Is Google Polluting the Internet?

Pickens writes "In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: 'We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.' Now, Micah White writes in the Guardian that the vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact, where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. And at the center of it all, with ad space on 85% of all internet sites, is Google. In the gleeful words of CEO Eric Schmidt, 'We are an advertising company.' The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore, writes White. 'The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatize the index, commercialize the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder.' Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. 'Now it is up to us to realize the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet. ... We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.'"

Comments

Re:Does the Bear poop in the woods ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot.

Re:No we don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

"As Microsoft strives to migrate their core technologies from the desktop onto the Web, so too is their propaganda machine migrating from the established press to the informal social web. Microsoft shills are invading social web sites everywhere - in forums, discussion groups, comments to news items, edits to Wikipedia, manipulation of search engines, comments to blogs - posing as innocent participants to promote their agenda and counter wide spread complaints about their shady marketing practises. Even in the comments section of blogs by Microsoft employees on their own corporate site they employ sock puppets to say the things the author felt inappropriate to say directly. They race to place their shill postings at the top spot in the comments section of news and blogs, or perhaps they are given advance notice enabling them to do this where they are a sponsor.

The evidence is here on Slashdot for all to see, without embellishments from me. What I say here is amounts to only a digest of hundreds of postings by others. A careful investigator can see for himself the evolution of discussions on Microsoft related issues, especially those accusing them of their usual hard ball tactics. As one reads from Slashdot's historical record on through to recent times, the evolution of Microsoft's efforts to pervert Slashdot's discussions becomes readily apparent. Microsoft's ambition is to twist internet discussions around a full 180 degrees until these discussions become a platform for propaganda from Microsoft's "Ministry of Truth". A study of the comments of the shills posted here can be cross-correlated with postings on other sites. Their pattern of saturating a discussion with shill postings, and the repeating of mindless memes becomes obvious. Their harassment, ridicule, and suppression of criticisms is designed to intimidated those who would speak out against them. They seek to establish and enforce a discipline of giving Microsoft "fair treatment" and their propaganda the same consideration and respect a real person would deserve.

In the process they are destroying Web 2 as we know it. This insidious attack on the infrastructure we rely upon to form our opinions in a complex world has both a direct and an inhibitory effect on free speech as a side effect.

We must stop this while it is in its infancy. Once it fully established, it will become much more difficult to root out, and other ruthless corporations, organizations, and even governments will want to emulate the success of Microsoft's campaign. This is the nightmare vision of the end of the social internet as we know it. "