If Google went down...literally overnight, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small businesses that rely on AdSense to pay their bills would be in serious hot water.
Not to mention those companies that rely on Adwords to drive traffic through their doors (both online and offline).
I can almost assure you that the markets would get very jittery and irrationality would likely spread to all sorts of other industries.
It is easy to take these things for granted.
Amazon is the same. There are thousands of mini-retailers that earn a living on Amazon. Amazon might even be more so - the equivalent of a Walmart going down....but almost worst.
At it's extremes, the beauties of capitalism lead to large firms that build ecosystems to entrench their positions - whose failure would be significant and potentially systemically dangerous. It is the nature of capitalism - it actually is very healthy for the system. Over time they eventually fade out and other large companies come and take it's place - e.g. the newspaper industry, telecom, etc. So you can't really escape it.
Not to mention those companies that rely on Adwords to drive traffic through their doors (both online and offline).
I can almost assure you that the markets would get very jittery and irrationality would likely spread to all sorts of other industries.
It is easy to take these things for granted.
Amazon is the same. There are thousands of mini-retailers that earn a living on Amazon. Amazon might even be more so - the equivalent of a Walmart going down....but almost worst.
At it's extremes, the beauties of capitalism lead to large firms that build ecosystems to entrench their positions - whose failure would be significant and potentially systemically dangerous. It is the nature of capitalism - it actually is very healthy for the system. Over time they eventually fade out and other large companies come and take it's place - e.g. the newspaper industry, telecom, etc. So you can't really escape it.