Christmas is a magical time isn’t it. I fondly remember years of waking up at stupid o-clock, dashing downstairs to find a Christmas tree almost buried in a colorful packages. I’d scour them all quickly, but ever so quietly, so as not to wake my parents who would rather I wait until they came downstairs before I started to tear packaging.
As you get older the magic, I find at least, wears off slightly. The news that Santa isn’t real shook me to my core somewhat and took a lot of the fantasy away from the whole deal, and as the years went by exciting toys in shiny brightly colored boxes gave way to ’soft’ gifts (trousers, socks, t-shirts).
Today, though I realized the magic is still there. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good” the song says, “He knows if you are sleeping, he knows if you’re awake”. Apparently the better you are the more favor Santa (who I now believe does really exist after all) will bring you.
I woke up this morning, bleary eyed and exhausted after a long 4 hour drive to family in Southern Florida. I wanted to go back to bed. I wanted to just close my eyes and sleep the whole weekend away. After the first obligatory cup of coffee (it actually took 3 before I found one I liked), I stumbled into the lounge and casually picked up the business part of the morning paper. There, on the back, was conclusive proof that Santa does exist and dreams do come true. The headline shone at me like a magical gem, full of wonder and promise for the future.
“Antitrust officials pressed to look at Google takeover”
At long last the European Union are pushing for Antitrust people to take a look at Google’s proposed 3.1 billion dollar takeover of DoubleClick.com. At long last peolpe have woken up to the realization that a company that exists solely to mine data and personal information could probably be a really bad thing when it gets to Google’s size. More than anything though, they are realizing that when you get to Google’s size, taking over something like Doubleclick just gives you way too much power than is sane when it comes to completely controlling and dominating a market. For Google to further tighten it’s grip on the demographics mining and ad serving business would be bad on so many levels. Competition would get slammed into non-existance. Privacy advocates, the sort of guys that normally I dismiss as slightly odd and a little too excited about stuff that really isn’t all that important, would actually have something really valid, and really scary to worry about.
Google is a great search engine. I admire the way that Larry and Sergey monetized the business, especially given that Google was formed at a time when search was just a commodity, a feather in the cap for companies like Lycos, Alta Vista, and Yahoo. I admire the growth Google have experience, I admire the share price they have achieved. I admire the way they grew the business and I just generally admire their whole success story.
But they reached a point a year or two ago where they realized just how big and powerful they are. When that happened they started to exploit that power. They filter search results to exclude sites that we want them to exclude (child porn, ad farms and so on), but now also to exclude anyone that doesn’t abide by their commandments. They de-rank websites of single mothers simlpy becaue they didn’t like how the website owner stuck a link on a page; you know, if you have the power to de-rank a website because you can identify something that page is doing that you don’t like, you have the power to just ignore the link juice from that page alone. You don’t need to be an ass and derank the entire fucking site.
You can’t compete with Search because Google are just so big. It’s hard, but not impossible, to compete with their advertising model because as many small companies found recently Google will go to great lengths to pretty much remove you from search results and the face of the Internet if they perceive you to be a threat. Google are looking at entering the wireless service arena. They are looking at being the world’s main repository for the human genome. They mine and store personal information on billions of people, their habits and activity online, and the acquisition of DoubleClick and their tracker technology would expand just how effectively they can mine that information, and give them an icy vice like grip on advertising online as a whole.
They have too much power. They are a company, they make money. They exist to turn a profit. The power their weild should be in the hands of something far more altruistic than it is. Time for Google to do the right thing. Allow free competition in search, and online advertising. Find a better way to be an information provider, instead of an information tyrant.
