Let’s be honest about why most of us buy things on Amazon. It is rarely because we admire the design, and it is almost certainly not because we enjoy sifting through forty identical listings for USB cables manufactured by companies named XILONGTECH.

We use Amazon because the rest of the web makes buying a pair of socks feel like applying for a mortgage.

To purchase a woollen jumper from a lovely independent shop in Norwich, you must surrender your postcode, invent a twelve-character password with a punctuation mark, decline a marketing newsletter three times, and worst of all, physically walk into the hallway to retrieve a credit card from a coat pocket. Halfway through this administrative ordeal, perfectly sane people give up, open Amazon, and buy a jumper they like slightly less, purely because they can do it with a thumb-twitch while lying horizontally. Amazon’s true monopoly was never logistics or price. It was the total eradication of friction. They weaponised human sloth.

Which brings us to Google’s latest announcement: the Universal Cart. By plugging Gemini into Search, Google is attempting to turn the entire, fragmented internet into a single checkout counter. You pick an artisanal lamp from a tiny Shopify store, a kettle from an electronics retailer, and a book from a boutique publisher, and Google will bundle the lot into one transaction.

Silicon Valley will describe this as a breakthrough in multi-agent orchestration. A behavioural psychologist would describe it as an attempt to strip Amazon of its only real psychological moat. If purchasing from three independent merchants becomes as effortless as buying paper towels on Prime, Amazon's walled garden suddenly stops looking like a sanctuary and starts looking like a giant warehouse.

The tech commentariat is already wringing its hands over the data implications: Gemini as your personal shopper... brilliant convenience or privacy nightmare?

It's a respectable question, but it completely misjudges how human beings actually behave. Privacy is an abstract moral preference; laziness is a law of physics. When forced to choose between safeguarding personal telemetry and avoiding thirty seconds of typing a billing address, sloth wins by a landslide.

Google have handed the open web an 'Order Now' button, and that should keep Bezos awake at night.