Benjamin Arvey

ALT The curse of bigness is by no means limited to Google. The other tech giants have each attained gigantic market shares in their respective territories. Even where there is a duopoly — say, the Google/Apple mobile duopoly, or the Google/Meta ad duopoly — growth is more likely to come through enshittification than competition. Google and Meta don’t want to compete on their respective share of the ad-market, because each one is strong enough to seriously challenge the other. Instead, they illegally colluded to rig the ad market in order to steal from advertisers and publishers, who are soft targets. Likewise Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors”