It is precisely because these companies are not content providers themselves that they can be portrayed as post-ideological. Smythe's critique remains germane because it enjoins us to consider the production regimes that structure the relations between the affordances of the platform or application and the process whereby free access is valorized. The importance of such an approach is that it further invites us to think through the relations between the reliance on advertising, the collection of personal information, and the customization of the information environment: to see these as dialectically linked in an economically productive fashion. Google does not produce goods or services for sale in a conventional sense (it even offloads the creation of the ads it serves onto ad purchases)--the only product it produces for sale is the audience for its various advertising products. [...]