A Modest Proposal Regarding Google: Separate Greed From Cognition

Abstract: I propose to legislatively force Google to separate its for-profit search from its non-pecuniary interested search. In one case one would look for $Search, say Google$.com and in the other, one would search inside Google.com. (That is Google without the $ dollar sign…)

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I spoke to the owner of a cheap hotel in the Alps. He explained to me how much money he was loosing from the already hyper wealthy, powerful and influential Google and its associated for-profit accomplices. Then I got a very simple idea to remedy part of the problem.

Google is the search engine most used around the planet. That made it into a world public utility. Now of course those who contributed most to its growth may object that Google is a private company, and they should be able to do with it as they want, like any other private company (private companies which are on stock exchanges are, confusingly, called “public” in the USA; they are not “public”: they are the property of the holders of the so-called “stock” of the company, so they are truly private!)

I had a much more thorough, truth-telling picture at my disposal. However, more than 15 years ago, I got evacuated from the then search engines because I had gone a few truths too far… (when I mentioned this to “friends”, then, they told me that was impossible, I was paranoid… Nowadays, few would believe that can’t happen: search censorship is official). So I didn’t want to repeat the experience (I got enormous censorship from Facebook in the last few months). So here above was a much milder picture: those billionaire creeps, endowed with all the powers thanks to my good friend Obama even scare people who, as I did today can hang on a cliff, 1,000 feet above the deck. We are in censoring dictatorship… At least we don’t get cut-up in pieces: see the Saudi Arabia exploit below…

But Google, by hook or by crook, achieved a world monopoly. That position is, in turn, an asset. How it became a world monopoly was by paying, directly or indirectly, by cash or by jobs, some “consulting”, some obtained just through the grossest influence peddling. Same as Apple and Facebook. (Notoriously Steve Jobs made a deal with corrupt Irish leaders to get Apple worldwide profits taxed only 1%… in violations of EU and US law…)

Thus Google owes We the People of Planet Earth, quite a bit. Besides, its spy-on-everyone practice should be unlawful: “We don’t need you to type at all because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about … Is that over the line?” – Google (then) Chairman Eric Schmidt

https://gizmodo.com/5878987/its-official-google-is-evil-now

Now if one looks for a given product or subject, one finds plenty of “Adv” (Advertising) listed on top. Then there is a whole jungle of paid transactions: Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM) search engine advertising, sponsored listings, paid for placement, and that’s before you get to services provided by the search engines themselves – Google AdWords, etc…

This is all extremely lucrative. Google has paid billions of dollars just to have Apple, its partner in crime, brandish it as its default search engine:

https://searchengineland.com/report-google-to-pay-apple-9-billion-to-remain-default-search-engine-on-safari-306082

Thus, worldwide, when people search for something, they enrich the crooks. Crooks? How else do you want to qualify those who pay very little or even no taxes, while being the richest (legal) persons on Earth. Companies as persons? Since “Citizen United” the crooked (?) Supreme Court of the US (“SCOTUS”) has recognized companies as “persons” with a right of free speech… GAFA (Google Amazon Facebook Apple) pay very little tax, whereas normal companies pay much more; that’s (greatly) how they became the richest in the world. They do not invent the science: they are technological aggregators, exploiting the work of obscure, impoverished, scientists.

Google once had a deep partnership with Apple. Then, while Steve Jobs mentored co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Schmidt sat on Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) board of directors, Android magically acquired into iphone like capabilities: do Google and Apple constitute a double headed duopoly?

One could use against them the insult GAFA use against companies who buy patents from inventors (thus rewarding inventors). GAFA and their ilk are NON-PRACTICING ENTITIES:  indeed, they, mostly, didn’t practice the research. They are just tax free monopolies exploiting the discoveries of others (who now, thanks to SCOTUS’s devastation of the Patent System, can’t exploit their own discoveries pecuniarily…).   

So Google: let’s separate for-profit search from non-profit search. Greed needs to be kept away from knowledge.

Morality starts legislatively.

Today, Trump said that Saudi Arabia’s disappearance of a well known journalist, if confirmed, would bring “severe punishment“.

Things are getting ever more complicated and rougher in Saudi Arabia, as expected (from, in part the war against Iran by proxy in Yemen, where faults are shared, and civilians facing today’s world greatest human crisis). The disappeared journalist used to be an Islamist and was a supporter of the (fascist) Muslim Brotherhood, before supporting in 2018 democracy (& incoherently, still, the Muslim Bro!) Missing Journalist Was an Insider Willing to Cross Saudi Red Lines

The famous Jamal Khashoggi rankled authorities (and maybe Muhammad Bin Salman, MBS Himself, the reigning “Crown Prince”) with socially liberal views and (intolerable) sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood…

What to do? Just as common denizens should put pressure on legislators to separate profit and search, they should insist to separate fascist regimes and supporting them… by frequenting them. For example, going to Thailand, or Indonesia, let alone UAE or Saudi Arabia, as a tourist, should be carefully considered for what it is: an active support for fascism. Evil regimes (and that could be arguably more than 100 countries) should be spurned, avoided and rejected. I was no friend of Khashoggi, because of his Islamist past.. Nevertheless, cutting up the enemy in body parts (as probably happened to Khashoggi) just because he is basically right, is enforcing terror, just as efficiently as others are enforcing terror with biased search, and for the same basic reason.

Google greed cognition, the Saudi Islamist dictatorship: time to meditate the well-known Chinese proverb:”Kill the chicken, to frighten the monkeys“. If we chicken out of all this, the mighty getting mightier, in the grossest ways, we will be all become frightened monkeys..

Patrice Ayme

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Note on something somewhat related: Calling “private” companies the shares of which are publicly exchanged, enables the wealthiest owners of the world to claim, intuitively and emotionally, that they do something “public”. Whereas, of course, the exact opposite is true. The equivalent happened when Google seized as motto “Don’t be evil” (we will do it for you…)

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Note on the author not being an hypocrite contrarily to appearances: I use Google all the time… I even use, very rarely, features of Google I know enrich it… But I would use any top performing search engine: search is a public utility…

Tags: Cognition, Google, greed