Google’s Guide to Taking Over the Web
Do you have a dream? A dream where you call the shots for billions of other people and how they communicate with each other? Well, we’ve got the guide of the decade for you, taken straight from personal experience. In just four easy steps, you’ll be able to corner the tech industry yourself!
1. Bribe your competitors.
This first step is the most important. Without getting your name out there, you don’t have the influence needed for web domination. Take out a small loan if you have to. We’ve bought out Mozilla for $450 million and Apple for $15 billion so that we’re the default search engine in Firefox and Safari. Why would our users ever bother to change the default — to something like Bing, no less — when ours is good enough?
You gotta get your customers to associate you with the web, and you know you’ve got that when your company name is added to the English dictionary. What’s the first thing you do whenever you want to look something up? You Google it. And the simplest, easiest, lowest-effort way to do this is by bribing your competitors.
2. Create a browser.
Make it simple. Make it fast. Make it such that people actually want to use it. Creating your own browser lets you into a whole bunch of important standards organizations, including Ecma and ISO, but most importantly, the W3C.
Now that everyone is using your search engine, you can abuse your near-monopoly there to tell everyone to use your new browser.
“A better way to surf the web.”
And since you’re Google, they trust you. After all, they get all your information from you, so why would you lie to them? Your users will all happily switch. And, if you’ve gotten creative, your newfound popularity might mean that your browser engine will be used outside of the browser in, say, a popular server-side language, or even to make desktop applications!
All giving you more power over where the future of the web goes.
3. Extend open standards.
Now that you have a secure foothold in guiding the future of the web and everyone loves your products, it’s time to take the rest of the pages out of Microsoft’s playbook: Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. It’s time to add new features. Ones that your users like! But make sure you leverage your own services to show just how important you are to the web. Make others depend on you.
For example, you could send all traffic to news sites through your own servers and call it “speeding up page loads.” Don’t forget to pretty it up! Open source it, but you’re the only one allowed to contribute to it. In your search engine — you know, the one that everyone relies on? — rank sites higher depending on if they use your service. That’ll encourage them.
Also, this point is a great time to start hobbling your browser competitors. Lots of people are using your own browser now, but the other browsers are just as good and less people are switching. That’s a problem. What can you do about that?
Hypothetically, of course, you could take another one of your services — one might even say one that is indispensable to the web — and make it several times slower in other browsers by using special code in your own browser. Now you’ve got users’ attention. An essential service they use is slow in their browser! How convenient, then, that your browser just happens to fix all those problems!
Alternatively, if you happen to own an operating system that powers 70% of all smartphones, you can also put it in there, as only 10% of users change their default mobile browser!
4. Make so many standards until no one can catch up.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got this in the bag. Just make the web experience “more complete” and “more streamlined!” Do what you’ve been doing in step 3 but make it impossible for any newcomers to do it securely and properly. Add a protocol for USB access in the browser. Add a protocol for Bluetooth in the browser. Replace third-party cookies with your own specialized tracking mechanism. All in the name of security and privacy, of course.
There are so many “standard” features in Chrome that it is practically unsustainable to create a new browser engine properly. Opera gave up and switched to Chrome. Microsoft tried with Edge before they gave up and used Chrome’s engine instead.
5. Profit!
That’s it! No one can stop you now. You have a stranglehold on the web. Your browser / browser engine have 70% of browser share worldwide. Even in China, where your whole ecosystem is practically banned, you have more than 50% market share. Developers optimize for you, further reducing the market share of other browsers as sites are now broken in other browsers.
You’re done. You’ve taken over the web. There is nothing anyone can do…except switch to Firefox. But who’s going to do that? Why would anyone sacrifice the convenience of Chrome just to reject the anti-competitive behavior of one company?
