It's not even the beginning of an end game. We're in midgame, at most. 10 years ago Ars Techinca published the evergreen article called "Owning the stack: The

It's not even the beginning of an end game. We're in midgame, at most. 10 years ago Ars Techinca published the evergreen article called "Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack-the-legal-war-for-control-of-the-smartphone-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack... At the time it explained, with great accuracy and insight, all that was happening in smartphones: all the visible and invisible wars and battles to control everything, from hardware to apps, in order to control ... well ... everything. It didn't occur to me then, but it also explains everything that's happening on the web. It's the same damn war. Alphabet aka Google derive 80% of their revenue from online ads. For all intents and purposes it has no other source of income. However, it still own just a very thin slice of the stack that brings in money. So, it does all it can to take control of as much of the stack as possible: - AMP, subsume websites and ad distribution channels. - Chrome, subsume web standards and replace them with "if it works in Chrome, it's a standard" (web.dev serves as a propaganda machine for this, as well) - Google Services, subsume as much of digital life as possible under a single controlling entity (AOSP is a lifeless husk, and will remain so) and so on. Google is very intentional