Google is the Evil Empire. The Internet Search behemoth has long been using its monstrous power not for good, but for ill.
To give but a few examples:
Google was knowingly running illegal ads for Canadian pharmaceuticals – since 2003. And they just had to pay a $500 million fine for so doing.
Google has been – for their Google Books – scanning in their entirety tens of thousands of tomes – without the legal approval to do so. Myriad publishers are currently suing.
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Their serial illegal business practices are a natural extension of their Leftist ideology.
They are incessant violators of antitrust, privacy and private property law – it is a business ethos borne of a political one.
To give but one example, Google was long the Daddy Warbucks behind the push to Network Neutrality. Which mandates that Google have free, unlimited access to the Inter-networks that others spend hundreds of billions of dollars building and maintaining.
Google has been very busy, and very thorough.
Google has repeatedly been accused of violating privacy laws, facilitating copyright infringement and aiding online piracy.
Why?
Google and its political allies want to turn the Internet into an “information commons.” To that end, they seek to weaken copyright, trademark and patent protections.
Why?
This “what’s yours is mine” philosophy is used by Google to monetize others’ information and content without paying for it.
Behold the Socialist undermining of property rights. They want to illegally make money off of your stuff – at the expense of you legally making money off of your stuff. Hence their aforementioned Google Books massive private property heist.
However.
Ask them for access to their mystical Search algorithm – how they arrive at the Search results they do – and they go ballistic. Screaming “Proprietary!” – and steadfastly refusing to acquiesce to any degree.
For Google, it’s “what’s yours is mine” – and “what’s mine is mine.”
Access to information should be unfettered: Google aims to replace user privacy and data security with radical transparency and openness.
Translation: Google doesn’t give a rats rear end about your privacy – or, again, your property rights.
There’s very much more to be mined, but you get the idea.
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Google has been for some time under antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). But as the above demonstrates, there is oh so much more to be investigated.
Meanwhile, there have also been multiple Capitol Hill hearings looking into Google’s myriad bad practices.
The Senate’s Antitrust Subcommittee had one on September 21. During which, example after example of Google manipulating Search results were presented.
What was gleaned therefrom led to a letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz from Utah Republican Mike Lee, the Subcommittee’s ranking member.
What was gleaned therefrom was so disturbing, it led to that letter also being from uber-Leftist Wisconsin Democrat Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl.
If the long-Leftist Google has drawn the ire of uber-Leftist Senator Kohl – how far from the path have they strayed?
The letter lays out some of Google’s many, many abuses – including consistently favoring Google products in Search results at the expense of all others.
Note: Google is a big Yes for Net Neutrality – but a vociferous No on Search Neutrality. “What’s yours is mine” – and “what’s mine is mine.”
The letter concludes by asking Chairman Leibowitz to – given all the evidence uncovered at the hearing – pursue with all vigorousness the FTC’s antitrust investigation.
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As conservatives, we want Less Government and maximum freedom – but within the confines of the rule of law and order.
Google makes a multi-billion dollar living well outside said confines – abusing the economic rights of others for fun and profit.
All hail Senators Lee and Kohl for insisting upon the rule of law. For the lawless, illegally self-serving Google.
Just for the record, you *can* be anti so-called Intellectual Property, and yet still be anti-socialist. This has been a HUGE issue at mises.org, where patent lawyer Stephen Kinsella continuously makes libertarian arguments against patents and copyrights.
And I, for one, agree. The original purpose of copyright was for the Government to control what can and cannot be published; the original purpose of patents was for the Government to award monopolies in an attempt to attract artisans to their countries. While both are in place, they stifle free speech and creativity. We would do well to get rid of both mechanisms.
Having said that, it would be folly to dismiss Google as doing “harmless things”: their position on Net Neutrality is a clear attempt for them to use their clout to obtain free access to networks–or worse, to deny others *cheaper* access to networks, when they already have already set up their own inexpensive networks. That is, they are attempting to create new regulations to ensure their place in the marketplace.
Which, incidentally, is what patents and copyright are used for–and which is why I’m opposed to both mechanisms, both as a software developer and as a mathematician.
It has been my observation that those most against the idea of intellectual property rights are those least likely to have produced any intellectual property. They just want to get free stuff from others. Ironically, they call those who want to profit from their own creations “greedy” but expecting something for nothing is the height of greed.
Allow me to be a counter-example to your observation, then. I am a mathematician who has also always wanted to write, to compose music, to design and program computer games, to design little devices that can fly, and to tinker with any idea that I can come across. When I was younger, I *dreamed* of obtaining patents, and of publishing games and stories, and of becoming rich and famous from my creative output.
My interest in patents waned, however, as I looked into software patents, and the havoc they cause for the Open Source programmer–and for tiny startups, for that matter, regardless the industry.
As I have looked into the idea of “intellectual property”, I see countless music artists locked out of singing their own songs before an audience, because the Recording Studio they signed up with was so determined to make profits from *them*. I see authors who cannot republish their books, because the copyright owners have no interest in doing so, but no desire to relinquish their “rights” to those books. And I see large corporations stockpiling thousands patents in an “arms race”, ready to fight multi-million dollar lawsuits over small ideas, if they ever get it into their heads to dominate the market-place. Of course, that small company with five patents will be *crushed* if they get hit by a single patent lawsuit, just as surely as Philo T. Farnsworth was crushed by RCA over TV patent disputes, and Whats-his-name Kearns was crushed by the Big Three over intermittent windshield wipers–and these are examples of people who *won* their lawsuits.
Of course, I’m a mathematician, so perhaps I’m bitter because I can’t patent my theorems, and copyright is next to useless on theorems as well. Using my theorem to prove something else–or even using the basic outline of a proof to prove something else–are both fair use! But then, if I dare go out on a limb, and use my extensive knowledge of linear algebra to design 3D graphics engines, I expose myself to potential patent lawsuits, since 3D graphics is a realm that is heavily patented. Perhaps I’ll be able to claim “prior art”–even assuming I have the deep pocket-books needed to fight such a claim (and I certainly don’t have big pockets).
I cannot make the case here that patents and copyrights cause more harm than good. It would take over three hundred pages to do so, though, and it already has been, in a book called “Against Intellectual Monopoly”; the book is available online as well as on Amazon, and you can freely copy it, because, well…they are against Intellectual Property.
So very, very, very much confusion in one paragraph. So very, very, very much that is dead wrong.
There is nothing which prevents any musician from recording anything; copyright law is designed so that under the system of compulsory licensing, which provides for a pro forma royalty payment, anyone can do a cover of whatever they want to—and nobody can prevent them from doing so. If a book author’s work has gone out of print, the rights usually revert to the author within six months to a year. If they do not, it is because the author has stupidly signed an extremely bad contract—such as the work-for-hire contracts beloved of textbook publishers which strip the author-in-fact of authorship and transfer that authorship to the publisher as author-at-law. But that is a matter of bad contract negotiation, and has nothing to do with whether or not copyright law is good or bad.
Likewise, while a patent suit may bankrupt a small company, that is not because of the patent system; that is because litigation is terribly expensive. It is expensive because it is a highly skilled profession that, in intellectual property litigation, often protects millions of dollars.
What you call confusion, is merely the result of trying to squeeze a lot of knowledge in an itty-bitty living space. As I said before, I do not have the room here, and nor is it desirable to, make the case that copyrights and patents cause more harm than they do good. I will say this, though: I have seen many examples where copyrights and patents have hurt *everyone*, both customers and creators; I have also seen many examples where creators prospered in absence of intellectual property law.
Do you really think it’s a good idea to have a system where we have to have a lawyer by our side for every transaction? Such a system opens the door for great abuse of those who cannot afford lawyers, and for those who are naive. Indeed, the music industry is *rife* with bad contracts.
Then there’s “fair use”, which sometimes is only defined *after* a judge looks at a given case.
With respect to patents, do you really expect me to believe that ideas are worth *anything*? That the only thing preventing Yahoo from prospering, is the lack of Google’s algorithm?
The only way to make money is to provide goods and services. Google could make their algorithms public, but it will do me no good, because I do not have the servers, nor the customers, nor the personality, to make use of it the way Google does. Yahoo *might* have these resources, but they simply don’t have the culture that Google has–a culture designed to attract the best minds, and they try to produce the best products–but the moment they no longer provide a useful experience, they are up a creek without a paddle.
Finally, to say that lawyers get paid well in patent lawsuits because they are protecting important ideas is a bit disingenuous. Why should I pay a million dollars to convince a jury that a given idea was “prior art” or “obvious”–that is, to convince a jury that I should be free to use an idea, because it was in use even before the patent was filed? And why should I be denied the use of *my* idea–one that I came up with myself, after spending time and money on research–because someone managed to come up with the *same* idea independently a year before I did, and patent it?
The *only* reason why IP lawyers provide a valuable service, is that they help us navigate a labrynthine set of laws that make no sense to the average creative person, in much the same way that a tax accountant helps us through the complicated mess of laws set up for us to pay our taxes. That is, they help us deal with complexity that shouldn’t exist in the first place!
I would add two things to my remarks: First, I see nothing wrong with refusing to disclose something you know; everyone ought to have the freedom to decide when and how, if ever, they will disclose their knowledge about something. Second, Google’s lack of concern for privacy disturbs me, as does Facebook’s (which, as a company, has strong libertarian roots). Indeed, it’s because of this reason, I’ve been pondering lately what I can do to replace these services with services that will better respect my own privacy.
Can’t Google be brought up on anti-trust laws? At least broken up like ma Bell was.
Unfortunately, I don’t see anything that Google is doing that is downright illegal. As much as we shouldn’t petition Government for special favors, so long as petitioning Government is legal, big corporations will always seek new laws that will favor them, and lock out new, smaller companies.
As much as I think Microsoft is evil, I didn’t think the solution then was to break it up by legal fiat; indeed, I didn’t expect it to do much good if the courts succeeded to do that. The solution is to seek out, and move to, other alternatives. Which is why I use Linux.
And in a similar vein, this is also why I’m beginning to explore other options to Google and Facebook. I won’t be able to completely withdraw myself from these companies–the companies I currently work for use Gmail and Google Docs, for example–but I can at least seek other, more private ways of doing things for my own life.
I, for one, would like to see a “decentralized” version of Facebook, although I haven’t yet figured out all the logistics of how such a beast would work. Who knows? Perhaps someone will read this sentence, come up with a successful model, and become rich!
For that matter, perhaps a decentralized search engine might be the way to go, too…