I don't want to veer into conspiracy territory here - I absolutely think DDoS protection is a great project, and we need it no matter who it's being provided for.
But reading The New Digital Age was a creepy experience that made me stop equating Google's political standing with that of Apple or other US tech companies. It was very openly a love letter to state power in a way I haven't seen even from topical companies like Palantir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen#Involvement_on_Syr...
>In an email addressed to the deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton dated on July 25, 2012, Cohen revealed that Google Ideas was working on a project, together with Al Jazeera, to track defectors of the Syrian Army with the explicit goal of "encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition."
That is pretty frightening.
I started from Assange's scathing review and decided I had to read the thing for myself. From an inside view, it's just terrible futurism (who wants to read the news on a transparent screen facing a window?), but from an outside view it's a fascinating position paper from Schmidt/Cohen.
I'm usually unimpressed with the "tech companies are all government conspirators!" paranoia, but I do have the sense that Google has chosen a way more active role in international politics than others.
No we don't. For one, every publicly-known piece of evidence suggests that after the Snowden leaks revealed the NSA illegally tapped Google's network connections, they immediately began implementing full transport encryption both between and within their own data centers. You could say they just did that to save face, but no evidence has ever suggested Google has ever wittingly provided the NSA or other agencies with intelligence (excluding responding to NSLs and similar orders).
>Google makes its money from consumer propaganda
Could you elaborate? That's very vague.
>Of course google is responsible for what content it shows in its search engine and other products, and which content providers they reward.
Google claims their news-ranking algorithm is 100% algorithmic and that humans are never involved. Is this true? Who knows. But, again, no one has provided evidence to the contrary yet.
>You seem to have one goal here - defend Google. Somehow other corporations doing wrong is what absolved google (and probably all other corporations) in your eyes. Nice try.
Most private corporations in the US lack transparency. They create tax havens, keep proprietary algorithms secret, and don't tell the public that much about their internal structure and processes. Sometimes lack of transparency is the right of the company, sometimes it's an ethical violation, sometimes both sometimes neither. Again, you'll need to cite specific examples of Google skullduggery for this accusation to hold any weight.
>Nope, they participate in censorship and will remove and website or content from their results if some government (like the US government) asks them to.
Examples?
>while google is the master of spreading consumer propaganda and spying on people.
Equating automated behavioral analysis or ad targeting with willful communications-spying, like NSA does, is retarded. Yes, Google has been guilty of many invasive tactics and holds too much power right now, but claims that they're doing that to "suppress dissent and unpopular opinion" or "spread propaganda" will need a lot of evidence.
>The commercialization of news is the best form of censorship. You don't need to censor much when the vast majority of news is meaningless bullshit stuffed with ads and promotions, and is already controlled by organizations like Google.
How is this Google's fault in any way? Google owns a lot of those ad networks, but beyond that they're not responsible for news quality.
>Google is one of these organizations that operate without scrutiny and transparency alongside organizations such as the NSA.
Aka every other private corporation in the US? You really seem to be grasping at straws trying to make them out to be as bad as intelligence agencies.
>If you think Google will help you with anonymity, free speech, or 'unfiltered' news, you are retarded.
They're dedicating their network resources to preventing independent news websites from being censored by oppressive governments or DDoS'd by hostile entities, pro bono, and it appears to be working quite well. You've cited no specific examples of them doing the opposite, while there are many examples of them doing as they say.
I am no Google fanboy. I hate advertising and ad networks and think (or at least hope) they'll mostly die within a decade or two. I use ad blockers on all my devices and have never put a single ad on any website I've operated due to the ethical concerns.
But come on.