You're really arguing against a straw man here. Thiel was talking about the motivations monopolistic companies have to obfuscate how people view their market.

You're really arguing against a straw man here. Thiel was talking about the motivations monopolistic companies have to obfuscate how people view their market. If Google is a search company, it holds 2/3 of the market. If it's an ad company, its revenues are equal to ~1/10 of global ad spending. Therefore, if Google doesn't want to be seen as a monopoly, it is in its interest to have the public face of an ad company, even if it views itself internally as a search company. Which to me is an interesting, subtle point.