Any discussion of what happened to Google has to start with the two individuals who together still control most of the shareholders' votes and together still have (IANAL) effectively almost completely control over it, Page and Brin.
(Yes, they put someone else in as CEO: so what? Yes, they've largely disappeared from public view: so what? Page and Brin still exist and still control Google even if they have a lower profile than eg. Zuckerberg and even if they aren't jumping up and down in public like the current owner of Twitter: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence . If Sergey Brin is able to start poking around inside Google again because he's worried about competition from OpenAI https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/01/31/sergey-... then he's also perfectly well able to come back to scotch the Web Integrity API. The fact that he hasn't done the latter is simply a choice that he has made.)
Some people are too young to remember, and some seem to have forgotten, how much Google's rise to dominance was enabled by the perception that Page and Brin were two fine young men who could be relied on to act with restraint and a sense of public responsibility—a perception which Google itself of course encouraged. If they'd had the same public reputation as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison then the early history of would likely have been very different. (Now, more fool the rest of us for putting stock in that perception, of course, but that doesn't let Page and Brin off the hook either.)
So, what happened there? HR scandals and maybe health issues seem to have helped drive them out of public view. The end of Google's all-hands meetings also seems rather significant, though it doesn't seem clear whether it was more a cause or a consequence of other changes (Back in 2019 Steven Levy wrote "That’s why, when Google said Thank Goodness It’s Finished, it ended a lot more than a weekly meeting. Winter has come to Silicon Valley. And no beer for you." https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-en... , which now seems prescient.) It also looks as if they simply got bored of running Google, and seem to believe that simply running Google is beneath them. Cut off from normal life, it also seems likely that they've been radicalised by an antisocial subculture of billionaires and cent-millionaires. But others must know much better than I do.
(Yes, they put someone else in as CEO: so what? Yes, they've largely disappeared from public view: so what? Page and Brin still exist and still control Google even if they have a lower profile than eg. Zuckerberg and even if they aren't jumping up and down in public like the current owner of Twitter: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence . If Sergey Brin is able to start poking around inside Google again because he's worried about competition from OpenAI https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/01/31/sergey-... then he's also perfectly well able to come back to scotch the Web Integrity API. The fact that he hasn't done the latter is simply a choice that he has made.)
Some people are too young to remember, and some seem to have forgotten, how much Google's rise to dominance was enabled by the perception that Page and Brin were two fine young men who could be relied on to act with restraint and a sense of public responsibility—a perception which Google itself of course encouraged. If they'd had the same public reputation as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison then the early history of would likely have been very different. (Now, more fool the rest of us for putting stock in that perception, of course, but that doesn't let Page and Brin off the hook either.)
So, what happened there? HR scandals and maybe health issues seem to have helped drive them out of public view. The end of Google's all-hands meetings also seems rather significant, though it doesn't seem clear whether it was more a cause or a consequence of other changes (Back in 2019 Steven Levy wrote "That’s why, when Google said Thank Goodness It’s Finished, it ended a lot more than a weekly meeting. Winter has come to Silicon Valley. And no beer for you." https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-en... , which now seems prescient.) It also looks as if they simply got bored of running Google, and seem to believe that simply running Google is beneath them. Cut off from normal life, it also seems likely that they've been radicalised by an antisocial subculture of billionaires and cent-millionaires. But others must know much better than I do.