Google could plausibly have been a public project rather than an ad company

Evidence

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, 894

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Wu’s recurring counterfactual about roads-not-taken in media — the public-service alternatives that attention merchant capitalism foreclosed. — connects to: Publicly owned platforms could rival corporate platform control. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 1201; Fear of financial obscurity drove Google founders to abandon founding principles — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 264; Google’s founding culture was a radical technical meritocracy contemptuous of mundane business — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 881
• QUESTION: Would a publicly funded search engine have been politically viable? Worth tracing how the dot-com era foreclosed this path.

Broader Connections

• Google’s founding culture was a radical technical meritocracy contemptuous of mundane business #complicates (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 881
• Fear of financial obscurity drove Google founders to abandon founding principles #qualifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 264