There are at least two trends that are driving the company's gains: its utter dominance as the discovery mechanism for information online and the inexorable shift to computers—particularly the ones in our pockets and purses—away from print and television.

The singular corporate innovation of the 21st century has been the creation of discovery platforms that, rather than own their own products, instead control their customers’ discovery of those products. Just as Facebook does not own its content, and Uber does not own its cars, Google does not own the websites it surfaces in the vast majority of search results.

These discovery firms thrive in marketplaces of abundance. In early 1996, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing the web page-ranking technology that became Google, there were about 100,000 websites in the world, according to Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators. Yahoo! and AltaVista rejected Page and Brin when they tried to commercialize their work, because, well, search just wasn’t an important functionality in the mid-1990s. Page and Brin’s little science project would only become truly lucrative if the internet somehow became a labyrinthine enormity—perhaps 1 million web pages! or 10 million!—so that the search engine itself would become the default homepage of the internet.

The bigger the web grows, the more valuable Google becomes. And, with more than 1 billion websites in the world and more than 4 billion people with regular access to the internet, finding your needle in that haystack is the fundamental problem of internet use. As the tech writer Ben Thompson wrote, “Google is the king of aggregators because, when information shifted from scarcity to abundance, discovery became the point of leverage, and Google was better at discovery than anyone.”

Second, the migration of attention from print and television to the internet—both desktop and mobile—has created a advertising duopoly for Google and Facebook. As these slides from the last Kleiner Perkins internet presentation show clearly, mobile is the future of media attention, and Facebook and Google’s share of digital ad revenue is growing faster than the rest of the industry combined.

Meeker / Kleiner Perkins

Meeker / Kleiner Perkins

Those graphs are for U.S. revenue alone, but the global picture isn’t much more balanced. (In fact, Google’s Asian revenue is growing faster than its North American markets.) According to eMarketer data emailed to me, Facebook’s worldwide digital ad revenue is larger than Alibaba, Baidu, Twitter, Amazon, and Snap, combined. And Google? Its global ad business is bigger than all those companies—plus Facebook. The upshot is that Google is, conservatively, eating at least 30 cents of every marginal ad dollar that shifts online.

When a company becomes this dominant, its gravest threat is political, not economic. Indeed, the company recently paid a $2.7 billion fine to the European Commission for its treatment of shopping websites in search results. Antitrust experts in the U.S. may similarly punish Google for anticompetitive practices. As a behemoth, Google may eventually attract unwanted attention from government regulators. As a pure business, however, Google appears unstoppable.