> The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a European Union (EU) law that took effect on March 6, 2024. As a result of Article 5(2) of the DMA, in the EU, Google offers you the choice to link certain Google services.
> Those Google services include:
Search
YouTube
Ad services
Google Play
Chrome
Google Shopping
Google Maps
> You can choose to link all these services, choose to have none of these services linked, or choose which of these individual services you want to link.
Google services that are linked by default
The following services are linked by default for users in the European Economic Area (excluding Germany) and can’t be unlinked:
You have so much "freedom from" in a world with strong, effective, well-designed regulation. It's unreal. How amazing is it to be able to buy pretty much any food product and eat it without wondering (almost ever in your life!) if it's been tampered with. How amazing is it to have your bank deposits insured up to $200,000. How amazing is it to be able to fly safely anywhere in the world and know it'll be totally perfectly fine with 99.99999% probability. I love regulation.
I've found good alternatives for pretty much everything: search, mail, drive... But I remain pretty addicted to youtube, and haven't found a good alternative to that. Also, my (French) employer uses gmail for mails, calendars and meetings. So I couldn't really escape Google if I wanted to...
> The actual risk that the author does not even broach upon for investors... the thing that will actually torpedo this massive investment are the open source open weight chinese models.
The monopoly will likely then shift from the model to the compute, i.e. who has the GPUs to serve inference at scale from the open weight models. The cloud compute giants have basically bought everything that Nvidia, Broadcom etc. have to offer.
Currently, the inference margins are shared between the cloud giants and OpenAI/Anthropic. But if training great models becomes easier for some reason, the cloud giants benefit. Then they'll have used the OpenAI/Anthropic revenue and spending commitments to grow their cloud business, and then can serve other models and make even more money.
Given that OpenAI and Anthropic are private, I don't think there is any risk to retail investors in this scenario.
AI not turning out to be so useful, and OpenAI/Anthropic not being able to pay their bills is the correct failure scenario i think, as identified by the author.
The hyperscalers already had the compute monopoly. They just spent a bunch of money on even more compute. Compute is OK because it's reasonably general purpose to reallocate for what comes after chatbots (e.g. consumer robotics which is reasonably likely to take off in the next 4 years).
They will change when a significant portion of booking are happening via agents, and they would be missing out if they didn't change.
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