It retrospect, it was a no-brainer. But the firm's principal founder, Larry Page, was unusually sensitive to the corrupting potential of advertising. Before Google had come to its fork in the road, he had strenuously insisted in a piece coauthored with Brin that "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." As an engineer and scientist, Page had wanted to build a clean, pure tool, free of commerce's distortions. His aversion, moreover, was not purely academic: he had seen what an advertising-driven search engine looked like, peddled by a man whom both Brin and Page found distasteful—a character, now mainly forgotten, who was for a while Google's greatest rival. His name was Bill Gross.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 873