I first wrote that Google is the East India Company of the internet two years ago, while the antitrust trials were still arguments rather than rulings. The analogy has only sharpened since, and in the time since, two federal courts have said out loud what the metaphor implied. This is the expanded version.

The company that became a government

The English East India Company was not, at first, an empire. It was a trading company with a royal charter: a legal monopoly on commerce along certain routes. But a charter to trade, unchecked, became something else. The company raised a private army, minted its own currency, collected taxes, wrote the rules of the markets it operated in, and eventually governed territory. Commerce fused with sovereignty until you could no longer tell where the business ended and the government began.

That is the template. Not "a big company," but a private enterprise that quietly absorbs the functions of a government (infrastructure, rule-making, taxation, enforcement) while narrating the whole thing as ordinary commerce.

The trade routes are made of attention

A colonial company’s power began with control of the routes: whoever owns the passage owns the trade. Google owns the modern equivalent: the route to information itself. In its 2024 ruling, the court found Google held roughly 90% of general search on desktop and 95% on mobile. When one company is the road almost everyone takes to reach everything else, it does not merely compete in the market. It *is* the market’s entrance.

And like the extraction economies of empire, the resource being harvested is not gold or spice. It is human attention and web traffic, converted into advertising revenue. The interface looks neutral. Neutral is exactly how durable control is supposed to look.

Owning the ships, the ports, and the sea

The Company did not just sail the routes; it owned the ships and the ports. Google owns the browser most people sail in (Chrome), the mobile operating system (Android), the data centers and cables the traffic crosses, and the maps of the territory. Vertical control at that depth means the operator can shape what users see and experience without ever appearing to intervene: the self-preferencing that looks like a default.

Merchant and market regulator at once

Here is the sharpest parallel, and the one I lived through. The East India Company’s deepest conflict of interest was that it was both a merchant and the regulator of the market it traded in. In digital advertising, Google occupies the buy-side, the exchange, and the sell-side simultaneously: it represents the advertiser, runs the auction, and represents the publisher, then reports the results to both.

I did not learn this from a diagram. I built an independent ad-measurement business, and I met non-technical roadblocks from Google at almost every stage of growth: the kind of friction that has nothing to do with whether your product works and everything to do with who owns the market you are trying to measure. A company that both sells the goods and runs the scale has no incentive to let anyone else weigh them.

The reckoning arrived

Two years ago the argument was that the courts should examine what Google *is*, not what it claims to be. They did. In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in search. In April 2025, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google had illegally monopolized the ad-exchange and publisher ad-server markets. The metaphor became a finding of fact.

Empires rarely lose in the way you expect. Google lost in court and kept the empire: the search remedy stopped short of breaking up Chrome, and the machine kept running.

That, too, is faithful to the analogy. The East India Company was not dissolved because it lost a case. It ended when the Crown finally absorbed its functions, when the state decided that governing could not be left to a company. A narrow remedy that trims a contract here and shares some data there does not touch the deeper fact: the functions of a government have accreted inside a corporation.

The next charter is AI

The expansion I did not fully see two years ago is that the model does not stay still. The same enterprise that owns the route to information is now building the machine that *answers* instead of routing, trained on the open web’s content, then positioned to intercept the traffic before it ever reaches the publishers who produced it. That is not a new business. It is the oldest colonial move there is: enclose the commons, then charge for passage through it.

So the closing line from two years ago still holds, only with more evidence behind it. Study what these companies *are*, not what they claim to be, and watch where the tentacles are quietly preparing to leech next.