Google is first and foremost an advertising company. They're going to do whatever makes them the most profit. It always had razor wire fences unfortunately.

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rickdeckard 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'd argue that they are not merely an advertising company, they are an "attention facilitating company", taking and curating attention of large groups of users and making it systematically available to other parties, acting as middleman.

You know, like Apple...

> [A] is first and foremost a [B] company. They're going to do whatever makes them the most profit.

This is the definition of any commercial business.

	▲	tracker1 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have to disagree... while most "corporations" are chartered in such a way that shareholder value is maximized, you can put other provisions and leadership goals into a corporate charter, and privately owned businesses can have much more leeway in terms of structure and goals. Many NPOs are corporations/companies legally, but their founding structure isn't to maximize shareholder profits/value. Beyond this, most businesses have two operating models, one is for maximum stock price, which increases the value, but that remains static without trade and/or to provide dividends from profits, which tends to keep stock values more level. With the latter, a business might not be chasing a 20% growth every year, but a healthy margin and predictable dividends to shareholders. IANAL, this is not legal advice... but if you start a company, and want to emphasize values beyond pure growth/value, then what I would do is definitely talk to a good corporate attorney and tune the founding charter documents to that effect.

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pepa65 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a datamining company, and there are many ways to profit off of that...

	▲	BiteCode_dev 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's like saying Disney is an "image showing" company.