"If I were to leave Google and found a web business, I would spend very minimal time on SEO, despite knowing (in broad strokes) how the ranking algorithm operat

"If I were to leave Google and found a web business, I would spend very minimal time on SEO, despite knowing (in broad strokes) how the ranking algorithm operates and having a huge leg up on the competition." This is a critical point and needs to be underscored. Chasing SEO from a technical perspective is a fool's game. I think SEO can inform your choice of person-to-person marketing activities, but can never take the place of them. I agree with everything you've said, but I would add one thing: as the complexity of Google's algorithm increases, there's more and more collateral damage. So, for instance, I had a micro-site I made several years ago. Back then the thing to do was to make sure you tweaked your on-page content so that the search engines better understood it. Flash forward to today. Now if you "over-tweak" (who knows what that means) you get penalized. The same goes for a dozen other topics. They used to either be best practices or work well. Now they're either considered bad practices and you get punished for them. It's completely unrealistic to expect that I am going to have time to go back and re-honk around with stuff because in the great search engine wars the rules change every year. As far as the protocol thing goes, who knows? I think it's important to realize that we all have the power to do whatever we want on top of TCP-IP. Let a thousand new ideas bloom. See if any of them gain traction.