"...In 2020, the company made $147 billion in revenue off ads alone, which is roughly 80 percent of its total revenue. Most of the tech company’s products—Maps, Gmail—are Trojan horses for a gargantuan personalized-advertising business, and Search is the one that started it all. It is the modern template for what the technology critic Shoshana Zuboff termed “surveillance capitalism.”..."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/
@gaba I can't help but get the feeling that Google is stuck in a tricky situation because they're so dependent on ad revenue so even if they wanted to moving away from such a model their shareholders will never tolerate a slight dip in profits or slower growth. I also wonder how much of their Cloud computing aspirations are underwritten by the revenue that ads bring in to cover the cost of building out datacenters around the world.