I have been toying with one fantastic idea lately. I know why it would seem like a pure fantasy, and I'm not pretending that it's anything more at the moment, but give it some benefit of a doubt.
It's quite simple. Imagine, just for a second, that current trillion evaluations for all the unicorns will turn out to be true in some point in the future. How can it be? What will be going on in this fantastic world? There's only one possible explanation: internet ate everything.
The dotcom boom hanged on a very simple, explicit assumption: that internet commerce is viable. That people actually will spend money on the internet. Of course, it lead to a bubble, and that bubble burst, but the assumption itself turned out to be correct. More than that: the valuation that NASDAQ have given to the whole internet industry in the late 90s is a reality know. Of course, individual 90s startups weren't worth that money, but internet industry as a whole certainly is. Even if you judge it just by turnover, without even looking at prospects of growth.
So, the first step of internet revolution that was promised by dotcoms already happened. But what about the next step? No one is really talking about it, because it's too fantastic to believe in and nobody wants to be laughed at. But we know what it can theoretically be: the current wave of SV unicorns will _eat_ their respective industries.
Imagine it. 90% of taxi industry is Ubers, Lyfts, Getts. 90% of book industry is Amazon. (Wait, that almost already happened). 90% of TV is Netflix and stuff. 90% of payments are Square and Paypal. 90% of hotel industry is AirBnB, Booking.com and something else. Walmart have gone after Blockbuster, everybody orders groceries with online drone delivery. Giant malls stand abandoned, everybody's ordering from AliBaba. And so on.
Of course it sounds a little stupid; I drastically simplify it, so we can talk about it without spending time arguing about inconsequential details. And don't forget, all this is more like a fantasy right now.
But the point is, in this fantastic world such initiatives by Google, just as free basics by Facebook have nothing to do with charity. Remember, how in the 90s, the only companies that really made money of internet were telecom companies, because the only sure way to monetize an internet user was to charge him for access? (Oh, and porn of course). In contrast, in this fantasy world, the cost of internet access will become insignificant compared to all the money you can get from a person with internet access. And in this fantasy world internet corporations will gladly provide you the access for free. May be they will still charge you a couple of cents for 100Mbps to 1Gbps upgrade, but the 0 (zero) bps to 1Mbps upgrade will make so much money to them that you have no chances of paying for it.