Google’s money was “key” factor in Apple rejecting Bing purchase

As a society, we want businesses to do risky things to provide better goods/services/capabilities we did not have before.

We never previously had the capability to index and search through the entirety of human knowledge effectively before. That's a game changer. The innovation and breakthroughs that could be fueled by that capability are near infinite in potential payoff.

Yet... that system never happens, why? The answer is, profits/moneymaking usurped the original purpose of the corporation.

Apple took the 20 billion because fuck yeah, no risk, and that becomes revenue stream. Progress toward organizing and making available human knowledge? 0. Google created an offering, then degraded it intentionally to preserve profit making over usability. The serving of ads, in short, is not the subject of which you should be asking. What you should be asking is "did Apple really think that they couldn't index and make available search results"?

And even before you answer that, consider there is a heap of government and industry originated pressure to actually fundamentally degrade any project that actually does an honest to god indexing effort. By indexing I mean INDEXing. A purely reversible reflection of the net as is without any of type of policy mandated distortions like "don't surface classified material, extremist content, or other verboten material".

Answer: We cannot have nice things.

Why?

Answer: Because everyone is to afraid of what would happen if we had nice things. Me included at some points. I've lived long enough to see first hand what assholes inevitably do after getting their hands on something nice. I'd love to take a stab at a distortionless index of the web. Given three years, a sufficient pool of hardware, and a ton of determination, I could probably whip up something reasonably great.

I'd have to either keep it to myself, or have the wrath of policymakers rained down upon me for facilitating "terrorists, criminals, pirates, and sexual predators". Can't even try to reach beyond the bad to the good on the other side, because the tide of innovation lifts all boats, and there's a bunch of boats that seemingly no one wants lifted. So here we sit. A society stuck in the grip of collective push to keep ourselves ifnorant through intentional acts of informational partitioning when in reality, we have the technology to render any one person able to access the sum of human knowledge at any time.

We could literally live post scarcity in terms of info-propagation. In reality, the only ones who do, are the very corporations, painstakingly building the apparatus to only go one-way, toward them, and no one else.

And we only have ourselves to blame.