in my opinion worrying about Google is a lot less productive than worrying about other entities and organizations.
Considering all the raw power Google has to influence public opinion on critical issues through its search results, I think it’s very productive to focus on Google. It’s far beyond time to properly regulate their near-monopoly on search.
Pew Research surveys show that most of the public is bamboozled into thinking search results are relatively fair and unbiased sources of information when that can’t be furthest from the truth. Pew results also show that the overwhelming majority of users think the results are accurate and trustworthy, which is also a farce.
For example, Google is set up to allow corporatist “think tanks” to rig and pollute their top search results with corporatist studies and points of view. If you’ve got the money and time (huge corporations have both), you can dedicate yourself to drowning out the free speech of others and manufacture consent on vital issues that affect our world today.
This affects public opinion on climacteric issues such as global climate change, more sustainable energy adoption, etc. While it’s certainly nice to see that Google (like many tech companies) invests in more sustainable energy, they do far greater harm in that area by enabling rich corporations to overwhelm nearly everyone else in manufacturing dissent against cleaner energy.
To exacerbate the situation, I’ve already showed you with my links and sources within my post above that Google uses its anti-competitive, monopolistic weight to thwart other would-be sources of search information that could better counter the corporatist newspeak and think tank “studies” that currently overwhelm search results for most of the public.
Of course, if one is to also read through my links and sources I provided, you’d also see many other far-reaching problems Google is creating and/or abetting with its abuse of its near-monopoly (that should be broken up and properly regulated, by the way).
Google is an outright attack on our privacy rights and free speech among many other issues. It’s incredibly unproductive to ignore those issues and keep our heads in the sand to promote their status quo corporatist agenda that benefits the extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
It’s about the externalities.
