Three truths:
1. Google is a middleman made of software. It's a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That's Google.
2. The middleman acts in the middleman's interest.
3. The broader the span of the middleman's control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman's power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.
For much of the first decade of the Web's existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine.
We were misinformed.
