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Google's Gatekeepers
theodp writes "With control of 63% of the world's Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, the NY Times reports that Google is the most powerful and protean of the Internet gatekeepers, exerting enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. Deciding what controversial material does and doesn't appear on the local search engines Google maintains in many countries — as well as on Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, and Orkut — falls on the shoulders of Nicole Wong and her colleagues, who have arguably been given more influence over online expression than anyone else on the planet. Some find Google's gatekeeper role worrisome: 'If your whole game is to increase market share,' says Lawrence Lessig, 'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"
Um, I don't think you can just "blow Google up". Don't they have datacenters around the globe?
Perhaps in the USA and parts of Europe Google has around 90%, but there is a very popular Chinese search engine that is what most of the people use in China to surf the censored web and I'm sure that in some parts of Europe there are more popular search engines unknown to the rest of us.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Google dominates that latin language set. Once you get into Asian languages other search engines start to win out but they are country by country.
Korea and China for example have their own top search engine.
Google is able to compete in all of them with market share in double digits almost everywhere but it's not de-fact.
Google is not easy to say in none-western languages unfortunately and is therefore not a 'catchphrasy' name either.