See, this is what I don't really get. Sure, they can make money by selling ads on the content they're indexing (which is the primary reason their ranking system has to stay egalitarian, or roughly so with a few exceptions), but publishers are by no means obligated to purchase display ads from Google, or to host using Google's platforms (Youtube, Blogger, etc). Imho, it's only a blurred line iff a publisher chooses to make it so.
