My personal opinion is that corporations are not supposed to have an explicitly altruistic social conscience, they're supposed to do what their shareholders want them to do - most likely to maximize profits. A corporation is an organizational directive, a force of nature, like fire or nuclear energy, useful but deadly if misused. And yet, most of the time that works out very well, "the consumer is always right"... until the government gets involved.
A corporation is a legal fiction. In its basic form it's just a government personifying a business owner.
I don't want my local business owner to do whatever he can to make an extra penny, morality, civility, or atmosphere be damned.
I like the kind of business that doesn't make you feel like they are an entity set up to efficiently take my money. I like the kind of business where the owner talks to you, knows you by name, and maybe carries some products that don't have the highest profit margin, but he knows will be popular and draw people to his business--they kind of stuff some MBA grad in corporate would never allow to be stocked in Wal Mart because it doesn't fit the minimum profit-per-square-foot quotas.
In short, I *WANT* my business owners to have a conscience.
I also want cheap prices
But I absolutely won't support people who are racist, sexist, or jerks.
By becoming a part of the government apparatus, in part or in full, corporations can inherit its limitless power over their consumers and employees, and become intrusive and dictatorial over them. Without all-encompassing government, people's political energies would go into economic activism, a mechanism that is less corruptible and even more empowering to the poor, since the poor people's dollars can
collectively buy more products than they can political influence. A large all-encompassing government can safely expect all large for-profit companies to play ball when it asks them to, but it can't be everywhere at once, and it can't stop people from preferring transparent and decentralized solutions that localize the power.
Avoidance of Google's dominance may seem like irrational paranoia to the uninitiated, but the more you think about it, the more you realize how much information Google can collect on you over repeated use, and that in the information age this constitutes a tremendous power. In the wrong hands, this power can give the government a level of surveillance that Hitler and Stalin could only dream of! Needless to say, the people who've trusted Google with their e-mail are fooked, but you don't have to be logged in to their user management system to be recognized when you perform a search, and many non-Google sites report your usage to Google through their advertisements. You can be wary of cookies and use dynamic IP's, but the government is pushing for regulation of ISP's to track who held a given IP at a given time. You can use an anonymizer to hide your IP, but the information it collects on you, combined with some very fancy fuzzy logic algorithms, can narrow your identity down with amazing effectiveness. (See
this thread for info on an interesting lecture by a cyber-PI Steven Rambam, who semi-jokingly called Google the closest thing to
Skynet that exists today.)
Can consumer activism keep Google's market dominance in check? It's not as simple as switching to a different brand of papertowels, because Google after all is unique - it is faster and more effective than the other search engines, the leading of which are also billion-dollar corporations. When someone tells you to Google something and you use Lycos.com instead, your Top 10 sites can be quite different. When something is hosted on Google Video, the interest in decentralizing by mirroring it on other sites or using P2P technologies tends to be rather low.
There does, however, exist a freedom-loving minority of users, say 10%, who value being in control of their information technology, and they give the passive 90% a choice of possible escape pods if they'll even choose to use them. It is those people that are behind the decentralized Free / Open Source Software movement, and you will already find some of them nagging, "whenever someone links to content hosted by Google, they should make a decentralized BitTorrent link as well". (I volunteer to be the first nagger on this forum, at least if the content is important enough to decentralize.) Instead of Google Talk and Google Groups, they'll advise you to use IRC / Jabber and Usenet. Instead of Yahoo TV listings, they'll advise you to use an application that downloads complete public domain data in XML to your local computer and searches it from there. Browser settings /
plugin can automatically reject ads and other content (especially JavaScript) from an ever-growing immense list of hosts that report back to Google and other tracking databases.
How does this attitude apply to generic Web search? Obviously it is very difficult to offer decentralized community-hosted version of Google's billion-dollar server infrastructure that spiders, indexes, searches, and caches massive quantities of information at amazing speed... but you can take advantage of the principle of factor sparsity, aka the
80-20 rule, though in this case the curve is more steep. It's probably the case that 99% of the time people search Google with the desire to find 1% of the Web-sites, or even less if intermediate junction points are used. If that small fraction can be contained within a few dozen gigabytes, then it's possible to have a Web-based (or otherwise) search server that most people will be able to host on their computer / network. Content can include MediaWiki sites, the
Open Directory Project, a digest of
Archive.org, a specially designed keywords database, and some other peer-maintained data sources. Updates to this database could be distributed through P2P technology, which would be useful if your connectivity to the Internet is lost or some Internet fragmentation ever takes place. In other words, about 99% of the time, you will be able to find what you need without a search engine, and the remaining 1% can be outsourced to some kind of a crawler bot that would try to anonymously fetch your search results from another place.
Coming up with alternative technologies is the easy part, but changing human behavior to let go of old habits is pretty hard. I'll be the first to admit to being a total hypocrite, using Google's fast and powerful auto-correct features for things as mundane as confirming a word definition...
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Topic: Is Google turning into big brother? (Read 25536 times)