Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.

They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.

Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.

Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.

I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.

Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.

[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.