In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had written that reliance on advertising would inevitably make it difficult to create the best possible product; in the late 2010s, in competition with Apple, they faced their own prophecy. Since the death of its founder, Steve Jobs, Apple had softened somewhat in its opposition to open platforms, and was able to use its enormous profits to build better products. Google had bested rivals like Yahoo!, who were hamstrung by their own excessive reliance on advertising, but over the late 2010s, in competition with Apple, Google got a taste of its own medicine.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1130