Dear Dr. Farber: I ran up against the Google monopoly, when I tried to use their adsense to sell bumper stickers and other schwag at AnyoneButBushIn2004.com I signed up and was getting good traffic, but within a week, my ad was pulled and I was told my money was no longer good at Google, because I was promoting hate, just because I used the phrase "Anti-Bush Bumper Stickers". I altered my ad verbiage and then they reinstated me for about two weeks, then I was thrown out again. This was in late 2003 and I felt censored and could not understand what the problem was. It seemed I was just promoting a point of view. Two weeks before the election I received an email from Danny Sullivan about how egalitarian Google had become and adsense was the way to go. I wrote to the SearchEngine guru and he followed up for me...within three days of his inquiries, they were taking my money again...no apologies nothing. I will never know what a years worth of traffic would have done for my bank account, because I did not get turned back on until a week before election day. Interestingly, all my inquiries with Democratic politicians in that year produced no results, but Danny Sullivan got me turned on in nothing flat. Hmmmmm???? Google was able to control the message and my market penetration for almost a whole year, an election year. Not sure what the answer is...being a libertarian, but there is a whole lot of power concentrated in a few hands there at Google and it concerns me. Thanks for all the good work you do with this list, ~aw Anthony@neo-liberalism.org http://www.neo-liberalism.org At 03:07 AM 6/12/2007, David Farber wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Date: June 12, 2007 2:26:22 AM EDT To: dave@farber.net Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Urgent Call For a Google At-Large Public Ombudsman

Dave, please remove my email and name from my email reply.

...

How can people who are otherwise liberatarian in viewpoint support an idea like this? Google is a company like any other...

1) Google is not just a company. If any company wants to be found by customers, wants to make sales on the web, or wants to be part of the modern world, it has to be findable in Google. People under 35 don't use telephone books, magazines, or newspapers anymore. They use Google. It's not a choice "to not be on Google". Google isn't a company: it has become the infrastructure for the delivery of information.

2) Lauren Weinstein writes about the privacy issues at Google. It's far more serious than privacy. Very few people understand how Google works. There isn't "one Google" and the results you see in your search in Miami are not the same as the results someone else sees in Seattle. Google constantly adjusts the results according to many parameters, incl. user personalization (Google Toolbar), the length of the user's search session (you may get different results during your session), your physical location, and so on.

There are millions of searches and results, and these constantly shift. This means it is literally impossible for anyone outside of Google to track the search results.

Results don't appear consistently. They can appear intermittantly. Instead of appearing 100% of the time, a result can appear for 90% of searches or 80% of searches. There is no way to track this.

It would be easy for Google to slightly suppress a result. So a search for a particular company would only appear for 97% of searches. That's a small amount, but it is significant for ecommerce. This means Google can manipulate the sales and valuation of companies.

It works the other way too. Google can "over-produce" results for a publically-traded company. Their earnings and valuation rise slightly.

3) Google's ability to suppress (or enhance) results isn't theory. Google has a secret team that suppresses the ranking of people who criticize Google. Never complain about Google in Gmail, in a public forum, or wherever your comments will be found by Google. Your rankings will slide down just a bit. You will lose web traffic to your website, your blog, or your company.

That's why I asked Dave to delete my ID from this reply.

This means that Google doesn't have to blacklist you. Nothing that blatant. They just lower your ranking. End of problem. Nobody can prove anything, because Google is an informational black hole; they never reply.

4) The privacy issues are thus both ways: the right to keep one's information private, and the right to publicize one's information. It's bad to lose privacy, but what is it when one's public persona is downranked by Google and one can't be found in searches? Professors, researchers, journalists, etc. can be removed from public access. And remember: Google doesn't have to blacklist you. They only have to lower your ranking. Or show you in the results only intermittantly.

Microsoft was (and still is) a monopoly. But you can use your copy of Microsoft Word to write whatever you like.

Google is a far greater danger than Microsoft. Write your emails in GMail, use Google word processor, the Google spreadsheet, Google video, or any of the endless Google tools, and they correlate everything about you. Google can read all of your emails, docs, and spreadsheets. By merely suppressing or enhancing results, they can make vast profits, erase careers, and literally control economies. This creates spectacular power. No company has ever been able to resist that kind of temptation.

Google needs an ombudsman? Definitely.

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