PR exec, Steve Rubel, sees trouble ahead for Google.
In chapter eight John Battelle’s incredible book, The Search, he astutely predicted that Google would increasingly fall under the watchful eye of the US government. As we saw earlier this month, John was right. The US government requested aggregate search data not only from Google, but from all of the major search engines. Only Google didn’t comply.
Years from now we will remark that this was the beginning of the end of Google as we know it. The reason is one day – maybe sooner than we think – the government will try to break up Google. This may accelerate depending on the outcome of the 2008 election.
Whether DOJ would succeed here is entirely an open question. However, if this does indeed happen, it will certainly slow down the search giant and the Web economy overall, much as DOJ did for Microsoft and the PC economy.
