On the contrary. Google requires the access to the open web, because its advertising and its search engine need that access, as I will show below. Reader was n

On the contrary. Google requires the access to the open web, because its advertising and its search engine need that access, as I will show below. Reader was not known to most people, but to many technical folks. Among them are many bloggers. Shutting down Reader certainly removed one big plus of the open blogging world. Thereby people have less arguments to blog openly. How is that a problem for Google? If people choose to move over to closed platforms, that content becomes inacessible to both Google's crawler, and to Google ads on blogs. Thus, by turning off Reader, Google actually hurts itself not only directly, but indirectly by treating the openness of the web less favorably.