The only thing we have to fear is the mindset of the five-year planner

It was going to happen.  

One of the challenges for a Classical Liberal, when responding to any more or less self-evidently bad thing, is that we believe in complex, chaotic, power-law influenced evolving systems.  We can understand systems reasonably well but we know it is difficult to predict outcomes from the interactions of multiple complex systems.  Predicting the real national GDP per capita a year from now is hard enough.  Predicting stock market values or real national GDP per capita distributions five years from now is virtually impossible given any defined level of useful accuracy.

We believe in human rights and liberties, we believe in property and markets, and we know these are complex evolving systems.

So when someone complains about a polluted environment or a social inequity or a dominant and unassailable market position, it is impossible for us to forecast when the problem will be solved or how it will be solved.

All we can know with reasonable confidence is that it will be resolved.

At the beginning of my consulting career, the Bell Telephone system has just been broken up by court order.  There was much debate among politicians, regulators and economists as to whether that was a sensible or destructive policy.  And it was a consequential one.  The government still had an open case regarding whether to break up IBM and its market dominant position.  

Very soon, Moore's Law and evolving new technologies unseated dominant IBM rather than public policy.

In fifteen years, the same issue and concerns arose around Google.  They were too big, too dominant.  Partisans on the left and right became concerned about their capacity to influence policy through their money and their ability to control public speech by shaping their search results.

As a market based Classical Liberal, the response is obvious.  Wait a while and they will no longer be dominant.  

The demand from authoritarians (five-year planners) was for a roadmap for how Google would no longer be dominant.  And as a Classical Liberal I could not answer that.  We know that complex systems can be influenced at the margin but cannot be meaningfully predicted.  I could not say, back 10-15 years ago when I first began having these conversations, what might be the technology, corporate error, regulatory intervention, or international competition which might erode Google's lucrative position.  All I could argue was that all economic theory and historical evidence supports that it is virtually impossible to sustain a lucrative monopoly much less a dominant position.  

I could then predict that AI would be the mechanism by which their lucrative stranglehold would be threatened, but here we are.

All thoughts arising from today's article in the New York Times, Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals by Nico Grant.  

Indeed, I do not know yet that AI will bring Google down.  It could but they are also a research rich and possibly desperate enterprise probably beginning to take the bet-the-farm kind of decisions that locked them into their current lucrative position.  They may come through this as a mere matter of turbulence.

But I remain confident that their fortunes have a half-life and no entrenched benefit, whether a monopoly, a patent, or a seemingly unassailable position can last for a long period of time.  I also am confident that the half life of any social or commercial trend is shorter than it used to be.  The J-curve is steepening and the average duration between the introduction of new things and market saturation is shorter than ever, probably down around a decade.  

From IMD:

According to a McKinsey study, the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it's about 16 years. McKinsey believes that by 2027, 75% of the companies currently in the S&P 500 index will have disappeared.

The answer is that complex systems are difficult to predict but they are inexorable.  Now or eventually someone will displace Google.  Everyone will be richer and better benefitted.  And the biggest challenge to this positive future, from the informed perspective of a Classical Liberal, is the ineffective intrusive ham-fisted efforts by those in government who are enamored with the mindset of the five-year planner.