To begin on a positive note: Google has both computational mathematics that are out of this world, an order of magnitude better than anything IBM or the other usual suspects can muster, and it has cracked the cloud storage and heat and throughput issues in a way that is now an almost insurmountable barrier to entry for corporations (China and India are emergent and Brazil and Russia might have some anti-Google surprises in the making).
Google lacks human and intelligence-oriented leadership, and suffers from the usual problems associated with a bureaucracy that grew too fast on the fantasy cash from credulous investors. “Zooglers” is the term of art now used for Google people that have vested and leave to create new capabilities that “surf” on Google while doing things the Google bureaucracy could not countenance as an internal active.
Then there is evil Google. Click on the Google Evil-Bad Google logo for a page of links, or choose from among the links below. We know Larry Page personally, through the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference. He is a nice person, an engineer, with zero ethics in the sense that dorks do not know anything about etiquette. Eric Schmidt is the new monopolist in town, and Eric Schmidt has absolutely zero interest in the public interest.
It's time people woke up to the evil and bad that is in inherent in Google, which is a supranational out-of-control predatory immoral monster that makes Exxon, Enron, Worldcom and Madoff look like chumps. Combined with Google's rotten Deep Web search and Google's programmable search engines that show you only what someone else has paid for you to see (when paid to do so),
The only thing not obvious from these headlines is that Google is also claiming ownership over all “dead souls” works, articulating a new legal principle, that in cyber-space, Google is the “default owner” of anything not claimed by a living person or their estate. Follow the Frog at the bottom to Stephen E. Arnold's set of books on Google–as with most warning, we have not lacked for the warning, only for integrity in our poltical leaders who continue to droll over Google's largesse, which is itself fantasy cash from unwitting stockholders financing their own demise.
EU hearing set for September 7
Pamela Samuelson: The audacity of the settlement
William Morris advises clients to say no to Google settlement
Letters to the Court (opt-out deadline is September 4)
American Library Association takes a look
ACLU: Don't close the book on reader privacy
Copyright attorney: “Is Google too big to infringe?“
Brewster Kahle: A book grab by Google
Google-eyed U.Michigan gives away its library
Authors-publishers settlement with Google (PDF, 1.9 megs)
