I'm going to disagree with that.
It was when business plans from moved from letting users control what they consume to being in control of what users consume.
It was when business plans from moved from letting users control what they consume to being in control of what users consume.
Generally speaking when Google prevents and limits what end users can control -- the offending product gets worse and eventually dropped.
The biggest is that they are trying to maximize revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information to people they are in better control of that. A lot has been studied about this.
I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB started to publish studies they carried out on people. Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were around the manipulation of users emotions and their ability to target voting groups (to increase people going to vote in target groups) around elections.
It's all advertising all the time.