Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

This is just silly. If you were scraping a site's content and publishing it elsewhere maybe there would be a case, but for personal use you can create as many derivative works as you like under fair use. If not then accessibility features like screen readers and magnifiers (many of which are built into browsers) would be illegal.

Users are free to modify site's content as much as they want, using adblockers or using cornify, etc. This is no different than someone cutting out parts of articles from a magazine to make their own collages. Once it's in your hands you can do what you like with it, as long as you don't republish it.

I think Google would put immense pressure on them via anti-trust if they did that.

Besides, not everyone wants all ads blocked. When I search on Firefox, I don't even see ads on the RHS of Google. Sometimes I want to and don't need MS deciding what I'll see. MS would lose huge if they did this.

That joke may not age well, but at this moment, fantastic.

They seem big enough and profitable enough that to really dent their progress, it will probably take something no one has foreseen, and which they can't easily chase without ruining their current business.

22 points for this? Really?

1) Google hired and operated like Larry and Sergey's late night bull session.. Under Schmidt, et al. in recent years this appears to be starting to be reined in..

You do realize that Schmidt has been there since before they went public, right? ie, he was there for the hiring. They currently have slightly less headcount than at their peak, but they say (in their last earning call no less) that their main limiting factor is their ability to hire good engineering talent.

2) "Collapse of advertising.... New market makers will enter and take Google's margin on ads to $0 (in the limit)"

Any evidence to support this? Given how effective AdWords is, it seem unlikely that people will stop paying for it?

"Ads on such a "decision engine" (!) should ultimately be based purely on actual sales commission, not CPMs"

You mean kind of like the "Action based commissions" that Google is trialing with selected vendors now?

3) "They seem well on their way to failing hard on those data centers by trying to monopolize what system software runs on them."

What does this even mean? You mean they haven't open sourced their BigTable implementation? They did publish the BigTable paper - that hardly seemed "closed, arrogant" to me.

"They wound up, a few years back, outrageously overcapitalized."

Do you mean how they left money on the table when they floated using their dutch auction style of stock allocation?

Or do you mean their stock price peak of $700? That is around 20% above it's current price, and given that the US is on the tail end of a recession it would seem to me there is a fair chance that peak will be beaten within 2 years.

GOOG's current P/E ratio is around 34. That's fairly comparable to APPL (29), and Goldman Sach (36) - all seem fairly reasonable for companies showing strong growth in earnings.