Alphabet Says Other Bets Losses Widened as Waymo Expands

The headline treats Waymo's $2 billion quarterly loss as a story about whether Alphabet can afford its moonshots. That is the wrong question. Alphabet can afford anything. The right question is who gets to decide what these machines do to our cities, and so far the answer is nobody but Alphabet.

Start with the money. Other Bets lost $2.05 billion in one quarter, and Alphabet shrugged. The company is guiding to $195 billion to $205 billion in capital spending this year, mostly for AI. Against that, Waymo's burn is pocket change. It is pocket change because Google's search business still throws off monopoly profits, the same monopoly a federal judge found illegal last year before declining to break it up. Waymo's expansion is a gift from a market power the government has already identified and then flinched at remedying.

That matters because a company that can lose billions indefinitely does not play by the rules of the businesses it displaces. It can price below cost, absorb years of losses, and wait for the taxi companies, the small fleets and the human drivers to disappear. Call it innovation if you like. It is also the oldest play in the monopolist's book, funded by a cash machine the public never agreed to hand over.

Now the part my side is uncomfortable with. The technology appears to work. Waymo's own data, and some independent analyses of it, show far fewer injury crashes than human drivers. Roughly 40,000 Americans die on the roads every year. A left that sneers at a machine that might save thousands of lives is not defending anyone. It is defending nostalgia.

But note the phrase "Waymo's own data." Three hundred million driverless miles is an impressive number, supplied by the company selling the miles. We are taking the word of a corporation on the central public-safety question of a technology it is rolling out across public roads. We would never accept that from a drugmaker or an airline.

And those roads, curbs and airports are public. San Francisco, Phoenix and Las Vegas had to grant access to their airports. Cities control curb space, permitting and enforcement. Yet Democratic officials have mostly behaved like supplicants, competing to be the next launch city and asking for little in return. Where are the data-sharing requirements, the congestion fees, the accessibility mandates, the local-hire commitments, the transit integration? California's governor vetoed bills that would have required human operators in autonomous trucks. Whatever one thinks of those bills, the party of workers has not offered a serious alternative for the people who will actually lose their jobs.

Those people are not abstractions. Hundreds of thousands of Americans drive for a living in taxis, ride-hail and car services, and ride-hail drivers already work without benefits or bargaining power. They were told the gig economy was freedom. Now they are being told they are a transitional cost. Fifteen cities, with Canada, Singapore, Spain and Germany next, is not a pilot program. It is the opening of a new industry, and the question of who owns it is being settled right now, mostly by default.

The answer is not to ban the cars. It is to treat them as what they are: private operators profiting from public infrastructure. Require independent safety auditing with public data. Make cities charge real money for curb and airport access, and put it into transit. Fund transition support and wage insurance for drivers before the layoffs, not after. And finish the antitrust job so that Alphabet's search profits cannot subsidize a land grab on our streets.

Safer roads and a fair economy are not opposing goals. But they will not arrive by themselves, and they will not arrive from a company whose only obligation is to its shareholders. If we wait for Waymo to volunteer them, we will get exactly the deal that every earlier generation of platform monopolists gave us.