> Personally, the sooner ad companies like GOOG are wiped from the face of the planet then the better for humanity.

I fully agree. The Bill Hicks position on advertising and marketing always seemed a little charitable to me.

And yet there is space, indeed a great necessity, for companies like the one Google used to be. Independent commercial actors are an absolutely vital element of our information ecosystem. Otherwise, who wants to rely on governments and regulators to oversee search and manage "truth" ?

Here, we all know that the story of Google is a story of "The Fall" (Not Mark E Smith's band). And we always talk of that corruption as if it were "inevitable", a fact of human nature no less. But I don't think so, and remain optimistic that "How we stop the enshitification of everything?" remains a vital question.

Google is the lesson.

Google became an ad company. They fucked up. They dropped the ball. They turned their back on a worthy and moral mission. They turned their back on truth. In the end nothing achieved at Google by all those smart hard working people will be remembered as anything but a cheap manipulation. Just another crappy advertiser who took the immense potential of "The Information Age", held it in their hands, and then utterly betrayed it.