alt Hacker NewsI think it's a fair question
It would be interesting to know what Cerf, Thompson, etc. saw in Google. Why was it more appealing than, for example, academia
The ethics question might be something like: Is advertising really the highest and best use for a public computer network; does it justify using the network for data collection and mass surveillance
I think, in many ways, google is the only real successor to the research labs (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.) of the 20th century. If they had somewhere else to go, I don't doubt they'd go there