The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on.
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
I think you're wrong, and you're underestimating the transformational impact of Ad-Words.
Free internet existed before paid internet, true, but mostly because people did things for other motives (like fun). Altavista was a tech demo for DEC. Good information was found on personal web pages, most often on .edu sites.
Banner ads existed, but they were confined to the sketchy corners of the Internet. Thing today's spam selling viagra. Anyone credible didn't want to be associated with them.
What Google figured out was:
1) Design. Discrete ad-words didn't make them look sketchy. This discovery came up by accident, but that's a longer story.
2) Targeting. Search terms let them know what to ads to show.
I can't overstate the impact of #2. Profits went up many-fold over prior ad models. This was Google's great -- and ultra-secret -- discovery. For many years, they were making $$$, while cultivating a public image of (probably) bleeding $$$ or (at best) making $. People were doing math on how much revenue Google was getting based on traditional web advertising models, while Google knew precisely what you were shopping for.
By the time people found out how much money Google's ad model was making, they had market lock-in.
commercial TV and radio stations were a very well established thing already by the 90s, the audience paid for their receiver and in exchange for the ads got to see movies and serialized shows.
similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads
... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting
free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage
...
and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions
...
the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser
these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation
(of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!