Before Google, the local newspaper had like 80% of advertising market share in each city, and many were owned by national conglomerates.

I highly doubt that.

But anyway, I don't see how that's relevant.

Because Google has not changed the structure of the market, only which player sits in that position.

But when you advertised in a newspaper, you didn't have to fear the newspaper suddenly becoming your competitor and then refusing to run your ads.

Well, I suppose that might've happened if you were another publication or something. But it was relatively rare. Also, newspapers weren't the only way people advertised, for instance the yellow pages was a big deal when I was a kid. (and it was the subject of a Ralph Nader article calling it out as a monopoly: https://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2004/08/fo... )

Google refused to run someone's ads? When I search for "cloud hosting" the first two things I see are ads for IBM and Lenovo. The third hit is an ad for Google.

Right but what about having a product in an app store and then next thing you know Apple or Google has their own product that competes with it.

Your comment is about the ads market. The GGP is about the search market.

Search is something that didn't even exist back then (yellow pages were the nearest thing, but still way different), so there is no way to claim that the structure was kept the same. Nobody could take your store out of its physical location and make it unreachable back then.

The Internet is so full of spam and noise, people have become dependent on gatekeepers to sift through for signal. Nobody really wants to browse the raw web anymore. If you want to make money online, youre going to have to buy access to someones platform, whether that be Google, Apple, Ebay, Amazon, Facebook. Youre either buying shelf space in a marketplace, or youre buying or selling billboard space. (Even if you are a self hosted website, which is becoming more rare as the CMS market consolidates behind newspaper's tech offerings) youre buying ads from Google, Facebook, or Microsoft.) The one I left out is "content production" whether that be journalism or entertainment, but the same thing applies. Youre going to need to convince a newspaper, radio, streaming service, or Disney to publish you.

However, a monopoly, this does not make. The world being pay to play doesnt automatically mean one behemoth is sole gatekeeper. There are plenty of different platforms you can fight for access on, fights you may win and profit from.

"Feeding the search machine only makes google stronger. If businesses stop giving away their content to google for free, it will stop being so important"

So, let's say you are a business. You can only control what you do, not what all the other businesses in the world do.

Is your strategy to keep your content off Google, in hopes that you will starve the "search machine" and thereby weaken it?

My guess is you won't be a business for long with that strategy.

So they should spam people rather than let people do searches and arrive at their site?

And that is just Basecamp. There are many other businesses whose best strategy is to "play ball" with the dominant companies. But they are at their mercy.

Many people (including myself) feel that this isn't healthy competition nor is socially optimal.

Regardless, my point was that you advocated a strategy that only works if all the small companies are cooperating....in other words, a game theoretically unsound strategy.