Poll: Is it time for the government to kill Google?

[BrotherRool]

If this is true of google, it's still true of Microsoft and certainly Apple in the mobile sectors

That's true and I'd be open to people thinking that maybe those companies have got too powerful, but both of them have much more restricted scope. It's not so much that companies have this information, but that companies have all this information.

Microsoft strangely enough is the company that I fear the least, because I think their bureaucracy would stifle any attempt they made at combining the data =D They can't even get Word and Windows to look the same, the chances of them developing the ability to combine your youtube data with your phone results is low. And whilst they have both a phone and bing, penetration is low (on the other hand they've got a more successful browser)

Whereas Google already asks to use the same account for your phone, youtube, google+ and chrome (i think) and that account will stay logged in when you're searching. And they're really good at mining data

*A image map of the entire world

You may want to do some research into that first before saying that [http://www.geoeye.com/GeoEye101/GeoEye-Google/Default.aspx]

I've never heard of Google sending their own satellite into space...Yet.

Dude I didn't say they took the photos =D I said they've got the data. It's one of the less threatening

Since you put an xkcd comic in your OP, I'll respond with another.


The fact of the matter is that Google has done nothing wrong in the eye of the public, who hold the company in very high regard. Until they do something that really pisses people off, I'd say they will continue to operate as is.

That comic does say that they could use the data to do a lot of things, it's just the person who did it decided 'money doesn't buy happiness' =D And if the data is that worthless why were there requests for 14 000 users data from the US government in a six month period? Apart from anything else, the data is powerful enough and valuable enough for them to make a lot of money

 

[mitchell271]

Google are nice people. I haven't seen them do anything bad (yet) but only time will tell. I mean, it's hard to hate or fear a company that included this in their search engine.

 

[mad825]

Dude I didn't say they took the photos =D I said they've got the data. It's one of the less threatening

Anyone can get the data.

So long as you have the cash you probably could order ultra high res pictures of Area 51.

 

[BrassButtons]

Whereas Google already asks to use the same account for your phone, youtube, google+ and chrome (i think) and that account will stay logged in when you're searching. And they're really good at mining data

Google offers to let you use one account, but do they actually force you too? Or do people choose to do that because they prefer it? And are you actually forced to stay logged in while searching for things, or do people simply not bother to log out?

And it's not completely information we give voluntarily. As I said, every site with a +1 or a google ad automatically logs your presence (they do it to better target advertising). But if it wasn't, can you really not use youtube and still enjoy internet videos? There are competitors but no-one uses the competitors, if we left on mass it would be fine, but as it stands all the videos are on youtube. There are a couple of reviewers you could watch on Blip and thats about it.

Just so we're clear: you're worried enough about the information Google has on you to seriously consider government intervention, but not so worried that you'll do something mildly inconvenient like stop watching internet videos?

(why is it that I never notice typos until right as I click "post"?)

 

[DoPo]

Microsoft strangely enough is the company that I fear the least, because I think their bureaucracy would stifle any attempt they made at combining the data =D They can't even get Word and Windows to look the same, the chances of them developing the ability to combine your youtube data with your phone results is low. And whilst they have both a phone and bing, penetration is low (on the other hand they've got a more successful browser)

Your only concern ever is online privacy? And you see Microsoft as "not a threat"? Sure, it's not like they've proven incompetent of making a working system at all [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591-paper_xbox.pdf] and being a big enough company, their incompetence actually threatens the integrity of computing, you know. Which has happened. Repeatedly. IE6 is responsible for doubling the work of web developers, because they were forced to comply to the non-stardards compliant browser. Issue that continued in IE7 and was almost fixed in IE8 but not quite and IE9, while better, still managed to break some things (some of the fixes for the previous IE were now breaking IE9). Microsoft has also tried to redefine some network protocols, you know, harmless stuff which only breaks networks with Windows and non-Windows machines in (I can't recall correctly but I think it was something along the lines of Windows not sending the last acknowledgement for connection termination, which broke the protocol and any standards compliant machines are just left hanging there. Something like that).

Or, I dunno, perhaps you hope one of Microsofts mistakes to reduce all computers to useless heaps of metal and plastic - that would certainly help with privacy online. If I remember correctly, one of Microsofts mistakes was trying to take down the internet. Some misconfiguration in one of the Windowses (2000? or something?) caused them to sent all DNS lookups to the root DNS servers and hammered them a bit. I can go on and on, recognising Microsoft makes mistakes should lead to the realisation of how scary that is.

 

[BrotherRool]

Whereas Google already asks to use the same account for your phone, youtube, google+ and chrome (i think) and that account will stay logged in when you're searching. And they're really good at mining data

Google offers to let you use one account, but do they actually force you too? Or do people choose to do that because they prefer it? And are you actually forced to stat logged in while searching for things, or do people simply not bother to log out?

And it's not completely information we give voluntarily. As I said, every site with a +1 or a google ad automatically logs your presence (they do it to better target advertising). But if it wasn't, can you really not use youtube and still enjoy internet videos? There are competitors but no-one uses the competitors, if we left on mass it would be fine, but as it stands all the videos are on youtube. There are a couple of reviewers you could watch on Blip and thats about it.

Just so we're clear: you're worried enough about the information Google has on you to seriously consider government intervention, but not so worried that you'll do something mildly inconvenient like stop watching internet videos?

Ah this is an interesting divide of opinion. See I'm not worried about myself, when I've got a choice of webservices I try to make sure that I'm splitting my data between several companies and individually any person having this much data on someone isn't scary at all.

So my problem isn't that they don't let you opt out, because they do, as I edited in at the top, Google isn't an evil company and they do their best, and the EU is breathing down their necks to further restrict what it can do with people's data.

So it's not that technically you can't avoid it, it#s that factually people don't and we all know that it would take something incredibly serious for people to stop using Analytics, Android, Google, Chrome, Youtube and Gmail. So regardless of opting out or not Google has a huge databank of a large section of people's internet lives and that databank has the potential to be misused either by a country or a person (although I imagine Googles security is too good for a person. A person would have to buy out the company or take over a position in the exec that has become vacant. Far from impossible but not going to happen at the moment)

I guess if I was plotting terrorism it would all be avoidable. If I were a country having an arab spring, thats the data which a government could use Google to exploit. Countries already use Google to shut down things that happen on the internet that they want to control and it's true this would happen if Google were fractured into smaller companies, but the negotiation would take longer and they'd be unable to track people through the various services

Google are nice people. I haven't seen them do anything bad (yet) but only time will tell. I mean, it's hard to hate or fear a company that included this in their search engine.

But they do have to give governmental access to that data. So thats more people who have to be good people too

snip

Okay, I was being too flippant. I concede Microsoft would be just as scary. In fact if they wanted to start taking data from Windows they could be a lot scarier than Google would be (although thats easier to just ban outright if they tried to do it for anything more than crash reports)

 

[F'Angus]

The Government controlls more than Google does or ever will... maybe Google should be destroying them instead.

 

[Alexander Bradley]

The only thing I have to say to your entire argument is a big, whopping, "so?". Yeah, Google may have all of that power, but it's not like it's completely monopolized the market of search engines, ads, video sharing sites, and such. There are plenty of alternatives such as Bing, Metacafe, using mapquest.com instead of Google Maps, and the list goes on. It's not that Google raped and pillaged it's way to be #1, it got there by being the better competitor, being continually innovative, and through being more popular. While this may suck for other companies that are trying to pull one over Google, I'm sorry, but I don't see a problem here. All you've proven is that Google is very good at what it does and that it's probably going to be a daunting task for any other companies to try and rival it.

 

[Esotera]

Google do a lot of good things as a corporation but pay very little taxes in the UK despite enormous revenue, and they're responsible for at least 90% of advertisting, which has got way too aggressive on the internet. They have also violated privacy to collect massive amounts of information (wifi info & cookies) and should be fined until they improve their privacy policies.

I don't think they're really doing anything that qualifies as anti-trust apart from possibly Google+, which hasn't taken off yet. Whilst Google are definitely evil they do more good than most corporations & they have bloody good products that are generally the best in the market.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

Well governments should and actually are looking into Google's data mining and privacy practices which could be a cause for concern.

As for whether they are a monopoly, well they are now a very big company with a lot fingers in a lot of pies, but they still have many sizeable competitors in a lot of these areas and are not in the position when where they have almost complete dominance over a marker like Microsoft has had in the OS market. Plus Google have got to their size by being smart and competitive and thus has cut out itself a sizeable portion of various markets, and I don't think that it can be said that they have used aggressive tactics to control markets or have used their position to stifle competitors.

 

[Happiness Assassin]

A company can be as large as it wants as long as it doesn't stifle competition and as of now, they aren't preventing anyone from competing with them.

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

-Google hasn't done anything really bad yet. They could, but they've been beneficial on the whole.
-From what I can tell Google is anything but anti-competitive. Their os isn't locked down to only work with their approved software, their search engine doesn't favor their own results, they promote their browser but don't force it on people with their os (could be wrong on this, don't use ChromeOS).

This thread is starting to make Google sound like some Randian organization. I wonder if that's legitimate?

 

[Dr. Cakey]

Google is exactly like most of its competitors, only with better privacy and somewhat smaller.

Wait, what?

Remember way back in 1870 or whenever that "Google storing your search info" debacle happened? The big joke is that all the other search engines were already doing what Google was considering doing (it did, in fact, end up doing it in a somewhat truncated fashion). Google receives requests from the government for user information. I believe Google does its best to be noncompliant in that regard, but even if that's not the case, so does every other company.

And, of course, Google is minuscule compared to Microsoft or Apple. Your concern is not that Google is a monopoly, but that it's the opposite of a monopoly; that it does a little bit (well, actually, a lot) in a lot of fields rather than dominating one field. The physical world analogy would be Wal-mart. They sell everything. So obviously, no one else sells anything, because everyone just goes to Wal-mart, right?

Except Google is much cooler than Wal-mart.

 

[GraveeKing]

You know I was going to go straight to 'No' as I really like Google and think you're a good company.
But after some thought on it, it is true they control way too much and it makes a lot of new ventures uncompetitive. I think as a search engine they should stick around... but everything else they do? I agree it's way too much after some thought. Maybe a government or two should step in to split them up for the sake of a free market.

One company with too much power is never a good thing - no matter how nice they may seem, in the end all it wants is profit and people tend to forget that.

 

[BrassButtons]

So it's not that technically you can't avoid it, it#s that factually people don't

And guess what? People are allowed to make that choice. You disagreeing with said choice is not a good argument for getting the government involved.

 

[BrotherRool]

So it's not that technically you can't avoid it, it#s that factually people don't

And guess what? People are allowed to make that choice. You disagreeing with said choice is not a good argument for getting the government involved.

I'm not disagreeing with said choice, in fact I'm not disagreeing with companies collecting all that data. Just not one company collecting all that data. Apart from anything else several people in this thread asked me for a citation on governments using this data, so many people don't even realise they are making that choice

And I'm not making the call either really, I expressed an opinion I had of the situation and I think we can take away from this discussion that there was a resounding no from everyone else =D So I can't see it changing any time.

 

[Vitagen]

I clicked on this thread for the crazy, and boy, I got it.

 

[Kolby Jack]

Google is certainly making waves, but a lot of those waves ride the currents of innovation. Google has done and is doing some pretty amazing stuff, just because they can. If Google is on the path to ruling the world, then I for one welcome our new stupidly-named overlords. All hail Google!

 

[DoPo]

[And I'm not making the call either really, I expressed an opinion I had of the situation and I think we can take away from this discussion that there was a resounding no from everyone else =D So I can't see it changing any time.

I still can't figure out what your point originally was. And I still haven't voted (for what it matters) because of this. What would splitting Google accomplish? Why should it be done? How did privacy ever come to be the crux of your argument? There is just so much I don't understand here.

 

[Verlander]

Google will be dealt with like all other companies when they breach Anti-Trust laws. Currently they are still a competitive market, and are quickly reprimanded when not. Easy answer

(for the smart arses who talk about "the internet is international" they will be dealt with in the legal system that they are incorporated under, which in this case is the USA)