What do you think the cost would be for these free things without advertising?
The biggest downside I can think of is while I would happily pay for Google search (per search, subscription, whatever) in an ad free world, there's lots of people who simply wouldn't bother to search and learn new things.
Really though I think they have a good model for their search page, it's unobtrusive and not rude, and it made them the most powerful tech company in silicon valley, so clearly it works. Wonder why other adtechs had to get so much shittier about it.
Like? You can't really know that you wouldn't have open source, p2p versions of the things you use today that you assume can only exist because of advertising.
