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That's the subtext missing from the article. It seems actually rather obvious that a big company built on owning the mechanism of information retrieval and priority organization of that information would see a decentralized, or at least more open, means of organization that takes the reigns away from the search engines would see this as an existential threat.

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Absolutely. Not that any organization should really default to getting the benefit of the doubt, but an executive from Google? Anything they do is about increasing company profits, and if there are any benefits to anybody else it is purely coincidental.

This is the first thing I thought of too. Improving organization of data would lower the barrier of entry for competitors and so be a threat to Google. Malicious and incompetent actors have to be dealt with anyway so he inserts a sneaky little non-sequitur there by implying that not having this metadata would somehow avoid that problem.

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