Category: Menacing Monopoly

As Google gets bigger… and bigger… and bigger… and continues to subvert free software, the Mozilla Foundation seems to be increasingly thinking about severing ties with the monster. Or so CNET's Matt Asay muses:

There have been rumblings that Mozilla would look to Google alternatives for the default search engine within Firefox, despite Mozilla pulling in 91 percent of its revenues from its Google partnership. Mozilla employee Asa Dotzler, though not speaking for the foundation, says that he'd welcome a switch from Google given its rising dominance over the Web.

BusinessWeek ran a story almost a year ago about the increasingly tense relationship between Google and Mozilla. Things have gotten worse since then, as Google continues to promote Chrome. The Monster of Mountain View is now encouraging developers of extensions for Firefox to develop the same extensions for Chrome, so that it can more easily poach Firefox's market share.

Mozilla should stop dithering and unhitch its wagon from Google's.

Lots of commentators are saying this is taking a page out of Mozilla's playbook (Mozilla has a deal with Google). But Mozilla wasn't the first to strike such a deal, and as Canonical has shown, it won't be the last:

The next release of Ubuntu will scrap Google as the default search engine on its Firefox browser in favor of Yahoo!, thanks to a new revenue-sharing deal between Yahoo! and commercial Ubuntu backer Canonical.

With regulators set to approve Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft, this means that Redmond will power the future of Firefox on Ubuntu, a combination with decidedly anti-Redmond connotations. The ultimate irony is that Microsoft will essentially be paying people to build a Linux distro.

Canonical's Rick Spencer announced the Yahoo! revenue deal on Tuesday, with a post to the Ubuntu developer mailing list.

Microsoft has likewise struck deals to make Bing the default search engine on certain devices (Verizon smartphones come to mind) and applications. Bing is also featured in a recurring segment on the soon-to-be-retired Jay Leno Show.

It's a bit odd that Canonical is doing a deal with Yahoo, which is basically turning over its search R&D to Microsoft and allowing Bing to power its search engine. But maybe Canonical's folks felt that dealing directly with Microsoft (which also makes Windows) just wasn't an option. Whatever. At least they're ditching Google. Next step: Quit collaborating with the Monster of Mountain View on its forthcoming Chrome operating system Big Brother portal.

Since LGB's inception, this site has contained sarcastic references to the eventual arrival of “GDrive”, an online storage “service” for users where data of all filetypes can be stored. Those references are unfortunately no longer a joke:

Google is making files more universally accessible through Google Docs, letting Google Apps users upload to Docs all file types up to 250MB, including large graphic files, .zip folders, RAW photos or personal videos shot with a smartphone. Essentially, Docs is now a universal storage repository. This proposition is not unlike the long-rumored GDrive, which since 2006 was believed to be as mythical as a unicorn until evidence of it was discovered in a Google Pack file in January 2009. Google denies that this Docs move is a move toward the GDrive.

Yeah, and not so long ago, Google was denying that it had any interest in creating its own browser. Even more recently, Google denied that it had any intention of making its own phone. And prior to all of that, Google denied that it had any plans to sell low-cost PCs running its own software, engineered with Google malware. It took a few years for the plans to materialize, but they did.

Google's product denials are just as worthless as the Monster of Mountain View's supposed commitment to the privacy and security of its users. The expansion of Google Docs is just the beginning of GDrive.

How can we tell? Because Google's appetite for user data is only getting bigger. Not everyone will buy a Google Chrome netbook with all of its contents automatically uploaded to Google datacenters, so a GDrive offering for users of other operating systems is a certainty.

So… how long before people start to realize that Google really is the modern day equivalent of George Orwell's 1984 nightmare?

Wow, didn't see this coming… (sorry for the heavy sarcasm)

New owners of the Nexus One, the latest touch-screen smartphone to run on Android, Google’s mobile operating system, have found themselves at a loss when it comes to resolving problems with the handset. They cannot call Google for help, and the company warns that it may take up to 48 hours to respond to e-mail messages.

This is what we mean when we say support for Google's products is lackluster at best and terrible at worst. Of course, the people who rushed to buy this invasive device are now reaping their reward:

Early buyers of the device, like Kiran Konathala, a 27-year-old database programmer in Long Branch, N.J., have complained of dropped calls, plodding download speeds and connectivity snags. “The hardware is great, but the software is a mess,” he said. “It’s not been a happy experience so far.”

It's a Google phone, Kiran. Did you honestly think the software was going to just work? Or that if it didn't, there would be a toll-free number you could call to get help?

Savvy smartphone users: Stay far, far away from the Google “Nexus One”, and any phone running Android. iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile are all superior, in any case.

Karma has finally caught up with Google's evil decision to do the bidding of the Chinese government on its “google.cn” site:

Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China’s attempts to “limit free speech on the Web.”

The move, if followed through, would be a highly unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies, which had for years coveted China’s 300 million Web users.

Google has not publicly confirmed that it believes the Chinese government is behind the attack, but its response pretty much suggests that, and sources inside the company are telling reporters that Google is sure it was some agents working on behalf of the Chinese government.

The Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the apparent target, or a target, of the cyberattack. Not surprising, since Google encourages its users to never delete anything, and even if they do, Google has the ability to keep permanent backups anyway, making the company's data centers a great target for very determined hackers.

So much for privacy and security.

Google's response isn't commendable, either, because the company never should have been censoring search results on the orders of the Chinese government in the first place. They're only doing the right thing now because they're mad at the Chinese. They didn't just decide one day to abide by their own self-professed principles, they were provoked into doing so.

Par for the course at Google.

They have to have a product for every conceivable market… but this one's not for standalone use. Well, not yet:

It looks like today has quickly become URL shortener day. Just moments ago, we learned about fb.me, Facebook’s new URL shortener. It’s already in use for mobile and page link sharing and spreading quickly.

One of Facebook’s mortal enemies couldn’t let the social network have all of the fun and attention, though. Google has just launched Goo.gl, the official Google URL shortener of the world’s largest search engine.

In a short announcement, the tech giant revealed that the Google Toolbar and the FeedBurner syndication service now utilize Goo.gl for link sharing.

Search Engine Journal makes the obvious point, albeit with bad English, that it won't be long before Google allows “goo.gl” to be used much like bit.ly is today:

Google said that URL shortener is currently being tested yet. Hence it was rolled out as a feature of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. But they are planning to make it available as a stand-alone product once they’ve proven it to be useful. I’m pretty sure it will soon be available on a wider audience pretty soon.

Oh, and by the way, Google says:

The Google privacy policy applies to the Google URL Shortener. Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.

In other words, screw user privacy.

So much for tinyurl and bit.ly, the pioneers of short URLs. They'll be history soon.

This is an example of why “trust us” doesn't cut it:

Google employees who asked not to be identified confirmed recently that the company was indeed developing new hardware and software for Android phones and coming up with new ways to get those phones into the hands of consumers, but they would not give more details. One Google employee said the new phone, which is being made by HTC, a major Taiwanese cellphone maker, was designed from the ground up by Google.

The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site late Saturday that Google would sell the phone directly to consumers rather than through carriers, which sell the bulk of mobile phones in the United States.

The move, if confirmed, would signal a more aggressive effort by Google to become a force in mobile devices. Google has long insisted that it is not interested in building or selling phones, saying it prefers to rely on hardware partners and wireless carriers to flood the market with a wide variety of Android-powered phones.

Google is playing its “partners” (i.e. Verizon Wireless and Motorola) for chumps. While Verizon has spent millions over-marketing a phone that runs Google's spyware-laden mobile operating system (the “Droid Does” campaign) Google has been quietly readying its own mobile device, which Verizon won't be able to cash in on. As far as Google is concerned, why should there be a middleman?

The Monster of Mountain View clearly envies Apple, Inc. and the success the Cupertino based company has had with the iPhone. It was really only a matter of time before the “GooglePhone” went from mythical device to reality.

Expect Google to increasingly begin competing with other tech companies that sell hardware in the months and years to come. It may choose U.S.-based “partners” at first, but as the likes of Dell and HP will ultimately learn, Google wants control, and to get that control, it will cut them out and do business directly with the Asian-based companies that manufacture components for phones, laptops, and desktops.

How many people would think twice about using Google if they saw this quote from the Monster of Mountain View's CEO on its home page?

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. 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.

Actually, Mr. Schmidt, as far as we know, you keep that “information” indefinitely. You can claim you delete search logs at some point, but we have no idea of knowing if that's true.

A Mozilla veteran community coordinator of Firefox marketing projects, reacting to Schmidt's comments, suggests that Firefox users ditch Google for Microsoft's Bing. (Bing is one of the alternative search engines we suggest using instead of Google).

It's nice to see that there's someone at Mozilla who takes a dim view of Google's awful business practices and lack of privacy safeguards.

Why? Well, again, it's because they want to dominate the computing world:

Google now wants to be your browser’s phone book, launching a DNS service Thursday in hopes that users will let the ad and search giant take over yet another part of their net experience.

Browsers ask Domain Name System (DNS) servers to translate URLs like http://wired.com into the web addresses where the servers are (e.g., http://69.22.138.130). That lets browsers retrieve pages and e-mail clients address e-mails to the right place. Most people simply use the DNS server provided by their ISP, and don’t even know the service exists.

OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch has written a blog post in response to Google's announcement. In it, he says:

Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet. To think that Google’s DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive. They know there is value in controlling more of your Internet experience and I would expect them to explore that fully.

He's absolutely right.

As far as Google is concerned, the bigger the better. Their mission is to compete with everybody, to the point where they have end-to-end control over a user experience. The goal? Turn the Internet into the Googlenet.

Everybody's computers run Google software and utilize Google's services. And everybody stores their data on Google's servers, where it can be indexed and mined for profit.

In such a world, there will be no privacy, for Google will know all.

Years ago, this notion would have been dismissed as fantasy. With each passing day it's getting closer to reality. When are people going to wake up and figure out what's going on?

Apparently they didn't have one. Now they do:

The search giant has quietly rolled out Google Dictionary, which presents definitions and synonyms. Exactly what you'd expect from a dictionary.

In addition to Google's own database of definitions, looking up a word on the Dictionary website provides a list of definitions pulled from a variety of academically authoritative sources (oh, and Wikipedia).

It's odd that the Monster of Mountain View was relying on Answers.com for definitions of search queries previously. Google doesn't like to outsource… their goal is to have a product for everything.

Dictionary.com, which is owned by the same company that owns Ask.com, will remain superior to “Google Dictionary”.