broadstuff

There is a good series of 3 pieces on GigaOm today about Online Advertising. But I disagree in part with the conclusions.

Om Malik notes that:

The media industry is in the middle of a massive change, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of broadband everywhere. Fast pipes are enabling niche networks, venture capitalists are investing in new media properties. The online video market resembles an old fashioned bubble, and companies are sprouting up like mushrooms after a fresh monsoon. All of this is predicated on one business model: advertising. Google bet $1.65 billion in chips on YouTube, betting that it can profit from this shift to online video. Their confidence is understandable: Google now accounts for 25%1 of all online advertising dollars.

One of the things we have repeatedly told our clients (and anyone who would listen) is that Online Advertising is hitting a tipping point and money will shift from Old to New Media. The impact is disruptive for both Old and New media - one because existing cost structures (with low margins) have less revenue flowing through, the other because an embryo industry suddenly has a flood of money coming at it. And it will happen very, very fast compared to the ability of the Old Media to scale down. The New Media will undergo exactly what Om describes.

There were 2 interesting pieces from my point of view:

- Robert Young on Google, YouTube and the Future of Video Advertising.
- Liz Gannes asked Where’s the AdSense of Audio & Video?

Robert Young's piece on Google and YouTube was interesting for us as we have done quite a bit of work in this space. In essence he notes that (I have summarised his text):

- Google could eventually control the flow of dollars generated via online video advertising because they have an “an unfair competitive advantage” when it comes to monetising online video inventory due to their AdWords & AdSense platforms.

- This is based on their existing relationships with hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses (“SMBs”). The backbone of Google’s auction-based, Pay-Per-Click ad platform was primarily built on these SMBs, and the key reasons why Google’s existing relationships with SMBs will prove so critical to the future of video advertising has to do with user-generated content.

- Big corporations are extremely sensitive to any content that could potentially “pollute” their brands, SMBs will be less sensitive and will weigh the risks - as long as Google can perform. Aggregate enough small ad buys and Google will be a position to generate billions in online video ad dollars.

In Liz Gannes piece here on the emergence of video advertising, she basically felt it would be Adsense Mk II but with more emphaisis on deriving context from non-text media, and sheer volume of ads to keep the inventory going.

I disagree somewhat, here is what I responded with. Firstly, to set the scene my notes to Liz were:

I think the main issues for video based Ads will resolve into:

(i) Getting a much better fix on the user’s profile and real time behaviour as part of building up their “context” - and I suspect this will be partly done by getting user opt-in for some benefit.

(ii) Being able to repurpose existing video inventory to match to these user profiles.

(iii) Building tools to allow easy self production of video media for all the SMB’s that are currently the main users of Portal (as opposed to Madison Ave) advertising services.

Despite all the work on analysing Video, I suspect in the short term the real benefit will come from letting users drive the metadata definition.

I also do not think that Adsense (ie classified Ad equivalent) is the same thing as what will work in Video Ads - I have no hard data, just an instinct. We have done quite a lot of consulting work on Interactive Video ads and they are consumed very differently.

Liz also wrote about the vexed questions of Old Media in online video such as Pre-Roll, popup inserts etc. Well, my take on this is that users hat them and love TiVo, Popup blockers and the like. I think in a multichannel, interactive world the Big Rule will be Don't Piss Off The Customer!

So, back to the Big Question in the piece - will Google Rool?

Perhaps, but the seeds of their possible demise are in this same shift.

Firstly, The move from "dial up" Web 1.0 to "broadband" Web 2.0 has been more than just a bandwidth shift. We know that Interactive Video is different in the way it is consumed than static websites, it is not at all clear the Adsense PPC model, which is finely honed for the current world, will win. Video is a creature of the broadband/ web 2.0 world, and it is different to Web 1.0 constructs.

Secondly, the tech shift gives a whole lot of big people a chance to "catch up" with Google, and a bunch of new players to blindside it - just look at YouTube for example. They may not - Google are smart people after all - but a disruption often resets positions.

Thirdly, Google wins only so long as it is the prime site to point to all that video content - the number of Niche (sorry, Vertical now) Search plays lining up now is quite large. In addition, the nature of aggregation is changing from web search through to social networking recommendation search to.........

Well, our view is that the endgame of the video web's search is that it will be more like a blend of search, social net and what is built on it to deal with the Video Net - which in our opinion will be a derivation of an EPG like function.

I don't know yet the ins and outs of how it will work, that is something we are still working on - but online Advertising will not work the way it does now - it cannot - the 'Net has changed, it takes a few years for the new models to emerge.

There was an article on whether people will trust Google with their data on TechCrunch today, and I replied - and then had some more thoughts:

My Comment was:

Michael,

We have done quite a bit of work on this issue of trust, and I think it resolves itself into 2 main areas:

(i) Will people trust any enterprise to keep all of their personal data in a digital form?

(ii) If they do, who will they trust - commercial startups, corporates, not for profits, regulated or government constructs?

Most of the testing we have done (and seen) seems to resolve itself into 2 broad groups right now:

- those who do understand the issues - by and large they are not keen on giving any player their data - and if they do, they want it regulated (we also picked up some concern about US data protection laws vs European ones)

- those who don’t understand - they will probably go with “trusted” brands, though what “trusted” constitutes is up for debate.

Personally, I suspect one (or more) commercial “trusted” party will eventually be tempted to misuse the data, and there will then be an ensuing scandal and call for government regulation so it may just be easier to go for that first.

Would I give any one of these guys my aggregated data now - No Way…I think they are just not anywhere near competent when it comes to ensuring security. My ideal would be a peer to peer system where my data is on my systems, and I control access to it.

Now my further thoughts go a bit more into my recent experience and the consulting work we have done on this subject, and it is to do with what the implications of centralised vs federated data will be.

Firstly, I have been a victim of Identity Fraud - we moved house, our mail redirection went wrong and my mail went awol...next ting I know people are applying for credit cards in my name. But...and this is a big but - they did not have all my data so it was fairly easy to prove it was not me. If they had been able to get into a central receptacle I would have been far worse off.

Secondly, we did some work on Identity and related issues like Trust earlier in the year for a client, and it seems the prevalent approach of people, if given a choice, is to keep their data themselves, and let other parties have relevant subsets - which we called Profiles - that they can then use.

Overall there seems to be a strong feeling that giving any 3rd party a lot of your data is a Bad Thing. The most trusted people (in the UK anyway) appear to be High Street Banks, Utilities such as BT (preferably regulated) and the Government - but they were not Trusted, just seen as a least worst option. US (and probably any foreign) based commercial Portals were not trusted much at all, in fact a "Swiss Bank" level of discretion was needed for real trust.

Last night I went to the 6th Beers and Innovations Event run by NMK. The topic under discussion was "Aggregators and Upsetters".

We were very keen on hearing Paul Pod speak about TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet), which we feel plays strongly to our views about MyPCTV media, but the overall discussion was very good, touching on Edge vs Central aggregators, old world vs online aggregators, Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 aggregation, and the value add of aggregation in general. However, chatting to the ReeVoo guys afterwards it was clear that they have pushed B2B Web 2.0 practice quite a long way forward (most Web 2.0 stuff is very much B2C right now), which I will cover in another post.

There were three very interesting questions that came up:

(i) What is the shape of an aggegator after social networks are just part of the knitting
(ii) What keeps an aggregator valid (ie given Friendster, will MySpace be around in 5 years time)
(iii) Given that its our user produced content in the Web 2.0 aggregators, when will they start paying us

Post Web 2.0, What is the shape of an Aggregator

Aggregation as a function has moved on from physical places (pre Portals?), through on-line search Portals, to social network Portals - and there is a sense that these are layers being built on top of each other - thus, what is the next layer.

Early days, but I think this will be driven by the next 2 questions , ie what keeps aggregation valid - and what is our payback.

I think it is all about value. in particular transaction value. Communication systems through the ages have tried to reduce the costs of (i) finding information and (ii) disseminating/transmitting information.

The 'Net dropped the cost of dissemination by at least an order of magnitude, the searchable Web reduced the ability to find it by a similar amount. (There is a marvellous book called The Victorian Internet that shows this is not new - well worth reading) Social networks have increased search efficiency by digitising the "Wisdom of Crowds" effect. So what will increase the usefulness?

I think there are 3 key things that will occur next:

(i) Putting "people like me" into the Social Net - a recommendation by someone unlike me is not helpful and as Reevoo CEO noted it is useful to know they have actually experienced the event/product/etc - I expect a rush into this area
(ii) Portability of Identity - There are too many sites asking for my details, and as (say) MySpace becomes less cool I want to be able to federate my social nets across all my social network sites
(iii) Video - the endgame is Video....I don't know how it will happen, but Video based media will be a key part of the next wave. All I can say at this point is that aggregation won't work the way it does now as Video is a different medium.

What Keeps an Aggregator Valid?

This exercised some furious debate, but my take on it is that it is simple - its us. So long as we find an aggregator does what we want it do do, it is valid. There are tactical things an aggregator can do, so for e.g. Friendster was less "user friendly" than MySpace, and Yahoo and Google have different flavours - but there is also a Zeitgeist - for example word on the street is that MySpace is passe, Bebo and Facebook are now "in".

I suspect therefore that aggregators have to follow the trends of "us", the smart mob - as we become familiar with each new layer, our wants change. Key trends I see emerging are:

(i) Trust - as more of our life is online, we increasingly need to trust our providers with that data - identity fraud and the abuse of our data are going to be real problems (I have talked a bit more abouth this on TechCrunch
(ii) Multi-media services - we will want to access services over PC, mobile and (probably) TV
(iii) Accessability - we are not putting our eggs in any one basket, and we want to be able to access various services - and transfer between them - fairly simply

When will they start paying us?

Many years ago I attended a Futures Workshop in Washington DC, and one of the sessions was on the value of a vendor knowing my Net Present Value over my life. As you can imagine, the value is far, far greater than the pittance that a storecard or Nectar like system pays you.

However, there is already value returned to us in using a desirable aggregation service. One question asked last night was "since YouTube used our content and sold for $1.65bn, should they not be paying us?" In YouTube's case when you sign the upload agreement you sign the rights over to them (in that respect at least they are a true Old Media aggregator), and clearly enough people thought the bargain was worth it for accessing everyone else's content easily.

In addition, we get value returned by allowing advertisers to sponsor the aggregator and advertise to us, and thus get the service at a lower price (a faustian bargain to be sure, but we all seem to like like Free)

Unless of course someone forms a C2B aggregator for us that then blends our buying power and sells this data to the retailers - but then will this aggregator pay us?

I can imagine people will eventually start paying us, but it will be done in the form of subsidies, and will probably require us to "opt in" to the services to get around privacy restrictions.

Our company does quite a bit of DRM consulting, we've even written a few papers on the subject.

Last week I happened on this note from zdnet re the new Protect-DVD-Video DRM. To quote:

"Part of the copy-protection mechanism is a non-standard UDF (Universal Disc Format) file system which results in the IFO file on the DVD (this is the file responsible for storing information on chapters, subtitles and audio tracks) appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long.

The upshot of this is that if you have a DVD disc protected by Protect DVD-Video and you try to play the disc in a PC-based system using, say, Windows Media Player, the process will fail. Now, lets be clear here, we are taking about a genuine, legitimate DVD disc not working in a PC, not a pirated disc or a download via a torrent."

Wow! Great business model - you sell me something I can't play on 4 of the 5 PC's I have in my home, never mind take over to my friend's house.

And it set me thinking about the whole State of Video DRM today. Let me recap:

(i) DRMs by and large reduce content usage to a far more draconian world than buying the existing physical product.....
(ii) ....but there (usually) is no discount in the price asked (and it must cost more to put the DRM in)
(iii) However, it can't stop the pro crackers....usually the crack is out within weeks of the new DRM......
(iv) ......and the crack is soon on the 'net anyway so anybody can find it.......
(v) ...and if you are too lazy you can get the content off a number of Peer 2 Peer sites anyway.
(vi) So, the main impact is just to increase the hassle for the ordinary customer.....
(vii) ......who has more options for their money and time than ever before.

Have I got this right? And if so, does this make sense as a viable approach? Its not just me, here's some comments on hacking netflix

As far as I can see, the risk for anyone to build any serious library of DRM'd content is too great, unless the content player is a market leader and unlikely to go under (or change things too much as it has so many customers who will shout), or gives some form of guarantee that its DRM will remain stable (like put it in an escrow form or somesuch) - or of course I have a hack I know works so i can always get the DRM content to play.

Without that, rental is in my view the only real model that is viable.

This to me implies that DRM cannot really be viable as is, if it cannot really be used for purchases. I have often wondered if in fact zero DRM was a more beneficial approach. And in fact a Yahoo senior executive recently noted that it may be better overall to remove DRM for the good of the whole supply chain.

This leads to an interesting model - imagine a simple supply chain, and say that with DRM the rate of sell through is (say) 50% of a total potential market. Then assume having no DRM both increases sales and increases copying. Play with it a bit on excel or somesuch. As you can see by playing with this, depending on the assumptions there are a number of fairly believable scenarios where zero DRM is very good news indeed.

I will add some scenarios outcomes in a later post, it is really very interesting.

Interesting post on GigaOm about GooTube over mobile.

Nice idea...but the economics of mobile data are not the almost "free ride" of the 'Net. Clip surfing GooTube on a mobile will cost real money - in the UK at any rate - a Mb a minute at even $0.50 / minute (lower end pricing) adds up fast. I haven't done the economics country by country for this yet, but I'd suspect as a rule its true in most places as mobile economics is still by and large like Telcos were pre Internet as its the economics of closed networks.

Certainly the mobile music download market was ceded to iPods et al in no small measure due to download cost - the term "sticker shock" was invented for this phenomenon

There are also a number of interesting problems with mobile video:

(i) navigating a mobile for complex web content like Gootube is darned clunky
(ii) its a small screen, a lot of the content will need repurposing for mobile. Technologies to repurpose this on the fly (like that from Snell and Wilcox ) are still in early days, but the problem remains that a lot of the content uploaded will still be for larger screens .
(iii) advertising on a mobile is a different experience, its still unclear if the web style works on the mobile - if not, more repurposing.

None of this is insurmountable, but they need surmounting.

But above all, its the money.....

So, after the dust settled this week it looks like Carphone Warehouse is no longer a mobile phone retailing warehouse cum Telco but a major ISP and network comms warehouse cum Telco. What is going on?

We came up with 3 possibilities for the AOL deal:

(i) Dumb money chasing an (apparently) cheap asset
(ii) An attempt to get out of their current hole
(iii) A cunning strategy that we have yet to grasp

Dumb money thesis first - on the surface, the AOL access business looks fairly cheap - £370m for 1.6 m customers, 2/3 of whom are broadband, all paying at least fifteen quid a month each in theory, so about 1 - 1.5 x revenue. Problem is that (i) a lot of this revenue goes out the door as cost already, and (ii) this market is only going one direction, and thats towards free - led by Carphone Warehouse among others. Even though AOL typically has the "family" market who traditionally are fairly 'net naive and slow to move, Free service will eventually triumph. This is so glaringly obvious that even the densest strategists must have seen it, so I rule out the dumb money option on that basis - for now, anyway - and assume they are trying to solve a wider problem.

So, that brings us to the second option - getting out of the current hole. Carphone started a Free (so long as you buy an £20+ per month bundled phone service) broadband service, which has been so succesful that they apparently are signing 15,000 people a week - only problem is they can't connect them, 200,000 out of 620,000 subs are still not connected. Those they can connect they annoy with lousy customer service in those fraught early setup times, hardly a smart play in a commodity game with low switching costs. The broadband service is expected to have lost £70m this year, and is subsidised by the juicy margins of its mobile customers. And, if its lost £70m on 400,000 broadband customers its not clear that doubling or trebling that is a Good Thing with their current infrastructure.

Right now this is being subsidised by the healthy nargins of flogging cellphones and voice telephony - but mobile is no longer a growth business, Vodafone has just pulled its distributor deal with Carphone and Orange will allegedly pull its deal later in the year, no doubt to get their hands on that revenue as they face leaner times. Ditto voice....VoiP is coming - so the margin money may well disappear fairly fast. Acquiring all those AOL users adds scale, short term revenue gain and no doubt the business case shows Significant Synergies, and margins of £30-40m are predicted by Carphone (which in practice are much, much harder to get of course ).

But access is a low margin business at best now, and neither AOL nor Carphone own the backbone side yet so are paying others for bulk haulage. So, after the dust is settled that is one huge future cash sink acquired and one huge cash source lost. Seems like this is at best an "if I dig fast enough maybe the old hole will fill in before anyone notices I have a bigger new one here" strategy.

Or is there actually a cunning plan behind all this. On Carphone's website, Charles Dunstone, CEO of Carphone Warehouse, said:

“The acquisition of AOL's UK Internet access business is transformational for our broadband business. This deal gives us significant scale to complement the rapid organic growth of our free broadband proposition. In addition, the joint development of AOL's already successful audience platform will bring us new advertising and content revenues in a proven and low risk manner.”

Ummmm.....but AOL still keeps all the content and thus the advertising power, so this is at best a point-through to Another Guy's Portal, guys. And who is this new revenue coming from - AOL takes but a small share of all the Ad money, Google, MSN and Yahoo take a lot more of it. The TechCrunch UK team have similar questions, comparing this deal with BT's position with BT Yahoo. (In defense of BT though, as the Previous Management had just spent all the family silver on Mobile licences it was having to flog whatever it could to keep the Manor in the family). Or did Carphone know the Voda blow was coming and were determined to Do Something before it happened?

At any rate, if there is a cunning plan I don't think its in the access business *as such*.

No, I think the cunning plan has been more about a bundle and sell strategy. Carphone Warehouse is rumoured to be in the sights of a number of Private Equity dealmeisters, and in PE land there are a lot of people looking, but far fewer decent deals, so even half decent ones get big premiums - how about a nice big triple play story?

Does it get sexier with a video play I wonder.....?

GigaOm picks up on the rumours about Google buying Level3. It is already clear that Video IP over PC is here to stay, but I think the next step is over the TV - (and imho it is looking less and less likely it will be over IPTV).

In our tests of the MyPCTV concept (see here) we found that we got a very entertaining experience with the jury rigged system we put together. Give this all a year of development and a ton of VC money to bring forward some of the technologies I have seen in various R&D labs, and I believe we are in for a brave new world of video media.

If there is enough bandwidth, of course - and at a reasonable price.

If there is not, this is a big blow for the nascent IP Video Industry...such as, well...GooTube. It has been known for a while that Google are building a huge infrastructure capability, but till now its been (allegedly) focused on hosting servers rather than network.

One of the prime tenets of the Video Rental boys, when asked if they fear online delivery models, is that there is just not enough bandwidth to deliver this sort of service, and even if there was the contention ratios would kill it.

Hmmmm.........YouTube is in essence a big real time Video on Demand (VoD) trial service, and its already serving a large community without the US backbones grinding to a halt, and thats with very little tuning, grooming or otherwise managing the network.

But, it has low picture quality and short clips (ie bandwifth required could be far bigger per show) and the number of YouTubers per dsl exchange is probably still not contentious (as it were). And clearly Google's new direction (Lots more acquisitions in the video space) requires there to be serious bandwidth.

Just in case, you can imagine the boyz at GooTube saying, maybe we better get ourself a nice big backbone?

The long rumoured deal is finally done.....in a flow of (hopefully) lucidity I posted my thoughts on it here, Liz Ganne's article on Google's psychology prompted it.

Here it is repeated for the mouse challenged

Liz

I believe this is the day that Google officially handed over its crown as leader of the New Wave of Internet companies. It has now confirmed that it is becoming de facto Old Web Establishment.

This is their Netscape Moment, when it becomes clear they are not really in the vanguard for the next wave.

Heres why:

(i) They clearly no longer “get it” - they have developed N new businesses in the past few years , few of which have really taken off, while all around them a new wave of creativity has started apace.

(ii) I don’t know how much was spent on Google Video, but even with all their king’s horses and men, they couldn’t get it together and a bunch of guys came from nowhere and stole the show.

(iii) They have already IPO’d and it is now (very) clear that the cool stuff (and increasingly the wealth) is being created elsewhere - how to retain the creative talent will be an increasing issue…

(iv) …especially as the thundering herd of the rest of VC community now tries to back every Bubble 2.0 company going. A million flowers will bloom, many will wither but some will flourish…

(v) …and Google can’t buy them all. Its share of mind and money must be diluted.

End of an era, end of an S curve.

Past examples show that psychologically (unless Google is very unique) the company will move more into a defensive, conservative frame of mind to retain what it has.

It then becomes harder and harder to make innovative plays that count, as too often they will tread on existing Googletoes and be strangled at birth. It is the Way of Large Companies. Acquisition at high prices become the de facto path to growth.

But, the big difference between Google and Microsoft, the company they replaced as King of the Heap during “Web 1.0″, is that Microsoft had a far tighter grip on its users, via a baked in operating system, for over 15 years.

Search is much more open and at a very early stage, ditto personalised advertising - it is (in my opinion anyway) extremely unlikely that Google can stop large niches (or verticals as I believe the in word now is?) of the space being carved out by players with newer algorithms, metadata or customer data analytics.

And as for YouTube customer loyalty… (or its economics, come to mind - video is far more expensive to serve than search, and as yet YouTube has no real revenue model)

We do not yet know who the new King is (it wasn’t Netscape last time, they were the starting gun), but now the mantle is up for grabs.

Let the games commence!

Now, the thing I have started to ruminate on is the point I made above...in Web 1.0 it seemed the Web Browser was The Thing, but it turned out that searching for web sites, and the related ad revenue turned out to be the real gold mine.

If (and admittedly it is an if) this holds true for Web 2.0 then plays such as YouTube - and probably the whole social networking thing - are like Netscape, ie they are the preconditions that must exist for the Real Web 2.0 applications to take root.

I think this is true because, well, YouTube is cool but in the same way surfing early web sites was cool - novel, different but ultimately not useful....but it shows the way just as Netscape destroyed the Closed Garden and CD-ROM approaches to multimedia that were competing at the time. YouTube shows me that video media over the PC is the Way things will work....

MyPCTV Rules OK?

Interesting post on GigaOm about women gamers. Neilsen has a new study on gaming demographics (see here).

According to Neilsen, ratios are:

- 2 to 1: ratio of men to women in overall gaming universe.
- 56%: percentage of active gamers who play online.
- 64%: percentage of online gamers who are women.

The Daedalus Project also shows some interesting demographics. From its survey data, the average age of the World of Warcraft player is 28.3 (SD = 8.4). 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Female players are significantly older (M = 32.5, SD = 10.0) than male players (M = 28.0, SD = 8.4).

So where are all these women and what are they doing?

The common wisdom I am aware of is that most women don't like to play competitive games, or those that require a lot of downloading and time investment in characters. Allegedly they mainly play simple online games that are free. A large part of the potential market is not paying subscriptions.

GigaOm notes that "The consensus is that online, women tend to play casual, Java and Flash-powered web games like Bejeweled5, generally passing on download-install-and-play “hardcore” online world games like World of Warcraft."

Interesting. I know many women play non PC based games like Dungeons and Dragons, so its not sword and sorcery per se that puts them off. And also, in "2nd Life" about 40% of players there are women.

What do women want then?

In observing women gamers and chatting to them, and scouring various chat boards on the subject I come away with a few general principles about what women like in games:

(i) creativity - do it yourself, or at least some saty in defining environments
(ii) being part of a non-competitive social network
(iii) using simple, easy to load and use games systems

This sounds a lot like the principles of Web 2.0. Maybe the way to include women is in the application of Web 2.0 principles to Gaming.

Gaming 2.0 anyone?

So...the long running rumours of Google buying YouTube seem to be coming out of the closet, the Wall Street Journal reported today that a price of $1.6bn (about 1/2 way between the highest and lowest rumoured prices going round) was the latest estimate.

Hmmmmm.....if you can't beat them, buy them?

Google are in good company, seems all the Old Media and New Media guys are buying New New Media companies, though one has to ask how many YouTubes (or Skypes or MySpaces) one could build at these prices.

The thing about Google that I do not understand is that, in theory, they should be able to build this stuff. Or, do what many have done in uncertain times - partner. What is going on - why pay top dollar for a startup?

The Economist today reports on Google's "formidable recuitment machine" scouring the planet for the best and brightest. Yet, at the same time, Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) told the UK Conservative party that about 10% of the company is aimed at blue skies, the rest are doing the same old same old.

So, has innovation flown the coop? Is the real aim is to take out a scary competitor asap, one that evaded the "early buys" radar and grew too fast. Is buying YouTube the Bunker Hunt approach to Web 2.0 - buy it all up before it threatens to break out (and maybe break you)? Every Tech wave produces a behemoth......IBM, Microsoft...now Google, who can exercise such incredible market power.

We haven't had a Netscape Moment this time around (yet), where the existing incumbent crushes the new guy with its market power, but this is a similar sort of defining point I think.

If it happens of course...it is only a rumour after all