I would argue Google turned evil quickly, pretty much the moment they released the surplus behavioural data they could glean off their users when they used thei

I would argue Google turned evil quickly, pretty much the moment they released the surplus behavioural data they could glean off their users when they used their services could be extracted for profit which begun even before gmail, allowing them to “personalize” your services. And by personalize, I mean Google built a profile on you to better learn how they could poke and prod at your behaviour in order to manipulate you into doing things for their customers, the advertisers. I think the doubleclick acquisition hopped this into overdrive and also allowed Google to start screwing both sides by extracting larger and larger rents from advertisers with its near monopoly power and ad cartel with Facebook. We saw the Google tracking cookie spread like a plague shaking down users for data even if they did not use a Google service, as sites effectively needed to install googles tracking cookie on its customers computers to take full advantage of the Google ad monopoly, obliterating the pretence of consent you had with a service like gmail where you were at least consciously agreeing to data scraping. I honestly think it took them almost no time at all to go from pagerank and spiders to leap towards building their panopticon and the modern surveillance economy. I think the reason people didn’t consider them evil is that what they were doing was so innovative and groundbreaking that people didn’t fully understand the implications. The way their business operates shouldn’t even be legal with them playing both sides of the ad market and their relentless spying being opt-out at best if you have sufficient technical knowledge. The spying of Google and companies like that it’s undermining government privacy protections at this point as the government can acquire spy data it couldn’t gather itself legally (for good reason) from private companies.