Oh My God, (Google) Admit It

Google's response to the DOJ acknowledges that Big Tech's one-click strategies continue to mess with our brains in order to create monopolies

If you’ve watched Netflix’s latest viral documentary, Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, you’ll understand the fundamental reasons companies like Amazon employ UI/UX designers, engineers, and psychologists at higher-than-average salaries to help Amazon build the perfect one-button solution. It’s deviously deceptive, designed to cut right through the secondary pause that occurs during a typical checkout process. Sifting through your wallet to get a credit card, inputting the details, reviewing the order, and hitting “buy” allows for more hesitancy. Better for our credit scores, worse for companies with lofty trillion dollar valuation ambitions. 

The one hyphenated word that launched a thousand ships: one-click. 

Not all one-click strategies revolve around retail. Some impact a person’s ability to choose how they use the small lifeline nestled safely in the pocket of their pants. Take, for example, this reaction from Google to the Department of Justice’s request for Google to lose ownership of its Chrome business. “[The] DOJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought,” the response reads. “And the design of those choice screens would have to be approved by the Technical Screens committee. And that’s just a small part of it.” 

Jokes flew around Bluesky about the harsh new world Google teams would find themselves in with having to install a whole other button, but those jokes miss the more obvious admission of psychological ownership that companies like Google have spent billions of dollars on perfecting. One-click strategies created a consequence of convenience, of quantity over quality, of expected ease in every part of our lives. Applying for a job? There’s an easy one-click solution for that. Signing up for a class? There’s an easy one-click solution for that. Purchasing a sweater you don’t need? There’s an easy one-click solution for that. 

Google’s teams admitting that not having access to a one-click or a one-button solution would directly impact their business is an admission that we should evaluate with much more rigor. One-click solutions aren’t just an easier way to sway customers into ordering more shit or spending more time on a platform or engaging with more strangers. It’s a solution that changes our approach to our relationship with the companies deploying these cognitive strategies, and the real goldmine at the other end of the rainbow: data. 

Party like it’s 1999

Like most diabolical realities of technological designs that seemed rather innocent at first, Amazon’s patent in 1999 for a one-click feature soon came to rule all of tech by the time the patent expired in 2017. The business advantages of the design were immediate to everyone inside and outside of Amazon. 

Barnes and Noble was sued by Amazon for infringing on the patent (can’t blame B&N for trying to compete with Amazon as the eCommerce giant started eating into its revenue shares). Apple licensed the technology for its own iTunes and App Store initiatives. Then it extended beyond retail. Google employed one-click solutions to make organization easier inside Gmail. As it pertains to this essay, Google uses one-click oriented solutions to bridge its product suites. Gmail accounts are logged into Chrome, which are tied directly to Google Pay credit card storage on Android devices. You can see the DOJ’s point — and you can see why adding even one more step may break Google’s chain of user reliance. Think of Google like a string of Christmas tree lights. One going out may not take down the whole set, but it’s certainly noteable to anyone looking at the display. 

One-click strategies became integral to the tech industry, but what about the button makes it so sinister? R. Polk Wagner, a parent lawyer and professor at UPenn, summed up Amazon’s one-click innovation rather nicely: “Most importantly, it allowed Amazon to show customers that there was a good reason to give them their data and the permission to charge them on an incremental basis.” 

Everything with companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple always comes back to data. That’s the real goldmine. But in order to get customers to willingly hand over their data — and I mean important data, like credit card information, driver license details, or even their facial recognition — they need to be shown that the value of that tradeoff is more significant than the potential consequences. South Park nailed it all those years ago with its “Terms and Conditions” meets The Human Centipede episode. It’s not that no one cares about their data or privacy, but human beings are designed to seek out ease and comfort over labor. Our history of toolmaking proves that mentality, from the beginning of humanity with arrowheads to kill prey easier through the Industrial Revolution with steam trains and smaller printing presses, all the way through your ability to purchase that coffee carafe from Amazon in time for Thanksgiving in order to better transport your mulled apple cider to your friend’s apartment across town. Okay, that last one is specifically for me but I digress. 

Technology, and especially handheld technology connecting us to any shop or any website to fulfill any need on the go, has removed the cost equation from the effort-reward scale. That ratio looks like this: 

When your brain is used to chasing dopamine hits at low effort, high reward consistency, of course you’re more likely to give what you need whenever it’s asked. Unsurprisingly, the low effort needed on behalf of customers or users also creates high reward for companies. A study from Cornell University in 2023 found that one-click additions to shopping portals increased a customer’s spending average by nearly 30% compared to previous purchasing levels. Not bad for Amazon, a company that has grown its valuation by more than 11,000% over the last 20 years. How much of that is purely attributable to one-click instead of the rise in overall online shopping as we shift to doing more day-to-day things online? We can’t say for certain, but that same report found that retailers without one-click activated saw an estimated 70% of shoppers not complete their purchase in large part because the process of checking out was either too complicated or too tedious. 

Too tedious! Imagine if they had to go to the actual store still! Just as unsurprising are the results those Cornell University researchers found around engagement. Sites with one-click shopping tools saw that customers visited an average of more than 7% more than before signup in the first 15 months of initially joining, looked at roughly 10% more pages on that site (such as Amazon), and spent nearly 8% more time on the site with each visit. The researchers’ takeaway is that if companies want to engage and retain more customers, they must make it as easy as customers have come to expect. I reiterate — not surprising. 

But what if we didn’t look at it through the lens of pro-company? What if we looked at it through the lens of pro-human? This is where Google (as well as Meta) get heavily more involved. The result might not be reflected in your bank account, but it’s certainly wormed its way inside your every action and expected reaction, and you don’t even think about it. Because it works. 

The Google of it All 

Google’s version of one-click solutions takes the form in two distinct, but important ways: preemptively built one-step solutions to wider access (Chrome on Android, Gmail into Chrome, Google Pay) and one-click discovery algorithms (YouTube, Google Search). These may not seem exactly one-to-one in comparison to one-click tools, but the behavioral training is the same. One-click solutions, when integrated into powerful algorithmic recommendation engines that remove options deemed “irrelevant” eliminate choice. 

That’s precisely what Google seems to be getting at in its response. I really like the way that Cory Doctorow put it back in August when he wrote about Google potentially having to include new choice screens when the DOJ’s initial argument came down. 

“Defaults matter. That’s a huge part of Judge Mehta’s finding in the Google case, where the court saw evidence from Google’s own internal research suggesting that people rarely change defaults, meaning that whatever the gadget does out of the box it will likely do forever,” Doctorow wrote. “This puts a lie to Google’s longstanding defense of its monopoly power: ‘choice is just a click away.’ Sure, it’s just a click away — a click, you’re pretty sure no one is ever going to make.” 

Google knows that people want easy, one-click solutions. Amazon knows that customers spend more with one-click shopping options. Even our at-home entertainment options, from TikTok to Netflix, rely on the idea that if you use them as a default option, you are one-click (or tap) away from what you’re looking for. It has ruined an entire generation of consumers and made true monopolies out of the companies that own both ends of the one-click journey.  

Mozilla published an interesting report in 2023 demonstrating that people liked the presentation of choice screens when setting up devices, which they tracked by simulating the experience across 12,000 trial participants in Europe where rules and restrictions on Big Tech companies are much more progressive. These results make sense. A personal device implies total personal ownership. Being able to choose what browser to use reiterates that it’s your device, and you may be happier with the choices you make. Now, as Doctorow points out in his write up that references the report, we don’t get any insight into whether people still liked those choices months later. We also know that people didn’t want to be prompted to choose a browser upon opening a default browser upon first use.

At that point, when the choice is made for you, people just want to use the damn thing. They want to click or tap something once and then go. Therefore, to Google’s point, people may be frustrated by having a second choice screen presented — but to the DOJ’s point, an expectation of less choice, and immediate results that helps companies like Google even if consumers don’t feel like they’re being taken advantage of (again, remember, it all comes back to data) is exactly the problem. Google is the focus of the DOJ’s inquiry, but it’s a problem contributed to and demonstrated by all of FAANG. 

I’ve reread that sentence in Google’s response a lot. “[The] DOJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought…and that’s just a small part of it.” Small. Miniscule. Something that Google’s team first notes as a big enough problem that it’s worthwhile to throw into a public response, but small enough that consumers shouldn’t think too much about the advantages that a default browser position or designs intended to work in Google’s favor provide to a company worth $2.08 trillion. 

And that’s why I keep coming back to the same I Think You Should Leave line from one of the show’s earliest sketches: “Oh my god, they admit it!” There it is. Point blank. All the data and user behavior tells us again and again that people are willing to trade privacy for a fair value, which is often defined by the reward of content or ease in experience. People believe they want choice, but they’re also fine with pre-installed options if it means they get to said reward faster. Data they give up to make those “choices” they’re presented with every day, from the minute they wake up and Google has suggested emails to read to the minute they go to bed and Amazon reminds them something they clicked on a week ago is 25% off and one-click away from being theirs, is utterly crucial to the future of companies like Google. 

So it’s not a small example. It’s the example Google’s team hid in plain sight. I’d almost be impressed with the brash arrogance of it all if I wasn’t so concerned that none of this will matter to anyone. If the banks were too big to fail, what does that spell for Google and Amazon?