The World According to Google
p2pnet view P2P | Advertising:- “Sometime in the middle of October, Google silently launched a new net domain — a barely-disguised doppelgänger to the familiar google.com — and according to the latest stats from the site watchers at Alexa, this mystery domain is now visited by nearly three per cent of all net users, making it the 44th most visited domain on the interwebs.”
Yeh? Yup.
“In other words, it’s bigger than AOL, Apple.com,red or the BBC,” says The Register.
By an amazing coincidence, almost exactly four years ago, “It seems Google, the world ’s largest advertising company, was “lusting for its own personal and private global internet,” said p2pnet, going on to quote Times Online as saying >>>
“Last month, Google placed job advertisements in America and the British national press for ‘Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in…identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fibre contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network’.
“Dark fibre is the remnants of late 1990s internet boom where American web companies laid down fibre optic cables in preparation for high speed internet delivery. Following the downturn in the technology sector during the early 2000s, the installation process for many of these networks was left incomplete. This has resulted in a usable network of cables spread across the United States that have never been switched on. By purchasing the dark fibre, Google would in effect be able to acquire a ready made internet network that they could control.”
Google already owns a large telecom interconnection facility in New York and “it’s believed from there, ‘Google plans to link up and power the dark fibre system and turn it into a working internet network of its own’,” we said, adding:
“It was also reported in November that Google was buying shipping containers and building data centres within them, possibly with the aim of using them at significant nodes within the worldwide cable network.”
Sebastian Stadil, founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group, note “1e100.net translates to ‘Google Network’ – the ever-growing Google private infrastructure that spans nearly forty custom-built data centers worldwide”, says The Register, adding:”
“According to a recent company presentation, Google intends to expand this private interweb to between one million and 10 million servers, spanning ‘100s to 1000s’ of global locations.”
‘ … all that information could be made available to the authorities’
“If you’re worried about giant online advertising company Google getting your personal data, you must be doing something you shouldn’t be doing, reckons Google boss Eric Schmidt,” said p2pnet a while back when Schmidt announced >>>
If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Then we posted Part II of Google Sneak Views in which we point out your privacy is just another ‘product’ hook for Google.
It’s scary, we went on, and, “Am I the only one that’s not eating the ‘Blue Pill’?” asked Gubatron.com, continuing >>>
If you’re not scared it’s my intention to shake you up a little bit. Let’s see what Google has done and what it’s trying to do.
Google controls over %70 of the Web Search Traffic, and over 57% of all advertising on the internet
Google started as a Search company and they’re supposedly great at it (until someone else can show us better) so everyone uses their search and that means Google knows what everyone wants on the internet, therefore giving it one hell of an advantage over everyone else when it comes to decision making of any kind. What technologies to build, What websites are successful (which services should they buy or compete against). They know about all trends of all kinds. From lottery ticket search, to medicine search, to what new website is being searched for.
Their great search capabilities made them hit gold when they started advertising next to search results. They made so much money that they were able to buy lots of ad networks including very powerful ones like DoubleClick ($3 billion, April 13 2007) which together with Adsense control 57% of the market share of Internet advertising.
Just know that pretty much almost every ad printed on the web puts money in Google’s Pockets, the company that controls search. I wonder if their PageRank algorithm also includes the eCPM of the ads shown on the target sites, if not, it’s a direct consequence of being on the top search results that you’ll get more visitors thus making your CPM pay higher… it’s all a little fucked up the amount of control they have.
And let’s not to forget that the little publisher on Adsense Gets Pwned with probably less than 10% of the cost of the click (Google gets $2 a click, you get less than $0.20 for that click), a percentage that is never shown to the publisher, a percentage that Google can adjust to their liking however they want. If you can sell your own ads, do so (and then tell me how).
On top of that, there’s tons of money to make on statistics for all of that search data.
You may want to read about a company called DemandMedia.com, in short they buy a lot of search engine data (probably Google’s included in there) so that they can generate a list of the things people want to know about every day, then they match that data to marketing databases (to see what the highest priced keywords are, data which may come from Google Adsense statistics) and they make a list of about 4,000 video titles, which they shoot and distribute EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Internet Video
YouTube… owned by Google, gets close to 100 million unique visitors every month. They’re the most influential video service on the internet. There are companies that exist and thrive (making millions a year) only because youtube is there (think again if you believe youtube is not making money). Oh and they know what you’re watching.
Privacy Stuff
Let’s forget about Search and Ad Monopoly, that’s their money maker, let’s start thinking about the creepier stuff, power.
GMail alone as of July 2009 had an approximate of 146 million unique users during one month. That’s a lot of conversations being tracked in one way or the other. Can’t imagine all the money they make on Gmail alone, since it’s one of the applications that people keep open most of the day, and that’s a lot of contextual ads right there, plus a lot of tracking on clicks to external sites linked inside the emails you read.
So they did Email great, you gotta give them that, but then they also have Groups, GTalk (instant messaging) and more recently they were talking about redefining email with Google Wave (which has been in my perspective a total failure, nobody is ever logged in or replying to the waves, it needs to integrate with email in order to replace it, maybe that’ll be the key and since they’re smart they should know this but they’re waiting for the right time…)
This year Google has gotten super scary with all the announcements they’ve made, one of the scariest is Google Public DNS, the service that converts a domain name like “google.com”, into an IP address so that your computer can connect to it.
Boasting on their excellence and good performance they’re trying to convince system administrators to switch over to Google Public DNS.
What do we know if already our local ISPs have turned off their own DNS servers and just redirected all requests to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s DNS) to save on costs and to have one less thing to manage?.
This is pretty scary because Google now would know where you go, even if you don’t use Google.com
Another really scary thing is having this company also build for you the web browser. Not only they control all the traffic, but they want to control the application that you use to browse the web.
They already own Firefox (a nice +$50 million dollar/year tax deduction) whose default search is, you guessed it… Google, and now they even want to make an Operating System that runs only their browser with the purpose of having you log in with your Google Account every time you turn on your computer (currently aimed at Netbooks, please install Ubuntu Netbook Remix and be safe)
If their plans go accordingly, they’d be controlling everything, from every request that comes out of your internet connection (DNS), to the kernel and browser in your computer, to your email, to your documents (Google Apps), to where you go (Google Maps), to where you are (Google Latitude).
And if that’s not enough, they want to give you a phone number (Google Voice) and transcribe your conversations and voice messages… but wait I forgot they’ve also built an operating system for your phone, Android, and next month they will sell their own phone.
Are you scared yet?
Other Services:
Google Healthcare (They want your medical records too)
Google URL Shortener (They want to track all the clicks inside Twitter and Facebook, they couldn’t let other companies deal with this, bit.ly FTW!)
Google Finance (They also know what stock quotes a lot of people are looking for)
Google Reader (They know what news and feeds you’re reading)
Google News (They want to control what news are read)
Google Blogger (They know what you write about, and bank on you)
Picassa (They want your pictures)
Google Maps and Driving Directions on Android (They want to know where you’re going)
Google Product Search (They wanna know what you’re shopping for)
Google Checkout (Do they have your credit card number yet?)
GMail (They know your contact list, who you talk to, who you do business with, what you want, what you hate, everything)
And so many other scary things… they must be so pissed they don’t own Facebook. Way to go Mark.
The scariest part however is that everyone is just looking at how convenient all this free services are, praising Google but not thinking if there’s a hidden agenda, it’s like nobody could ever suspect the real intentions.
At least with Microsoft you knew what to expect.
Doesn’t it all sound like an internet monopoly? It’s becoming impossible to compete with such a big monster… however like a friend said “History repeats, all Giants fall eventually”
Google wants every byte coming in and out of you, they own every major piece of the action, it’s all becoming like big media and newspapers, like the food industry which is controlled by only a handful of corporations and we really have no choice in what we eat because everything is so cheap and convenient.
Google at this pace will own the internet, or should we call it The Googlenet.
By way of a kind of footnote, in Google Sneak Views: p2pnet, Part II, “Google used to be a ‘good beats evil’ business,” we quoted Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, in Harvard Business, as saying, going on:
“But that was yesterday. Today, ‘increasingly, Google is an “evil subsidizes good” business,’ says Haque. ‘It’s not so different from Coke. The historic, globe-spanning bad stuff Coke does — selling toxic sugar-water to kids and the poor — subsidizes a threadbare patch of good stuff: a handful of spare change for charitable giving and public partnerships.
“Increasingly, the evil stuff Google does — supporting censorship, selling more and more toxic ads, squeezing suppliers and turning a blind eye — subsidizes a shrinking green patch of good stuff, like investing in the Mozilla Foundation.”
Stay tuned.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
The Register – Google doppelgänger casts riddle over interwebs, February 8, 2010
p2pnet – Google wants its very own Net, February 3, 2006
Times Online – Rumours mount over Google’s internet plan, February 3, 2006
a while back – Only wrong-doers worry about online privacy, December 8, 2009
‘product’ hook – Google Sneak Views: p2pnet, Part II, December 14, 2009
Gubatron.com – The Internet is becoming The Googlenet, December 14, 2009
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Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
February 8th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
They will replace dumb televisions with interactive devices that are as popular as TV, or even more popular.
“However, the moves towards providing equipment for as little as £60 will prove popular with home users and even governments, who will welcome the spread of the internet to homes that could not previously afford the intital costs of purchasing PCs.”
Google. Bringing 1984 closer to you.
February 8th, 2010 at 6:28 pm
If you’re worried about giant online advertising company Google getting your personal data, you must be doing something you shouldn’t be doing, reckons Google boss Eric Schmidt,”
A CEO who’s an asshole? Say it ain’t so, Joe!
February 9th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Google is evil but in world of corporate evil, they are on the good side.
They support Open Source unlike Microsoft that would love to kill all open source for their loved PC tax. They don’t try controlling everything you do with their product like Apple through DRM and special, closed, expensive interfaces.
I see a benefit to Google setting up their own backbone. Now they can compete with the AT&T’s and Bell’s to cut rates. Competition is good. I can see Google forcing the major telco’s to speed up their bandwidth and ensure Net Neutrality much more than the Comcast;s or Telus’s of the world. But as we know, with power comes the evil side.
Microsoft had to purchase Yahoo to even get close to Google for search. Yet with bribes and kick-backs, they have increased their search business.
Google pushes and supports open standards. Microsoft had to bribe the ISO committees and stack the mettings to get their not ready for prime time and we won’t use it standard through. Yet Google uses Open Document Format for their on-line apps. Same with open standards for their Cloud. Their mail supports multiple programs and they create plugins to make it work with even closed applications. Microsoft does everything to ensure that you are stuck with their product.
We are used to the evil Microsoft rants but with Google, it is new. I run No Script and I see just about every site using Google Analytic’s scripts. This is just another way of tracking users.
Well, there are ways to ruin some of the data gathering. Change your browser header information. Change your IP addresses by renewing your DHCP lease (if you ISP supports that). Use No Script and block “all things Google”. Use proxies and other tools. There are other DNS servers you can use. Heck, you can even put one on your own computers.
It is time to push for 100% SSL connections to stop Deep Packet Invasion and many of these sites data gathering. Stop, block and delete cookies, including flash cookies (Better Privacy plug-in).
Google has their evil side but they also have their good side. I see both sides of them. I don’t trust them for my privacy but I do think they are out more to support my benefits than either Microsoft or Apple.
February 9th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
http://www.seobook.com/google-hypocritical-importance-privacy
This article is linked from the article above
February 10th, 2010 at 9:52 am
At least most G products are FREE. The real evil is Microsoft.
February 10th, 2010 at 10:46 am
G products are FREE? Dream on.
Cheers!
February 11th, 2010 at 5:44 am
@ Robin.
Using evil to fight evil.
It still can come back to bite us in the ass.