Bonum Certa Men Certa

Google Built an Empire -- Mostly a Proprietary Empire -- on Top of Free Software, But Now It Helps Spread FUD Against Such Software While Mishandling the Web

Video download link | md5sum 430d51e9124c7c1ceff085d6e2420099 Noise Instead of News Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: In an act of unwarranted spontaneity many people respect anything that comes from Google (any service, software, site) just like that, primarily based on the glorified brand, irrespective of actual assessment of the quality of the "product"; in the case of Google News, many dangerous assumptions are made because the company has become a filter against information and amplifier of sheer noise/webspam

The most powerful Internet company (literally run by the people who made the Internet; it employs some of them!) is undoubtedly Google. It is a bad guardian of information and a bad guardian of the open Web, which it is closing while adding DRM on top (basically imposing proprietary software on Free software users). It does many other bad things, but let's leave that aside for future videos.



Google is evil. It's a Gulag. Look what it turned YouTube into. And it gets even worse given the roots of this company, showing a lack of gratitude and no reciprocity (Summer of Code is mostly a publicity stunt, a self-serving PR ploy, a corporate dodge/decoy).

"And it gets even worse given the roots of this company, showing a lack of gratitude and no reciprocity (Summer of Code is mostly a publicity stunt, a self-serving PR ploy)."Google (Gulag) came out of "Linux" (that's very obvious to those who look at prototypes and screenshots of the original google.com, the search engine), but nowadays it exploits a lot of free labour (hence the name "Gulag") to make proprietary software which violates people's privacy. We have Android -- by far the most widely used operating system -- built with Linux, ChromeOS built based on/atop Gentoo, and Chrome itself being a mixture of many Free software projects (while Chrome itself is proprietary spyware).

How does Gulag Noise (Google News) treat Linux and Free software? Not well at all! It lists many Microsoft propaganda sites as "news" sites (aggregated in the Gulag Noise) while excluding hundreds of decent and reliable GNU/Linux-centric sites (which cover "Linux" news and stick to facts). The distortion of news (or Gulag Noise) is shown above not in the context of patents -- a subject we shall cover tomorrow as usual -- but also Free software.

"The problem is, Google News is a monopoly in that area (no other company has the resources to crawl millions of sites so fast for news updates) and with monopoly comes special responsibility.""I wade through the crap written against Free software on a daily basis," an associate told us. "I'm not sure I have a view more like a litany of complaints."

As shown in the above video, a spontaneous (unplanned/unscripted/unedited) one as usual, Google treats Linux badly (amplifying anti-Linux sites), it is a terrible guardian of information (amplifying spam and misinformation), and the Web as a whole is getting worse because of Google. Many useful features have been removed (Google News used to be mostly news 10-15 years ago), RSS gets treated like second-class or non-citizen, and it's only getting worse over time. Google News might have become noisy due to litigation (e.g. large-scale lawsuits against Fair Use) and utter neglect. The problem is, Google News is a monopoly in that area (no other company has the resources to crawl millions of sites so fast for news updates) and with monopoly comes special responsibility. Many competing search sites merely 'borrow' results from the monopoly, so the misinformation propagates far and wide.

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