Google is treading very close to the line of having anti-trust regulation applied to them, and if anyone really thought about it for long, google is nothing more than a giant violator of copyright law. It's just that most people don't think about it.
I love the railroad analogy and guess what broke the back of the railroads?
The automobile? Perhaps.
So to stretch the analogy a bit further, what is needed to break the googleopoly is portable, personal search. Your own private geegle, that you can decorate as you wish and that meets your personal criteria, knows you and your tastes and does it's own crawling.
I'm talking about what amounts to a personal digital factotum. As distributed and quantum computing continue to evolve, it won't be long before google is no longer necessary. We'll have digital assistants with so much computational and storage capacity, and so many data storage cooperatives that we'll essentially all own our own engine that uses shared resources to answer our questions and queries based on our personal models of what is correct, useful and of sufficiently high quality as a user experience since it will essentially be a subset of our own thought-models that guide our personal search assistant.
Cookies are just the beginning of this process and are inherently unstable as a way for any third party to truly model our behavior and provide relevant results.
In the end I see google becoming a paid data storage portal, nothing more. They'll charge a nominal fee for access the data that they scrape, and our personal minions will do the algorithmic magic to deliver results we want.
Or, if they're smart, google will develop the personal search bot technology and market it to us.
And they're awefully goddam smart.
