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Well, you're right, initially Google is a great example of growing because it genuinely was a great well executed product whose time had come. I mean it was just such a fresh air to go from using Excite and asking Jeeves to just googling it.

> user lock-in, artificial bundling,

But eventually Google hit its peak and has had to for the last decade or so concern itself with just maintaining its monopoly position, and it's done a lot of shady things to abet that, if you recall from reading the news over the last decade. A few I recall offhand.

* The infamous developer wage fixing scheme! Remember when it was uncovered that Apple and Google had been secretly and informally following no-poaching and wage cap rules to try to use their market power against developers?

* Monopolizing the ad marketplace by constant mergers and acquisitions (eg DoubleClick)

* Just generally using M&A and hiring as an anti competitive tool, eg acquihiring, overhiring, acquire-and-shut-down, etc -- hiring and acquiring not as a way to legitimately add profitable capabilities but instead merely as a way to tie up valuable limited resources (devs) and thus deny oxygen to potential competition.

* Don't get me started on how they're currently abusing Chromebooks to infiltrate the schools and get kids hooked on watching addictive YouTube Shorts and otherwise being good online ad targets during class time

And I'm sure all the other usual monopolistic behavior companies in their position are often tempted into. Google's challenge has been that by the 2010s, there wasn't really anything left for it to innovate in that could possibly come close to adding more than a rounding error's worth of profit to the huge ad machine.

So since then Google has fundamentally been more like a petrostate or a traditional utility company or something -- just protect the cash cow at all costs and don't rock the boat otherwise. It still kept and continues to try to keep to wear the costume of its earlier younger hip innovative days, but I think that's falling away as a new generation grows up who now sees them as part of the Man, an institution that's been there forever and no longer have a memory of the days when they were new, fun, innovative, countercultural.

In summary, Google didn't do shady things to get filthy rich, but it did do shady things later to stay filthy rich once it became clear there was nothing else left to do but either that, or watch the business gradually decline and get eaten by newer, hungrier startups and competitors.