{"id":25068,"date":"2017-08-31T10:49:57","date_gmt":"2017-08-31T15:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25068"},"modified":"2017-08-31T10:49:57","modified_gmt":"2017-08-31T15:49:57","slug":"google-has-become-a-major-threat-to-democracy-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25068","title":{"rendered":"Google Has Become a Major Threat to Democracy in America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Google Has Become a Major Threat to Democracy in America<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this\u00a0prescient comment: \u201cTo love\u00a0Google, you have to be a little bit of a\u00a0monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power.\u00a0It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When Google was founded in 1998, it famously committed itself to the motto:\u00a0\u201cDon\u2019t be evil.\u201d\u00a0It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent. As\u00a0Lord Acton famously said, \u201cDespotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.\u201d Those with too much power cannot help but be evil. Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google has\u00a0recruited and cultivated law professors\u00a0who support its views. And as the New York Times recently reported, it has become invested in\u00a0building curriculum for our public schools, and has created political strategy to get schools to adopt its products.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It is time to call out Google for what it is:\u00a0a monopolist\u00a0in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google Has Become a Major Threat to Democracy in America About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this\u00a0prescient comment: \u201cTo love\u00a0Google, you have to be a little bit of a\u00a0monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.\u201d Wu […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[204,3484,378,15804,5164,6174,15806,15805],"class_list":["post-25068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-democracy","tag-dissent","tag-google","tag-liberty-krieger","tag-lobbying","tag-michael-krieger","tag-network-neutrality","tag-tim-wu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25069,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25068\/revisions\/25069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}