Google's Taking Over The World...And I Don't Like It

Oct 22

With Google increasing the size of Gmail to a bit less than 4 GB last week, I got to thinking about them as a company. They’re ubiquitous to anyone in a developed country because they are the de facto standard for search engines as of today. And they’re good at what they do, they’re real good.

However they’re obviously not all knowledgeable or almighty. They’re not God. Although I suppose that they could be a god to some. Anyways, not everything that they do is superior. But the fact that there is so much Fanaticism about Google that you should get an indication that something is up. And I’m not down with that. (Ha…ha…I guess that I still get amused by things like Up Or Down, Same Difference.)

Whatever the case, I know that for me they’re taking over more and more of my Internet profile. They have my e-mail with Gmail, they are starting to get some of my documents with Google Documents, they have a lot of my searching (although as of late I’ve been trying to be Winning With Blingo instead of going directly through Google), search all over the place with Google Maps, and I use Google Reader to peruse my RSS feeds. Update: I forgot about the obvious Google Analytics, Google AdSense, and the now Google-owned FeedBurner that I use for this blog. That’s a lot of Google products if you ask me.

But even more than the fact that Google is being used so often, they scare me for other reasons. The fact that they are creating portions where you are required to have a Google login (such as collaborating on documents) is understandable but at the same time rather monopolistic-leaning if you ask me. I’d wish that they’d allow create methods by which to create opportunities for people without having to create Google logins (easy as that may be). People need/want/love choice. And some people choose not to have a Google account. Arguments that they don’t need to use shared collaboration ignore the fact that they might need to. And then there are even scarier things like Google Web History (where they keep track of everything that you access from their site) and impinge on my personal life while also laying down the path to even scarier types of behavior.

I can see how as they get bigger and try to innovate, they could tread on territory that I’d much rather they stayed far away from. Somethings are more important than having perfectly relevant ads or a computer that can predict what you want to know.

Their well-known unofficial motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” I can’t help but get the feeling that the change of evil increases as corporations do. And Google is getting to be the big boy on the block. As big of a proponent as I might be for capitalism at work, that doesn’t mean that I always need to support the entities involved. I’m keeping my eye on you, Google.