Plot to Kill Google Paints Company as Victim of Success First, Monopolist Second
Wired has a well-researched piece on how Microsoft, AT&T, consumer rights groups and grandmothers (just kidding... Or am I?) are gunning for Google. It's an exhausting four-page spread, which reads as epic online, but if you like stories that highlight sleazeball lobbying and pandering to win an argument, this is for you. Hint: There's lots of lawyering and legalese here. First, the headline is overly dramatic. These entities knew they're not going to "kill" Google. Where would the majority of the world find answers to all of the world's information online? Certainly not Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search. But their collective efforts were meant to slow it down some. So, how'd they do? Google's search share continues to grow, sitting somewhere between 63 and 70-plus percent depending on what metrics you trust. However, what if Google had succeeded in partnering with Yahoo, an overture the article centers on as the main beachhead in the attack on the company? That number could be more today. So I'll venture to say these efforts by Microsoft, et al., along with the lumbering economy, did slow Google down a beat. Unfortunately for these erstwhile Google slayers, the piece does a greater job portraying Google more as a victim of its success than a giant corporation looking to take over the world. In effect, it offers no proof of serious wrongdoing or lawbreaking by Google. Net-net, it's a lot of hearsay by politicking lawyers scared witless that Google will stomp out Microsoft in search and subvert AT&T and other carriers in wireless. Mmmmmm. My favorite dish. Moreover, it also portrays Justice Department's Thomas Barnett as a power-hungry headhunter looking to make a name for himself as the guy who got to Google. The Wired piece noted of Barnett: "Staff," he proclaimed, "is irrelevant." He made the decisions around there." Oh, one of those guys. And yet, amid all the witchhunting going on, the Wired guys use the comments from their subjects to highlight one widely believed idea repeatedly: that Google, by dint of its search share and growing Web influence, has become a monopolist. The Wired piece notes:
Sanford Litvack--a government lawyer who would have run the DOJ's suit against Google had it not withdrawn the Yahoo proposal--says that, in his opinion, Google's current position may already constitute a monopoly, even without Yahoo. So why don't we see Google as evil as we saw Microsoft? Largely because people "choose" to use Google search. They're not forced into it. It's good and it works. How can that be bad? Google search in itself isn't. It's how Google makes the money from search that increasingly scares us. I've repeatedly said I'm all in for Google's Web services, including search, Gmail, Reader, and other Google Apps. I recognize the tradeoff of using those services and sacrificing some privacy. How much will the rest of the world be able to accept that when the wolves beset Google's door this year, as the Wired piece suggests? I don't know, but I'd hate to have to move my Web content to another repository because a bunch of whiny politicians succeeded in suing Google into stasis. That would suck more than anything that has sucked before. I just ask Google to keep clean until this mess can be sussed out. But maybe it's too late; once a monopolist in the court of public opinion, always a monopolist. There's no going back, so it's what you do in the future that matters. |
Comments (8)
"But maybe it's too late; once a monopolist in the court of public opinion, always a monopolist."
What exactly do you mean by that? Has the "court of public opinion" declared Google a monopoly?
WARNING: This blog is part of the Microsoft/ZIFF-DAVIS PROPAGANDA Machine.
Posted by zato | January 20, 2009 2:55 PM
uh, yes. Many media members write about Google being a monopoly. It's for the courts to decide if that holds up on the legal front.
Posted by Clint Boulton
| January 20, 2009 3:17 PM
"uh, yes. Many media members write about Google being a monopoly. It's for the courts to decide if that holds up on the legal front."
Nice going, Clint. You just confirmed my suspicion that you are a total Microsoftie, and a Google hater.
Posted by zato | January 20, 2009 3:48 PM
whatever. I can name you a dozen google pr people who love my google apps coverage, and a dozen pr people who hate how i prop up google and make fun of msft for being an also-ran on the internet. i don't spare ANYONE and my BS detector is always on.
Posted by Clint Boulton
| January 20, 2009 6:29 PM
Clint, another great article. I like this blog the more that I read it.
Could we also throw in there somewhere the Microsoft has to give user's incentives to user their Live search?
http://search.live.com/cashback
I'm not one to judge, but their something really pathetic about a company feeling obligated to pay (directly or otherwise) to stimulate interest in their services.
I just wish that Google would release their operating system already. We know it's coming ;)
Posted by Justin Bailey | January 21, 2009 5:51 AM
It's interesting to see all the lobbying AT&T has been doing on the issue, particularly their claim that they are "concerned about user privacy" and view Google as a threat to that.
AT&T was one of the first companies to turn information over to the government -- including web sites visited, private correspondence, billing records etc. -- without informing users. They also revised their subscriber agreements to declare billing information and other user information to be exclusive property of AT&T for whatever purposes they so desire.
Seems a bit odd for them to be claiming the privacy high ground after such a gambit.
Posted by SkepticalGuy | January 22, 2009 3:32 PM
Google is a master at searching. And GMail, which I use, is quite good. Though I swear they appear to be stuck with an interface and programming that is antiquated, almost as if they got caught in an evolution they had not anticipated. But that aside, Google Apps are not equal to Microsoft Office. When companies were transiting from whatever to Microsoft Office, we came to the conclusion that the app does not matter, but the format does.
Does it matter if I use WordPerfect, Google Apps, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or whatever, as long as the documents can be read across the platforms? That was the goal of the RTF format, and now Open Docs. Lets hope one of these succeeds and we can put this to rest.
As far as Google making money is concerned... more power to them. They have figured this out where others have failed, may they roll in their graves.
A monopoly? Don't tell that to the millions of Yahoo users, or the huge percentage of people who still use MS Office. They have a long ways to go before that happens. And Microsoft in hardly in a position to complain!
Posted by Farokh | January 25, 2009 10:20 AM
No one much seems to notice that any entity that effectively captures, integrates, and tracks the presence and points of view of such a large number and growing percentage of people, and in a growing diversity of ways, on a national, regional, or global basis, is not so much a market monopolist as an Intelligence Agency.
Google has become an intelligence agency.
To wit, anytime any SINGLE and (necessarily) methods-secretive, poor/no customer service body notes and tracks your online/offline personal presence as can be directly and indirectly determined through a combination of the following, then it's an intelligence agency in function - whatever else it professes to be in image and practice:
- Real-time satellite tracking (Google Earth - get the commercial version!); GPS and mapping (Google Maps, and Google Mobile); attention/search information (Google Advertising); e-mail (Google Mail); documents (Google Docs, Google Financials); voice calls, records and message transcripts (Google Voice); Google SMS; browser info (Google Chrome) - as well as search from all browsers; online personal/business applications (Google Apps); some of what you watch (YouTube); and the coming tsunami of collaboration and communication data [from Google Wave]), to name but a few,
Through legal means in the US, such as CALEA, the Patriot Act, DHS, NSA, and many others with serious and secretive wire-tapping powers (can I have your brain please?), what Google knows, or is instructed to know, so can, do, and does intelligence and other agencies of the US Federal Government.
CALEA, for example (The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) is a United States wiretapping law passed in 1994, during the presidency of Bill Clinton (Pub. L. No. 103-414, 108 Stat. 4279, codified at 47 USC 1001-1010). In its own words, the purpose of CALEA is: "To amend title 18, United States Code, to make clear a telecommunications carrier's duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for Law Enforcement purposes, and for other purposes." Google, though young, with its huge and growing global data centers, extensive dark fibre networks, public trust, and other growing telecoms assets, is a serious addition to US intelligence resources.
CALEA's purpose is to enhance the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment (emphasis added) MODIFY AND DESIGN their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time.
Some claim the banks are "too big to fail" - I say Google's grown "bigger" than a monopolist - it's now so data rich - especially with continuing acquisitions like DoubleClick - it's too big and present in so many American and other lives for US intelligence and other agencies to let it roam unhampered and unobserved 'off the reservation'.
"Do No Evil" may have been an honest starting sentiment with Google's founders, but billions of globe-straddling dollars later, and with governments from the US, China, Israel, India, the EU and many, many others taking an increasingly active interest in what Google knows and can know, "Do Know Evil" shows no signs of NOT becoming "Dark Eclipse".
Posted by kyle | July 23, 2009 5:38 PM