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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.'"
You're still the leech, when it comes down to it, the advertisers are still paying for the server costs in the majority of cases.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Most of us don't have to simplify the world to two choices, to live in it.
Most American's can only rely on their two choices, anymore and they plug there ears and go "lalalalalala", for fear that there brains may explode if they try to understand anything complex.
Sounds like something that's right up the EU's alley: creating a public alternative to a foreign-owned monopoly in a critical growth sector.
You know what else is right up the EU's alley? Banning references to certain bits of history, getting tangled up in astounding fits of political correctness, etc. Do you really want a government that aggressively controls the speech of its citizens to be running a search engine? If you want that, you can go to China.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Leech is too generous. Parasite is more appropriate. You take without offering anything in return. You aren't a fucking customer - customers pay for stuff. You are just a parasite that offers nothing.