monopolies are bad
via GigaOM: “Google spent a whopping $2.06 million on lobbying efforts in the second quarter of 2011, according to documents filed this week per the US Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Act. … This most recent quarter represents the first time Google has outspent Microsoft in formal lobbying.”
http://gigaom.com/2011/07/21/google-facebook-lobbying-washington/
“So, it’s not like your privacy’s being invaded – in fact I talk in the book about this moment I had with Sergey, where I was handling customer service and I said, we need to talk about the privacy issue around Gmail and he just stood right in front of me and he looked at me and he said, ‘There is no privacy issue.’ Because in his mind, there was no privacy issue.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/07/12/google-employee-no-59-on-google-privacy-and-why-he-left/
Scientists Benjamin Edelman and Benjamin Lockwood of Harvard University are conducting a research of measuring the search bias of several big search engines such as Bing, Google, Ask and Yahoo. Preliminary results lead them to the conclusion that there’s a bias in Google search favouring Google’s own Internet products like Google Mail:
“Google typically claims that its results are “algorithmically-generated”, “objective”, and “never manipulated.” Google asks the public to believe that algorithms rule, and that no bias results from its partnerships, growth aspirations, or related services. We are skeptical. For one, the economic incentives for bias are overpowering: Search engines can use biased results to expand into new sectors, to grant instant free traffic to their own new services, and to block competitors and would-be competitors. The incentive for bias is all the stronger because the lack of obvious benchmarks makes most bias would be difficult to uncover. That said, by comparing results across multiple search engine, we provide prima facie evidence of bias; especially in light of the anomalous click-through rates we describe above, we can only conclude that Google intentionally places its results first. “
There you go. Finally my lobbying with the European Commission paid off :)
They are opening an antitrust case against Google. About time if you ask me (The same goes for Apple but that’s another story).
“The (European) Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services,” the EU executive said in a statement.
“The Commission said it would also look into allegations that Google sets exclusivity obligations on advertising partners, preventing them from placing certain types of competing ads on their websites, as well as on computer and software vendors, with the aim of shutting out competing search tools.”
In Germany 244,237 people have vetoed against their houses being depicted in Google Street View. That’s 2.89% of all the households in question (the biggest 20 German cities).