How does this even make sense?
This is like saying "Once flying squirrels take control of the government...".
Sure, a government controlled by flying squirrels is something scary. But that doesn't make any sense.
You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.
Google is highly influential in how information is consumed and distributed. People use chrome to browse web, google search for searching information etc. If they have major control over how information is distributed, they have major control over the web. Ofcourse there are other similar services that are not provided by Google, but they are very less influential due to lack of users.
> You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.
What if web becomes a walled garden ? Look at what Google did with DRM[1], even Mozilla had to give up their efforts to fight against it[2]. How could that be possible without having a major influence over the web ?
[1] https://boingboing.net/2017/01/30/google-quietly-makes-optio... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...
> What if web becomes a walled garden ?
That, again, doesn't even make sense.
A walled garden isn't "you need to pay to access my content". A walled garden is "you can only access my content".
Apple is a walled garden. Facebook is a walled garden. The web, by definition, isn't a walled garden.
And that's why Apple and Facebook kinda hate the web.
It was only about 20 years ago that Microsoft went from thinking the web has nothing to do with their core business, to becoming the dominant browser maker, to spending 5 years without releasing an update, and hamstringing all efforts to push the state of web development forward for almost a decade.
Google is approaching a similar level of dominance with Chrome now, and it's pretty scary when you consider the kinds of power plays they could make if they really wanted to. A walled garden, by comparison doesn't have much chance of displacing something as broad as the web except by a complete paradigm shift—mobile apps are the closest thing we've had since the web became dominant, but there's still the installation barrier that has slowed or reversed the process with app fatigue.