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Google YouTube kingdom: Benevolent or despotic?

In “Google: Should we cheer it or fear it?” I put forth:Every day seems to bring another reason to cheer “everyone’s favorite garage band,” Google: Multi-billion dollar acquisitions (YouTube), strategic alliances (Intuit), product introductions (Google Apps)…Now may be the time to stop the cheering and start the fearing, however.
Written by Donna Bogatin, Contributor

In “Google: Should we cheer it or fear it?” I put forth:

Every day seems to bring another reason to cheer “everyone’s favorite garage band,” Google: Multi-billion dollar acquisitions (YouTube), strategic alliances (Intuit), product introductions (Google Apps)…

Now may be the time to stop the cheering and start the fearing, however.  Fear Google? Unthinkable to most, but real to many. Why? Google is steadily realizing its unflinching objective to control the world’s content (information) and then use that content of others to its own strategic and profit objectives while determining how it is made available, stored, manipulated, accessed…

Google proudly proclaims its desire for worldwide domination. 

YouTube’s “Chad and Steve” pranced around celebrating the marriage of two Internet “kings” in announcing their sell-out to Google in a YouTube “clip culture” video.

In “United States vs. Google,” Nicholas Carr speculates on a potential “defining antitrust case of the Internet era.”: 

In contrast to IBM and Microsoft, whose fierce competitiveness made them good villains, Google seems an unlikely monopolist. It’s a happy-face company, childlike even, which has gone out of its way to portray itself as the Good Witch to Microsoft’s Bad Witch, as the Silicon Valley Skywalker to the Redmond Vader. And yet, however pure its intentions, Google already has managed to seize a remarkable degree of control over the Internet…

Google’s corporate pronouncements are carefully, and, by all accounts, sincerely, aimed at countering fears that it is building a competition- and innovation-squelching empire. But its actions often belie its rhetoric. Its founders said they had no interest in launching an internet portal, but then they launched an internet portal. They said they wanted customers to leap off Google's property as quickly as possible, but then they began cranking out more and more applications and sites aimed at keeping customers on Google's property as long as possible. The company’s heart may be in the right place, but its economic interests lie elsewhere. And public companies aren’t known for being led by their hearts…

Should Google's dominance and power continue to grow, it would inevitably have a chilling effect on innovation and hence competition, and the public would suffer. 

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