[ex3xu]

Google in 1998: Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives from the original paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [0]

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make by adding a monopoly on digital search advertising to leverage their monopoly on digital search. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors.

Google in 2008: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly on digital search advertising and doubles down on surveillance capitalism.

Google in 2011: Buys out AdMeld, changes AdX contracts to be even more anticompetitive to maintain monopoly on digital search advertising.

Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU. Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1]

Google in 2023: Sued again.

[0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370