BIG CORPS DON'T CRY

In the beginning, it was just a blinking cursor waiting for a command, which today has become popularly known as a prompt. This was the result of almost a minute of waiting for the (often unsuccessful) attempt to access the Internet using the Banco Rural number. Then came Embratel, Brasil Online, and finally, Netscape Navigator, Alta Vista, Eudora Mail, ICQ, dedicated connections, internet service providers…

In this first moment, moments after the Big Bang of the Internet, we had UOL in Brazil and AOL in the USA as the major access providers, concentrating more than 85% of all traffic. Anyone trying to find content on Radar UOL discovered the pain points of the first search engines, like it and Alta Vista. Then came CADE (Brazil's antitrust agency) and the great star of the first wave: Yahoo!

By organizing the search in a way that people could use repeatedly, Yahoo showed that it was possible to find order in chaos. The internet was growing at a rate of thousands of pages per day, and Yahoo was creating a trail of breadcrumbs for us to find each other.

Everything seemed calm and under control, until a company with an even stranger name (for us Brazilians, Yahoo was initially the name of a band with Robertinho do Recife and a translated hit by Def Leppard): Google.

As simple as AltaVista (just a text window and two buttons, Search and I'm Feeling Lucky), but more powerful than Yahoo and its countless categories at the time. Suddenly, we discovered that Yahoo organized the visible chaos, while Google organized even what we didn't know existed.

Behind the insane search algorithm was an even better mechanism for analyzing relevance, consistency, and reputation that changed the internet as we knew it. That's where sponsored links and everything we know today came from. Well, until yesterday…

One of Google's greatest assets over time has been staying active and ahead. Yahoo practically died, Bing was never relevant, and 90% of internet access became controlled by a single company with multiple tentacles: Ads, Analytics, AdSense, YouTube, Earth, Maps, Gmail, Cloud, Android, Firebase, etc. Not even social networks, which Google created and abandoned (not without trying to return a few times), managed to drastically impact the position of the giant that was never asleep.

Then came the AI. And Open.ai, with ChatGPT. Others came along too, but ChatGPR arrived with more appetite and support. Then Google, which was already in the race, accelerated its pace and entered with Gemini and its versions and developments. ChatGPT launches a new version, Google comes with 3 new features. So fast that it was chosen by Apple, the most cautious player in this new world.

Google's pillars of success are solid and not easy to attack: there are many fronts, all with some free offering, which helps establish the user base. Maps and Earth, which are expensive to develop and maintain, are free, as is Analytics (does anyone remember WebTrends?), the same goes for YouTube, Android, Gmail. Buying the market and then extracting progressive revenue is a Google skill.

I know that AI is different. AI still costs more than it charges, tokens are subsidized, and there is a funnel that is narrowing, which is why so many people talk about the bubble bursting. The geometric progression of AI. This leads to exponential growth in storage. In this scenario, what could be a weakness for Google becomes a strength: it already makes money from this ecosystem and can subsidize new technologies without losing money in the end.

Google's dominance is so large and solid that it could even rest easy, but that's not what it's doing. Tirelessly, it only grows. I conducted a study with the help of its competitor ChatGPT and I have some numbers to show:

More than 90% of the world's internet traffic passes through Google (considering where it is present). In Brazil, it exceeds 97%.

The revenue of most segments where Google operates has only grown since 2015, even after the massive introduction of AI. Only the Google Network has not grown.

Google has transformed some new segments, such as Cloud, into machines for making ever-increasing money. And there are new developments all the time.

So, everything is under control, right? No. All the data in the study below ends in 2025, the first year of significant participation of AI in the game. 2026 is a new battlefield, and we will have many rounds in the coming years.

It would be very arrogant or presumptuous to think that Google's power might diminish in the coming years. I recently questioned Apple, and the recent changes in leadership and products show that if I knew anything, they certainly already knew and had already resolved it before I even thought about writing the article. The same is true now: it's possible that Google's power will indeed be dominant because AI is still in its infancy; it has barely begun to crawl. So, the question is not if there will be changes, but what changes and when.

One thing is certain: just like Yahoo, Netscape seemed unbeatable, Blackberry was ubiquitous, Nokia was innovative, and AOL dominated the market. In the digital world, there are no guaranteed places, and what you are doing right now is more important than anything you have ever done before.