November 2007

In "Google's tar pit," an article in the Atlantic about how Google's market dominance is attracting antitrust scrutiny in Washington -- much like Microsoft did before it -- provides us a new "image" or "word picture" of Google.

The article starts with this wonderfully telling scene-setter: "

• "The lawn outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is dominated by the imposing visage of “Stan”—tail thrashing, jaws agape, a full replica of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever discovered. Stan mysteriously appeared on the lawn one morning several years ago, and is presumed by Google employees to have been a gift from the company’s quirky founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin."

So what does Google's choice of a T-rex as its corporate mascot tell us about Google?

First, non-Google paleontologists have gotten it all wrong about the T-rex.

The Wall Street Journal article yesterday: "Google plans service to store users' data" is another stark reminder of the very dark cloud on the Internet's horizon -- Google's dominant "cloud computing" capability (i.e. Google's world-leading parallel processing computing grid and storage centers, which Google uses to cache a more-than-daily copy of every page of every website on the Internet and also every Google users' clickstream history.)

• According to the WSJ, Google is planning to offer a free way to store all the information on people's computer hard drives in Google's "cloud" -- ostensibly to give consumers the 'freedom" to access their computer's files from any where, whether or not they are at their computer.

Now why would Google want to give you that type of service for "free"? Because they want even more personal and total information about you than they have in your search history, in order to sell to advertisers even more info about your most private "hot buttons."

• If you are a free Google gmail user, Google already reads your email to send you targeted advertising. 
• If you use Google's free documents or spreadsheets, you may remember from a previous post of mine that:

It appears that AP/Moveon.org/FreePress are panicking and have called for reinforcements to try and shore up their unreasonable characterization of Comcast's reasonable network managment of P2P traffic -- as somehow a net neutrality violation. 

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a new white paper ominously entitled: "Packet forgery by ISPs: A report on the Comcast affair."
• Seems like they are desperate to try and add some "cyber-detective-story-drama" and new "buzzword blackmail" to get someone, anyone, to pay attention. 
  • This latest attempt by the "guilty-until-proven-innocent" net neutrality crowd, is obviously more focused on getting media attention than it is a serious attempt to influence the FCC.
    • News flash folks -- most all of the responsible press have caught on to your media and regulatory manipulation and tricks -- and are increasingly ignoring your desperate tantrums.  

One of the EFF's main claims in their report is supremely ironic and very telling: