I'd add that we've seen how the leadership/reputation of different AI leaders, and with 2 decades of history with Larry and Sergey, they seem to come up on top as the most respectable.
Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?
I could be missing something, but for the most part they seem to just get down to building and pushing technology/science forward and avoid drama rather than welcome it.
> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?
Plenty of times. Perhaps the worse is pushing Manifest v3 with no support for real ad blockers in Chrome. Not to mention no support for ad blockers in Chrome mobile.
Also, their stealing of newspaper content.
Their new push for AI summaries instead of actual search in their search product, stealing even more clicks from sites that actually produce information.
YouTube pushing Shorts to everyone, and now the weird text posts that you can't hide.
In general their gigantic push for ads everywhere all of the time.
Google, with the help of Facebook, destroyed the independent online publishing business. They made it impossible to maintain an honest publication and tunneled users to low quality websites until there's not much left of respect.
Ehh, the internet was worse before Google. Google actually became popular for having a nice blank page with only the search bar. Even the ads they had later were much cleaner compared to yahoo, altavista, lycos, aol and other firms of that time.
Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded? I could be missing something, but for the most part they seem to just get down to building and pushing technology/science forward and avoid drama rather than welcome it.