Actually, there were two other ways to go, neither of them seriously considered. One would have been to rely on donations or patronage, a course later pursued by other publicly spirited projects like Wikipedia. The other was even more radical, and might have been contemplated by men like Google's founders in an earlier time before the heady seductions of the dot-com boom. They might have made Google a truly public project, like email or the Internet itself.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 894