[bee_rider]

I would expect a commodity to be produced with pretty low margins (since the competition is pretty fierce), but not for free. If Google is giving away the information for free, is that really a commodity? I mean either they are giving it away for some strategic reason, they are taking their cut in some more byzantine way, or they have decided to act as a charity for at-home traders for some reason.

[Dracophoenix]

Information itself is a commodity. An encyclopedia doesn't have value have because it costs money but the vice versa. Wikipedia is free, yet it has done more for the world in 20 years than the Brittanica has in 250.

I'm not suggesting Google gives away information as a purely altruistic endeavor. However, Google's ulterior motives, should they have any, are irrelevant to the value of the information itself so long as it hasn't been edited or tampered with.