As Google grew, it combined the monopolistic business strategy of Microsoft with the disrupting scraper speed of Napster. It’s a potent combination, and it left Google strong enough to defend its book scanning from the Authors Guild all the way to the top courts. Not even Bill Gates himself could have conceived of a business plan in which his company extracted value from every word accessed or typed on a Windows machine. Google belonged to a different era. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, as output growth slowed and capital hunted for low-commitment bets, global advertising increased dramatically. In the second half of the 1980s, TV ad spending doubled, from $25 to $50 billion, then doubled again in the ’90s, then doubled again in the first decade of the new millennium—and for the first couple of decades, newspapers and magazines matched that growth.26 Advertising was a good way to compete without getting into the risky business of price competition or product innovation. The fact that ads didn’t actually add anything to the economy was good, since the world was increasingly oversupplied with cheap stuff anyway.