Google Scares Me Sometimes

"How can you adapt your business model to Google’s specs if Google won’t tell you what the specs are?"

The problem with monopolists, of course, is that they just can’t help acting like monopolists, even supposedly benign monopolists like Google and even when they are not consciously trying to rub out the competition. They are always right and everybody else is wrong. They have disdain for their own customers, knowing those customers have nowhere else to turn. They tell small fry like Mr. Savage to stop bugging them.

That is how Microsoft acted a decade ago, and that, increasingly, is how Google is acting. Half the time, the company doesn’t even realize how egregious its behavior has become, which is why it feels so misunderstood when it is criticized.

I think most of the time Google tries "not to do evil," but I think it has become (at times) the "evil" that it purports to not be. It not only knows what is good for you and me, it has the power to impose those good intentions on you and me. Power ruins. Always.

via Insty