Indeed. Google never really had to go this "ultra-targeted ads" approach. Perhaps it's the difference between Google making $30 billion in profit a year and "only" $10 billion in profit a year, and the difference between them mainly sticking to the search business and them paying for all of these failed projects like the $12 billion Motorola acquisition, Boston Dynamics, (even Nest, I'd say), and so on.

But as a company it never really needed to do those. Heck, Google doesn't even need to be in the self-driving business.

I think it's a failure of competition and anti-trust laws that companies are allowed to grow this big to get their fingers into all the pies out there. The only reason they even go into all of these different industries is because they've made so much money they don't know what to do with it.

Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with this rampant increase in monopolies and we'll have to take some drastic measures to do it. We may even have to break-up companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, Comcast, Disney, Goldman Sachs, and others, because they were never supposed to turn into such large conglomerates. The fact that they did was a failure of competition laws to stop them from growing this big in the first place.

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are now allowed to spy on you, then buy media and ad companies, and then use that data to manipulate you for political purposes so you end-up voting for the candidates that will help them further consolidate their power. We should have put a stop to that along the way.