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I don't know about you, but to me Google is already pretty scary. Google has the power to completely destroy your business. They have little to no human communication, thus not allowing for any real follow-up, they're like this god, or black box. You have to hope and pray your begging will correct things. For example, lets assume you have a somewhat successful product, getting pretty good search results for your cate…
This doesn't bother me. If my website got delisted from Google, I'd find traffic in some other way. If my ads didn't get run by Google, I'd just advertise somewhere else. Honestly, Google is not that big of a company. I checked out the Fortune 500 list, and Google is not even in the top 50. Amazon.com, Bank of America, and CVS Carkemark know a lot more about you than Google. And they don't care -- you come to them, a…
BofA, Amazon, etc. are all companies that we deal with directly in a customervendor relationship. Amazon puts up products for sale, people buy them. BofA gives people a place to put their money, in return for the ability to lend that money to others.
But your average Internet user isn't Google's customer. They're Google's product, and are "sold" to advertisers. People interact with Google every day, and in return, Google gets to collect, store, and mine our information in ways that we don't really know about or understand, and sell the results of that analysis to others.
So I think some of the Google-fear is based more on that than raw revenue generation. Being sold to advertisers on a massive scale is just kinda creepy.