Title.
We have come to rely on Google a lot over the past two decades or so. Since then Google has gone from being a humble search engine to a ad driven megacorporation today with revenue in excess of the GDPs of some third world countries. Over the course of their growth, they have started incorporating shady and anti-competitive practices to leverage its dominance of the web to bully competitors and consumers alike.
Some points regarding Google's maliciousness:
- Aggressively pushing Google Chrome and using non-standard web technologies to put other browsers at a disadvantage. This is what Microsoft was sued for back in the day for simply bundling IE with Windows, but Google gets a free pass?
- Bullying websites into adopting AMP so that those site contents will be displayed within a Google controlled environment without going to the websites themselves. Websites not adhering to AMP may have their search results rankings drop.
- Collects information of its users and uses it for not only personalizing the search results, but also to hide information that the user might disagree with, thus creating an echo chamber encouraging like minded behaviour among users. A massive attack on free speech.
- Hid a critical Google+ data leak from the public due to fear of govt. regulation.
- Bullies youtube content creators with severely demonetizing videos that don't confirm to their family friendly agenda. Such videos are identified using algorithms that are known to false flag videos and support for wrongfully flagged videos is slow. However, they hypocritically show ads on videos by viral content creators regardless of subject matter.
- Allows corporations and individuals to abuse Youtube's copyright takedown system to remove videos that they don't agree with rather than a legitimate copyright reason. Also, poor support for content creators whose videos were fraudulently taken down in such a manner.
Plus many more.
So, my question is, is Google going too far and at what point do we draw the line? I know that most of the public is apathetic towards such issues, but how much do we, the more tech-oriented populace, care about this?
Edit: For those of you who don't know, a Gulag is a soviet fortified prison camp. Goolag is a play on gulag. Gulag - Wikipedia
We have come to rely on Google a lot over the past two decades or so. Since then Google has gone from being a humble search engine to a ad driven megacorporation today with revenue in excess of the GDPs of some third world countries. Over the course of their growth, they have started incorporating shady and anti-competitive practices to leverage its dominance of the web to bully competitors and consumers alike.
Some points regarding Google's maliciousness:
- Aggressively pushing Google Chrome and using non-standard web technologies to put other browsers at a disadvantage. This is what Microsoft was sued for back in the day for simply bundling IE with Windows, but Google gets a free pass?
- Bullying websites into adopting AMP so that those site contents will be displayed within a Google controlled environment without going to the websites themselves. Websites not adhering to AMP may have their search results rankings drop.
- Collects information of its users and uses it for not only personalizing the search results, but also to hide information that the user might disagree with, thus creating an echo chamber encouraging like minded behaviour among users. A massive attack on free speech.
- Hid a critical Google+ data leak from the public due to fear of govt. regulation.
- Bullies youtube content creators with severely demonetizing videos that don't confirm to their family friendly agenda. Such videos are identified using algorithms that are known to false flag videos and support for wrongfully flagged videos is slow. However, they hypocritically show ads on videos by viral content creators regardless of subject matter.
- Allows corporations and individuals to abuse Youtube's copyright takedown system to remove videos that they don't agree with rather than a legitimate copyright reason. Also, poor support for content creators whose videos were fraudulently taken down in such a manner.
Plus many more.
So, my question is, is Google going too far and at what point do we draw the line? I know that most of the public is apathetic towards such issues, but how much do we, the more tech-oriented populace, care about this?
Edit: For those of you who don't know, a Gulag is a soviet fortified prison camp. Goolag is a play on gulag. Gulag - Wikipedia
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