Why didn't Google shake down ISPs?

Question

I saw a YouTube video (thumbnail) for a video essay about why all of Facebook's side projects have failed. I asked myself what I would do in Zuck's (or FAANG leader's) shoes; what kind of product would I make, if I had those kinds of resources? What is important to me today that technology could fix? Well, the most painful thing of late has been how bad search has become. So, I guess we're now in Google's shoes, instead. How do you avoid Doctorow's Curse in bringing any service that's supposed to be as frictionless as search? You can't force people to make accounts and pay. You can't support it with ads. You can't go to governments and ask them to pay. ...But what about ISPs? They're kind of the perfect middlemen in that (as common carriers, ostensibly) the government can't get involved in censorship, and as giant corporations with a de facto cartel monopoly, customers have no choice but to go through them. And you, as a dominant, quasi-utility c. 2012, can dictate (fair-ish) terms and protect your bread-and-butter (people who want to use your service, ISP machinations be damned).You even have precedent. Apple shook down AT&T and turned itself into America's dominant phone manufacturer. They used the threat of releasing the insanely popular iPhone with a competitor network to dictate terms, and then eventually released a phone compatible with Verizon's network anyway.Or look at cable networks in the 90s or 2000s, going directly to consumers to force the hands of providers.So, consumers see slightly higher internet bills. Who cares? Better than the ad hell and AI-biased neutering we currently face.Did they just not think it could get this bad? Or was the goal just always to make us the product?

detaro · Accepted Answer

If you try to make ISPs pay for connecting to you, don't expect your users to have a good time reaching your services. And it's difficult to have a "frictionless" popular service if your websites are the slowest ones around.To the contrary, the big sites want the opposite: they want all users to have as good connections to them as possible, which they achieve by being nice to ISPs.

chasing0entropy · Answer

The fundamental purpose of google is to use the internet(and search for things to use) while viewing their ads. The rest of the google garbage are vanity projects to make people use the internet and look at more ads. The underlying technology that drives internet search is no longer rare (look at yacy or elastisearch) what makes google powerful is vast tomes of information about who buys what. With sufficient data collection any corporation would be capable of serving targeted ad campaigns at their users weakening Google's position. If google were to attempt to exploit ISPs, ISPs would simply use their control over the consumer to drive their traffic another search provider more than willing to service them for free and serve ads.

nitwit005 · Answer

It'd likely be ruled illegal, since Google is a direct competitor: https://fiber.google.com/And generally, the whole idea of competition law is to try to prevent extremely large companies from leveraging their dominance like that, rather than competing on price/quality/etc in a way that would benefit consumers.