The original sin, as pmarca put it, is advertising.
All you need to know to realize that this is a bubble is to look at how Youtube keeps asking you to subscribe for their ads-free plan.
Google know it, but it’s too late for them...switching users from “products:through selling their data” to “subscribers:who pay for services” is going to be hard to sustain.
Hard because google is now competing with others for a reputation, which they already know they have a serious problem with.
Paul Graham tweet from last month “When I bought extra space for GMail, I got logged into a "google account" that I'm logged into even when I do searches. Searches are much slower logged in. And I'm not sure if I can log out without logging out of GMail
Solution: Use duckduckgo.com for search.” https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1248207051542745089?s=21
Jack tweet from last year “I love @DuckDuckGo. My default search engine for a while now. The app is even better!” https://twitter.com/jack/status/1199783221162053633?s=21
And this comment on hacker news that was doing astroturfing for Google two months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746
Internet has gone mainstream, globally. No one can live without an email or a social network!
Customers are now ready to pay for all the services they used to enjoy for free.
I wish App.net was still alive.