diberry - 2:59 pm on Oct 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

I canned them 100% in 2007 when they started getting abusive with adwords, I saw then these guys were werid... no business operates like they did, especially to PAYING customers.

I was trying to get a fresh perspective on Google this morning - think about them as a business, the way the government should. It occurs to me that if Google got to decide which movies got distributed, which books got published and which TV shows got green-lit, the entire entertainment industry would collapse because there's so much "dupe content" within it. Now, the profit and loss numbers show unequivocally that people pay for dupe content. They want to see essentially the same crap over and over because it's comfortable, and the different cast/author/characters can make subtle interesting differences. And financial backers love it - they know dupe content will make money, whereas original ideas may or may not. It's called "the formula" in entertainment, not "dupe content."

This means one company's worldview is shaping an entire industry (the net). Industries should be shaped by what makes money, not by somebody's worldview.

I don't know if the government will see this as a problem for consumers and therefore a potential anti-trust issue, but it certainly is a case of the free market not being allowed to work like it should. Instead of the customers getting to decide which websites they like, Google is doing it for them.