In my humble opinion, Google is the reason the web withstood as long as it did. At least the open part of the web did.<p>Yes, sure, they monetized, but also they gave back as much as, and if not more than they took. We have so many machine learning frameworks, tensorflow, research, payouts to creators, advertising opportunities, careers, products, a lot of things built and taken down but most importantly built. They were probably the most positive force for the internet age in the past 20 years and more than anyone will ever give them credit for. Only in retrospect will we realize how lucky we were to be alive in the Google age. Full stop.<p>What really killed the web was the rise of closed wall gardens platforms such as Apple, Facebook, Instagram and others. Putting up walls around content that didn't need to necessarily exist or not honoring open frameworks to exchange information and making things more widely indexable.<p>But even here there have been significant benefits. The present AI boom would arguably not have been as large as it is right now without Mark Zuckerberg choosing to put an unconventional amount of investment behind AR ambitions to take on Apple, an investment the size of which many conventionally run publicly listed or private enterprises could hardly imagine to take up, leading to the concentration of capital, talent, technology and hardware in a place that gave birth to open source Llama and others. Google as well was very well poised because of their investments in compute fueled by their business model which kept the web alive and also returned capital into places where computer scientists would be paid significant amounts of money and have job security and freedom of will. to do as they pleased as opposed to chasing a paycheck, working as a physicist at CERN or something.<p>All I'm saying is this article does not fully capture how significant the positive outcomes from Google have been.