[aklug] Re: Google Evil? Was: Re: I'm an Android

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Somebody tell me if this is OT. But it seems very related to me:
>
> I don't understand the Google bashing. Google has probably done more for
> open source than any company on the planet, depending on the measuring
> stick you use, of course. Google has supported Google Summer of Code for
> years. Google pays 85% of the expenses of the Mozilla foundation, and is
> therefore pretty much responsible for giving us the only truly
> marketable open-source browser (outside of Google Chrome). Google's
> flagship mobile OS -- Android -- is released almost entirely under the
> Apache license. Google gave us Google Apps which, outside of OpenOffice,
> has been pretty much the only successful crack in the Microsoft Office
> market.
>
> Outside of their search technology, virtually every software project
> they've every championed (that I know of) has either been an open source
> project or has advanced open standards in some way.
>
> I hear some people bash Google over privacy concerns. I'm not
> unilaterally standing behind them, and maybe you can educate us better
> on that. But there is no law saying that you have to send search queries
> over an unencrypted connection to Google, in order to get a free
> response back. And Gmail is a free e-mail service provided to almost 200
> million people. Can we really expect Google to exhaust their company
> savings defending client privacy when some agency comes along demanding
> particular information?

I think many of the arguments against Google have been amply documented in
the archives. That's not to say that an evil company can't do a few good
things. Google certianly has a mutually beneficial relationship with the
OSS community. It could be argued that they might not have been possible
without it.

That said, my concern isn't what they're doing in the OSS community, it's
what they're doing top our society. They fact is that they abject liars at
best with the "Do not evil" mantra, something definitively demonstrated by
their operations in China. Obviously, they have no problem playing ball
with the Chinese government and controlling the flow of information to their
citizens, even though the government has demonstrated a multitude of times
that they will oppress, subjugate, and exploit their populace with no regard
to human rights. That means that there's an exception to their mantra.
Indeed, it really is "Do no evil. Unless there's a lot of money in it".

And that's just the beginning. As I pointed in the net neutrality thread
what Google says they're asking for, and what they're getting their paid-for
politicians to encode in language are two separate things. Net neutrality
isn't neutral. It's biased and gives an unfair advantage to Google.

Finally, consider all the well reported incidences of Google manipulating
their own search results to show a bias to their political cronies. They
are certainly a great resource on tech matters, which is why I continue to
use them for search. But when it comes to society and politics they are
themselves not only not neutral, but it's reflected in their product as well.
They are activists attempting to re-engineer society. And their liberal &
socialist values are not the values I hold, nor are they the values I served
in the Marine Corps for to defend.

A company that truly believed in "do no evil" would let a country decide its
own course, not use their position in search technologies to influence
decisions.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Fri Jul 23 13:40:49 2010