[cromwellian]

Vertical crawlers and linkfarms going out of business is different than publishers going out of business. The web's fertile lifeblood is content, federated, distributed, content accessible by URL. I worry more about newspapers going out of business than comparison shopping sites or RSS readers that never could charge $1 per month, that's nostalgia for a history that never existed.

The open source community as a whole continues to put people out of business by offering free alternatives. We don't call it evil, we just tell those who can no longer compete with free to find another business that isn't com-modified.

There was a time when people also sold memory managers and TCP stacks and everyone OS vendors put them out of business by including their features.

If anyone is hurting the Web these days, it is mobile, and a new generation of DRM'ed, native, locked down computing devices that take away far more rights than people who had general purpose computers used to have, and who push a new way of distributing applications that is platform dependent, distribution dependent, even carrier dependent in some circumstances.

Yeah, but keep droning on about ads, ads, ads, as you seem to do in every post, and how the world would be a much better place if somehow people had paywalls and subscriptions for stuff they access for little transaction cost today.

[Apocryphon]

People seem to be clamoring for subscriptions to ostensibly free services that come at a cost, whether it's the threat of cancellation or restrictive use of their APIs. That's why App.net got so much buzz, remember?

[OGinparadise]

What I said is a problem simply because of Google's market power, power they got by behaving differently. You don't care if people pay on everything they find through Google simply because that benefits Google. You also don't seem to care if Google, with 70%-99% market share penalizes competitors in search.

With you it's mission impossible. Have a wonderful life.