I hesitate to suggest that Google would be able to get away with this next year when we have a new Administration, but Lina Khan is somewhat interested in breaking up Google as are plenty of smart people.
People who watch politics much closer than I have been talking about sea change, and one of the things that caught my attention is a new conservative populist spin against what we used to call ‘cyberselfish’. The conceptual illustration had a man on his knees with a gun to his head and the holder of the gun was Google saying “Aren’t we lucky that this I’m private enterprise and not government?” This is a body blow to laisez-faire capitalism. Considering what populism allows, there has got to be some moderation to what we monetize. Privatization itself is not necessarily virtuous as anyone knows who has followed the terms of service of the now awful Adobe. There is a such thing as good government. That’s the job of Congress which has probably outsourced all of its legislative guts & morals to lobbyists & pollsters. Do they even use think tanks any longer? Wasn’t someone just decrying the loss of the once-great RAND?
GO RUMBLE?