[jjoonathan]

Yeah. It's wild to see sibling comments thinking that it's an exec incentive "problem." No, exec incentives align to GOOGL shareholder incentives and GOOGL shareholders are pursuing returns at your expense, as is their right under capitalism. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but we either need to get much more serious about encouraging competition or we need to figure out a different way to organize control.

Personally I'm a bigger fan of "encourage competition" than "reorganize control," at least in the search engine market, but I fully agree with you that what we see here is the system working exactly as designed.