Google is *spending* a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will *make* a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing *zero* return from AI:
theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc…
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod…
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Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge
: PwC survey finds more than half of 4,500+ biz leaders see no revenue growth nor cost savingsDan Robinson (The Register)
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Cory Doctorow
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But maybe they've figured it out. In a recent edition of his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller pulls on several of the strings that Google's top execs have dangled recently:
thebignewsletter.com/p/will-go…
The first string: Google's going to spy on you a *lot* more, for the same reason Microsoft is spying on all of *its* users: because they want to supply their AI "agents" with your personal data:
youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-…
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- YouTube
www.youtube.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Google's announced that it's going to feed its AI your Gmail messages, as well as the whole deep surveillance dossier the company has assembled based on your use of all the company's products: Youtube, Maps, Photos, and, of course, Search:
twitter.com/Google/status/2011…
The second piece of news is that Apple has partnered with Google to supply Gemini to all iPhone users:
twitter.com/NewsFromGoogle/sta…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Apple already charges Google more than $20b/year not to enter the search market; now they're going to be charging Google billions not to stay out of the AI market, too. Meanwhile, Google will get to spy on Apple customers, just like they spy on their own users. Anyone who says that Apple is ideologically committed to your privacy because they're *real* capitalists is a sucker (or a cultist):
pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/you…
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Pluralistic: The Cult of Mac (12 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But the big revelation is how Google is going to make money with AI: they're going to sell AI-based "personalized pricing" to "partners," including "Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowe's, American Express, etc":
blog.google/products/ads-comme…
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New tech and tools for retailers to succeed in an agentic shopping era
Vidhya Srinivasan (Google)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Personalized pricing, of course, is the polite euphemism for *surveillance* pricing, which is when a company spies on you in order to figure out how much they can get away with charging you (or how little they can get away with paying you):
pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/pri…
It's a weird form of cod-Marxism, whose tenet is "From each according to their desperation; to each according to their vulnerability."
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Pluralistic: Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth (24 Jun 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Surveillance pricing advocates say that this is "efficient" because they can use surveillance data to offer you *discounts*, too - like, say you rock up to an airline ticket counter 45 minutes before takeoff and they can use surveillance data to know that you won't take their last empty seat for $200, but you would fly in it for $100, you could get that seat for cheap.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is, of course, nonsense. Airlines don't sell off cheap seats like bakeries discounting their day-olds - they jack up the price of a last-minute journey to farcical heights.
Google *also* claims that it will only use its surveillance pricing facility to offer discounts, and not to extract premiums. As Stoller points out, there's a well-developed playbook for making premiums *look* like discounts, which is easy to see in the health industry.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As Stoller says, the list price for an MRI is $8,000, but your insurer gets a $6000 "discount" and actually pays $1970, sticking you with a $30 co-pay. The $8000 is a fake number, and so is the $6000 - the only real price is the $30 you're paying.
The whole economy is filled with versions of this transparent ruse, from "department stores who routinely mark everything as 80% off" to pharmacy benefit managers:
pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shi…
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Pluralistic: What the fuck is a PBM? (23 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Google, meanwhile, is touting its new "universal commerce protocol" (UCP), a way for AI "agents" to retrieve prices and product descriptions and make purchases:
thesling.org/the-harm-to-consu…
Right now, a major hurdle to "agentic AI" is the complexity of navigating websites designed for humans. AI agents just aren't very reliable when it comes to figuring out which product is which, choosing the correct options, and putting it in a shopping cart, and then paying for it.
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The Harm to Consumers and Sellers from Universal Commerce Protocol, in Google’s Own Words - The Sling
Ted Tatos (The Sling)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Some of that is merely because websites have inconsistent "semantics" - literally things like the "buy" button being called something other than "buy button" in the HTML code. But there's a far more profound problem with agentic shopping, which is that companies *deliberately obfuscate their prices*.
This is how junk fees work, and why they're so destructive. Say you're a hotel providing your rate-card to an online travel website.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You know that travelers are going to search for hotels by city and amenities, and then sort the resulting list by price. If you hide your final price - by surprising the user with a bunch of junk fees at checkout, or, better yet, *after* they arrive and put their credit-card down at reception - you are going to be at the top of that list. Your hotel will seem like the cheapest, best option.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But of course, it's not. From Ticketmaster to car rentals, hotels to discount airlines, rental apartments to cellular plans, the *real* price is withheld until the very last instant, whereupon it shoots up to levels that are absolutely uncompetitive. But because these companies are able to engage in deceptive advertising, they *look* cheaper.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And of course, crooked offers drive out honest ones. The honest hotel that provides a *true* rate card, reflecting the all-in price, ends up at the bottom of the price-sorted list, rents no rooms, and goes out of business (or pivots to lying about its prices, too).
Online sellers *do not want* to expose their true prices to comparison shopping services. They benefit from lying to those services.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For *decades*, technologists dreamed of building a "semantic web" where everyone exposes true and accurate machine-readable manifests of their content to facilitate indexing, search and data-mining:
people.well.com/user/doctorow/…
This has failed. It's failed because lying is often more profitable than telling the truth, and because lying to computers is easier than lying to people, and because once a market is dominated by liars, everyone has to lie, or be pushed out of the market.
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Metacrap
people.well.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Of course, it would be *really cool* if everyone diligently marked up everything they put into the public sphere with accurate metadata. But there are lots of *really cool* things you could do if you could get everyone else to change how they do things and arrange their affairs to your convenience.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Imagine how great it would be if you could just get everyone to board an airplane from back to front, or to stand right and walk left on escalators, or to put on headphones when using their phones in public.
Wanting it badly is not enough. People have lots of reasons for doing things in suboptimal ways. Often the reason is that it's suboptimal for you, but just peachy for *them*.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Google says that it's going to get every website in the world to expose accurate rate cards to its chatbots to facilitate agentic AI. Google is also incapable of preventing "search engine optimization" companies from tricking it into showing bullshit at the top of the results for common queries:
pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/key…
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Pluralistic: Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands (03 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Google somehow thinks that the companies that spend millions of dollars trying to trick its crawler won't also spend millions of dollars trying to trick its chatbot - and they're providing the internet with a tool to inject lies straight into the chatbot's input hopper.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But UCP isn't just a way for companies to tell Google what their prices are. As Stoller points out, UCP will also sell merchants the ability to have Gemini *set* prices on their products, using Google's surveillance data, through "dynamic pricing" (another euphemism for "surveillance pricing").
This decade has seen the rise and rise of price "clearinghouses" - companies that offer price "consulting" to direct competitors in a market.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Nominally, this is just a case of two competitors shopping with the same supplier - like Procter and Gamble and Unilever buying their high-fructose corn-syrup from the same company.
But it's actually far more sinister. "Clearinghouses" like Realpage - a company that "advises" landlords on rental rates - allow all the major competitors in a market to collude to raise prices in lockstep.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A Realpage landlord that ignores the service's "advice" and gives a tenant a break on the rent will be excluded from Realpage's service. The rental markets that Realpage dominates have seen major increases in rental rates:
pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pri…
Google's "direct pricing" offering will allow all comers to have Google set their prices for them, based on Google's surveillance data. That includes direct competitors.
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Pluralistic: California bans algorithmic price-fixing (09 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As Stoller points out, both Nike and Reebok are Google advertisers. If they let Google price their sneakers, Google can raise prices across the market in lockstep.
Despite how much everyone hates this garbage, neoclassical economists and their apologists in the legal profession continue to insist that surveillance pricing is "efficient."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Stoller points to a law review article called "Antitrust After the Coming Wave," written by antitrust law prof and Google lawyer Daniel Crane:
nyulawreview.org/issues/volume…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Crane argues that AI will kill antitrust law because AI favors monopolies, and argues "that we should forget about promoting competition or costs, and instead enact a new Soviet-style regime, one in which the government would merely direct a monopolist’s 'AI to maximize social welfare and allocate the surplus created among different stakeholders of the firm.'"
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is a planned economy, but it's one in which the planning is done by monopolists who are - somehow, implausibly - so biddable that governments can delegate the power to decide what we can buy and sell, what we can afford and who can afford it, and rein them in if they get it wrong.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In 1890, Senator John Sherman was stumping for the Sherman Act, America's first antitrust law. On the Senate floor, he declared:
> If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.
pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-…
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We Should Not Endure a King – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Google thinks that it has finally found a profitable use for AI. It thinks that it will be the first company to *make* money on AI, by harnessing that AI to a market-rigging, price-gouging monopoly that turns Google's software into Sherman's "autocrat of trade."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's funny when you think of all those "AI safety" bros who claimed that AI's greatest danger was that it would become sentient and devour us. It turns out that the real "AI safety" risk is that AI will automate price gouging at scale, allowing Google to crown itself a "King over the necessaries of life":
pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-…
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Pluralistic: The real AI fight (27 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm coming to Colorado! Catch me in #Denver on Thu (Jan 22) at The Tattered Cover:
eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow…
And in #ColoradoSprings this weekend (Jan 23-25), where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine:
firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/
Then I'll be in #Ottawa on Jan 28 at Perfect Books:
instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/
And in #Toronto with Tim Wu on Jan 30:
nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doct…
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Cory Doctorow Live at Tattered Cover Colfax
EventbriteCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
Noah_Loverbear (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY-SA 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
File:Google Mountain View California - panoramio.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgNicole Parsons
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Remember who funds Google... #PrinceBonesaw
bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
Remember who funds AI...
nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technol…
Remember who aligns themselves with petrostate despots ...
washingtonpost.com/technology/…
cnbc.com/2025/05/13/photos-tec…
sfchronicle.com/tech/article/t…
reuters.com/investigations/mus…
bylinetimes.com/2026/01/07/tru…
france24.com/en/americas/20250…
al-monitor.com/originals/2024/…
sfchronicle.com/tech/article/p…
ibtimes.co.uk/critics-warn-tru…
desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch…
nytimes.com/2024/07/17/technol…
The Koch Network Is Pushing Trump to Accelerate AI, Documents Show - DeSmog
Geoff Dembicki (DeSmog)Phil
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Eka A.
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
"Imagine how great it would be if you could just get everyone to board an airplane from back to front,"
[Stands off to the side and watches the front wheels lift off the ground, and the tail hit the ground.]
Edit: They have special jack posts for some types of airliners that are very tipsy. Often they fill the front cargo holds first and let the first class passengers on first to be ballast for the bulk of the passengers. Rear cargo holds are filled last.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Joe Bayes
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sidestepping the actual point of your post, getting people to board airliners back-to-front is actually the LEAST efficient method.
Here's a super dorky and totally awesome explanation: youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0v…
- YouTube
www.youtube.comCory Doctorow reshared this.
Captain Superlative
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Can we please tattoo this onto every adult human? (Hm, wait a second…)
Nicole Parsons
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Agentic data harvesting on prices will also allow the kind of "corner the market" manipulation that skyrocketed dram memory prices.
techradar.com/pro/dram-prices-…
forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/20…
cnbc.com/2026/01/10/micron-ai-…
medium.com/@sahendra_/ram-cris…
tomshardware.com/pc-components…
A billionaire or hedge fund can buy year's worth of critical minerals or industrial inputs and trigger global economic warfare.
AI memory is sold out, causing an unprecedented surge in prices
Kif Leswing (CNBC)Tech Support
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Tech Support • • •Sensitive content
Nicole Parsons
in reply to Tech Support • • •Sensitive content
@TechSupport
Like PAC's, DAF's, and private equity hedge funds, obscuring the identity of who is effing you over is a critical component of "plausible deniability" for anti-democracy billionaires.
Funding a corporate fascist movement becomes "I just fund candidates I like" disingenuousness.
They have developed technology that has a digital dossier on nearly every human being on the planet, yet voters are not permitted to know their identity in turn.
Display Name
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
slop rose
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Reg has taken his sign down
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •This one is somewhat rational. When you practically own the online ad marketplace for search, you MUST bet heavily on anything that has a plausible road to replacing web search and the attendant ad revenues.
Reis and Trout described the overall strategy for the leader as "Play Defence," and one of the three ways to defend your turf is to "cover every bet." It's what leaders always do.
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Mittens XVX
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •That's brilliant.😭
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
oldguycrusty
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Graeme 🏴
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •UzOnChain
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Short term benefit is not the goal here. AI is the FUTURE.
Long term game
Alfred J. Kwak (audiokontor) ☕
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Man, I hope you have a chance to read Edward Zitron’s article on the topic of the giant black hole AI represents.
But everything is such a blur. You probably even mentioned it.
Wulfy—Speaker to the machines
in reply to GhostOnTheHalfShell • • •Zitron is a pompous, self important dickhead.
Wulfy—Speaker to the machines
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I remember the 1980s
Businesses saw zero return from infotech in offices...
...at the time, it was explained by the Red Queen dilemma.
Jennifer
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •𐁂𐀑𐀐𐁐
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Su_G
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Nicole Parsons
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
Google accepts money from #PrinceBonesaw to end any democracy acting on climate.
Ditto Koch Network.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
Petrostate despots & oil oligarchs are throwing billions at this AI white elephant for non-monetary reasons.
desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch…
forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/202…
Election meddling, price gouging, surveillance, wage suppression, frauds & scams, and world wars are the main purposes.
doctorow.medium.com/https-plur…
bloomberg.com/news/newsletters…
The Koch Network Is Pushing Trump to Accelerate AI, Documents Show - DeSmog
Geoff Dembicki (DeSmog)Aleksandr Koltsoff
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.