It's a question of what kind of business Google is/wants-to-be.

The one it claimed to be, in the past, with a broader holistic mission, claiming to attract the world's brightest to make information accessible? Using its hoard of cash to do a bunch of neat stuff and hire really smart people do it?

Or is it what we always suspected all along, a cynical money printing machine that turns ad impressions into shareholder value and nothing else?

It's always been a mix of both. Those of us who worked there certainly saw in the inside the gradual transition of the internal discourse from "justifying B to support A" to "who cares about A."

They can do whatever they want, they're a private business. But they still trade on a certain reputation, and have the advantage of a quasi-monopoly status in many things.

I would hope that advancing them any kind of good will as any kind of "special" company (which our profession tended to do, before) and muting criticisms is just over now.

They built their money printing machine in part by swallowing competition and exterminating it.