http://conservativeactionalerts.com/blog_post/show/2067That the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog is accusing the Obama administration of a "cozy" relationship with the Internet behemoth Google is hardly a surprise. I remember there were two Google executives on the speaker's platform in Chicago when Barack Obama appeared after winning the White House, a tribute to Google's assistance in helping his campaign raise millions of dollars in small contributions online.
I doubt Obama's organization could have raised all that money without Google. And I understand payback to contributors to an acceptable degree. But when the donor is Google, the largest non-governmental repository of information about citizens ever imagined, the payback takes on new dimensions. Consumer Watchdog is calling for a Congressional investigation of Google's close relationship with the National Security Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense and other government agencies -- and questioning the actions of White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin, the former head of global public policy for Google.
At the core of the complaints is the concern that the sacred doctrine of "openness," the organizing principle of the Internet, is being violated by Google via its relationship with the government. The two together appear to be engaged in clandestine and undisclosed projects, but who really believes that Google or the government will divulge their motives and operations? I don't know anyone who can describe exactly what Google does anyway -- and for sure the NSA is not about to say anything.
These issues are troublesome, but there is another problem. Google is politically slanted, leaning leftward in its public stances on gay rights and the environment -- and cemented by their total commitment to Obama's presidential campaign. I had my own confrontation with Google from 2002 to 2003 as a victim of the penchant to use their power to discredit those that didn't agree with their agenda. When entering my name in the Google search box, the usual directory of choices was replaced by a full screen shot of a hard Left web site featuring attacks on me. Worse, the negative comments were patently false, verified by comments to the site defending my views.
My correspondence with Google was an instructive lesson in obfuscation. The company explained that the site attacking me was receiving high rankings from users. I found that ludicrous. It was an effort to classify references to me in a negative light. I doubt Google central office was responsible, but someone within the organization was, more than likely influenced by the web site attacking me. I spent money on lawyers, and finally references under my name were listed the same as anyone else -- and the offending web site didn't make the cut.
Fortunately, the complaints by Consumer Watchdog are capturing the attention of Congressman Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee who represents the new breed of Republican cost-cutters swept into office last November. It was Issa who wrote a letter to Google about the role of technology advisor McLaughlin, and he certainly is not on the side of a company that had a lot to do with the election of Obama and flexes its muscles on Capitol Hill to keep the Net "open and free" as a cover to maintain their dominant position on the web -- and the attendant political power -- unregulated.
Answers to the complaints are not likely to surface -- despite Consumer Watchdog's purchase of a 540 sq. ft. video screen in Times Square to complain about Google: We are living in a world too complicated to understand, run by organizations too big to manage who can keep secrets locked in the vastness of their scope and scale. Google's founders and their breed paid lip service to the idealistic goals outlined by the founders of the Internet to be open and free to head off a take-over of the new technology by AT&T or other existing communications giants. All that blather opened the door for new communication giants, most notably Google, that functions as a secretive virtual monopoly with more power and arrogance than AT&T in its golden years before it was broken up by court action in the 1990s.
At least AT&T paid lip service to pre-digital age ethics. Google and the new breed of communications monoliths were founded -- and run today -- by youngish executives representing the first graduating classes from universities that ignored the inheritance of 2000 years of western civilization and the requirement of ethics and morality in society. Lacking a value system, the new technobrats rarely heeded the necessity of fair dealing as they ventured into the uncharted realm of the Internet.
Individuals and business people who have dealt with web practitioners can testify to the unsavory way they do business. Agreements and contracts are never what they claim. Since the web community knows the Latin of the new technology - which adds new terms constantly - customers are ill-prepared to ask the right questions, ending up in a swamp of changing contract terms and additional costs. Once a client signs on, they are stuck in the tar baby and can't get loose. The web firm owns the codes and controls the dissemination of your brand. If a customer wants out, he can't wriggle free without losing archival material and current content. It's the wild, wild west dominated by lawless gunslingers who run the new digital towns springing up along the information highway.
Topic: Google and the Government (Read 1228 times)