search started to vertically integrate these different niches bit by bit starving out incumbent competitors via prioritization of search results.

I can can think of one analogy that would be more obviously problematic and troubling: imagine a library system spread across a large geographic area with many branches that was wealthy enough to buy their own book publisher. Maybe it starts out with non-fiction and the quality of the published books remains high. What if the library system then started to prefer this associated publisher? At one point, the library network might end up saying that the other non-fiction books published in the same time period are not being lent out enough to be worth stocking, and so removes / puts them away in long-term storage. One day this library system buys a new publisher, but this time it is fiction, but maybe just one genre like adventure or children's books. Then, the same pattern of behavior emerges.

The library system / network I described above sounds like a very useful and successful platform: almost like a public utility.

Another example might be a telegraph / telephone company anytime before ~1950 buying national newspapers.

[0] https://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html