Fighting back against the internet giants – Google.

Posted by Pointman on September 2, 2017 · 20 Comments 

I wrote an article recently in which I called Google the evil empire of the internet. It’s a conglomerate which of course owns Google itself, Gmail, YouTube, Hangouts and the Android operating systems. Those are just the names you know but they also own other very influential behind the scenes companies like DoubleClick that the average surfer wouldn’t recognise.

It simply owns too much of the internet and is to all intents and purposes totally unregulated. Just like the monopolies and cartels which were rampant in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is now routinely abusing its position of market dominance not just to bully its customers, but to force its own political ideas on other parties.

You must think in google approved ways on the internet or you’ll get punished one way or another. Just ask the google software engineer James Damore whom they summarily fired for expressing non-approved ideas, or the conservative Liberty Caucus website whom they told to take down a non-approved article or google would completely cut their website ad revenue.

Those are neither new nor isolated incidents of its coercive and abusive practises.

They, like nearly all the other internet giants such as Facebook, listen to everything you do on the internet and record it in giant databases. Every click, every link, every email, every online chat, everything. That’s not a vague suspicion or onset paranoia, it’s a fact and you’d be surprised at what they know or more importantly can deduce about you after a few years of internet activity.

In 2006, AOL had an accidental release, which in reality meant they were hacked, of three months recorded search data from 700,000 of its users which was then put up online and it’s there to this day. You can still visit it and all you have to do is enter a search term to see the user IDs of anybody who searched using that term. Then you can click on one of those user IDs to see every search term that person had used in those three months.

Bear in mind, what you’re looking at if you followed that link is just bottom-tier basic information which had yet to be cross-referenced to that person’s other internet usage such as email which’d link names and a lot of other personal data to all those enigmatic IDs. When your fifteen year browser history is linked to other sources of information such as email or Facebook, and rest assured it is, they own your complete life story and its surroundings.

This is top-tier information on billions of individuals around the globe. It’s been collated, cross-referenced, refined, psycho-profiled, categorised, data-enriched and all of that done automatically from your interactions on the web with firms like google that make billions by making sure whatever you do is captured and recorded for analysis and incorporation into your individual computer file.

The internet is now nothing but a vast sprawling tape recorder and any idea of some sort of personal privacy on it is a nostalgic and touching notion, a distant receding image of childhood innocence in the rear view mirror of an automobile now hurling brakeless and out of control down a highway to hell over fully digitised stepping-stones to someone else’s idea of a digital Nirvana. It’s not mine.

This presents a number of serious threats both to an individual and to liberty in general, and some of those threats are right here and now, not star jumps away into some hypothetical future. What happens if all that data about you is lost in a hack? What happens if the government asks on the sly for all data held on you, akin to what the Obama administration did in the unmasking scandal? What happens if a totalitarian government demands lists of people whose politics it doesn’t approve of? What happens if that government was refused and decides to do a state-backed hack for it anyway?

In case you didn’t know it, governments are now the biggest hackers on the planet. As required, they hack you, me, each other, friendlies, enemies and anyone they can just on general principles. In the digital age, information is demonstrably power when you can do things like shutting down a nation’s whole electricity supply grid from a single computer on the other side of the planet.

That arms race started over a decade ago and the concepts of things like arms limitation or non-proliferation don’t exist in that theatre of war, which is raging all about you as you read this though you like most people might not be aware of it. Getting at your top-tier information from Google would present no problem to them.

If you were scared or at least concerned by the preceding reality bath, you’ve got commendable survival instincts. This is no digital Nirvana we’re heading into, it’s something well beyond an Orwellian dystopia we’re already half way towards and unless we dig in our heels and say enough is enough, that’s the sort of world we’ll bequeath to our children and grandchildren. We have to wrest control back from the abusers and monopolists of the digital age. The internet is the world’s thing, not the exclusive property of a malignant, controlling and spiteful corporation with its own agenda.

All they care about is money and power. What I find totally hypocritical about this wholesale agglomeration of everyone’s personal details is the way they spin what they’re doing as somehow being altruistic, noble and all for the greater good of humanity. What a load of bollocks, it’s all about the money and power. They’re no better than the nineteenth century robber barons of steel, coal and the railroad that I mentioned previously, and they share the same arrogance of their forebears.

In one important sense though, they’re actually worse, since their monopoly doesn’t end at the borders of a country, but extends around the whole world, and while it’s nominally a publicly quoted company in the service of Mammon, increasingly it’s using its monopoly position to heavily influence politics, both domestically and around the world by brute information management. All information going in is recorded, but what’s presented back is becoming more and more politically selective.

What’s more, any article appearing on the internet which is even remotely critical of Google soon gets pulled because they simply use their monopoly position to lean on the publisher and it disappears. It’s as if it never was.

They will eventually get broken up by government, but that’ll only happen when their compulsively intrusive and anti-democratic practices have so turned public sentiment against them, a populist government will feel free to intervene. That’s more than a few years down the line, but it’s going to happen in the end.

But what’s to be done in the meantime?

Let’s get the bad news out of the way up front – there’s absolutely nobody big out there trying to stop them. We’re it, I’m afraid. Just you, me and a few like-minded individuals.

There’s currently no organ of government, regulator (there isn’t one) or business that’s up for a fight with them. It’s not that those entities aren’t aware of the dangers of a company thinking they can play the kingmaker game and control free speech from behind the safety of a dominating position on the internet, but they either think they’re containable in the government’s case or a business war would be too damaging to the bottom line in the case of commerce.

That situation will change because from what glimpses we get from inside the Goolag Technopalago, it’s obvious it’s a fanatic’s safety zone. Fanatics are always undone in the long term by the same seed of self-destruction deeply embedded into that particular psyche; they simply don’t know when to stop. Enough is never enough, far enough is never too far and their intolerance knows no bounds, especially when dealing with people who simply will not give in to a big bully.

The princes of the internet have definitely got all the power at the moment but as opponents their grand weakness is that they’re still at heart techno nerds who live in a complete bubble of uncritical adulation. They will exercise their dominant position on the internet ruthlessly but completely oblivious of any understanding of the politics of perception. Every time they exercise that power openly, it’ll be to correct the thoughts of errant children, and publicising that is what’ll destroy their reputation in the end.

Those are their two fundamental weaknesses, the chinks in the giant’s armour that are waiting there to be exploited. Head on assaults are for fools.

As I said, there is only us up against an internet Goliath like Google which may seem like a futile endeavour, but I’ve been engaged in a seemingly hopeless endeavour like that before in the Climate Wars and seen the miracle of what can happen after a few years when a few determined holdouts against the big bully use their minds, their hearts, some resourcefulness, whatever’s at hand and never throw in the towel because there’s more at stake than poor little old you and your bruised feelings.

Your emotional understanding of the real nature of the conflict you’re getting into is important, but you’ve got to commit to a long bruising fight and be prepared to lean steadily into it for an indeterminate number of years. Initially, they’re simply invincible and going to have more big wins than a barely noticed nobody like you and you’re going to have a long line of bad days. Just suck it up and resolve to catch them a while down the line.

The strategic objective is to liberate the internet from the strangle hold of the evil empire. For an individual – that would be you on your ownsome – there would appear to be only two practical avenues of attack to move even a fraction of an inch towards achieving that objective.

The first is to bring the brand itself into disrepute, to the point where it is held in silent seething disdain or outright contempt. Articles like this in the free internet for as long as it lasts will inch towards that goal and also reporting on the Goolag’s excesses as they occur, but the problem is the new media live in such fear of Google, actual reporting of their excesses is a rare thing and usually done by people leaving the media business for good. That rings a few bells with any veteran of the climate wars.

Quite frankly, it’s up to Google to drive that axis of attack as obviously we can’t. Their arrogance can be relied on to inflict that self-inflicted wound again and again and we’ve only to report it for as long as any platform we might be lucky enough to have left such as this WordPress exists before we’re driven into the darknet where the Goolag has absolutely no influence.

I’m already tooled up on the under net to keep this fight going should they buy WordPress to simply shut down the opposition voices it hosts. That manoeuvre wouldn’t be a first for the Goolag.

The second is to attack their revenue stream, which means to pollute or deny the information flow to them. Going with the pollution thing, there are a lot of criminal scams going on about mucking around with the reality of or not of clicks on adverts provided by Google which have resulted in them having to refund advertisers when so many of those clicks have been found to be fraudulent. There’s a lot more interesting stuff going on there as everybody in the know knows. I should have said is cognisant of for the last word, but I’m a sucker for alliteration.

There’s very little I can point you towards which is not below the meniscus of the undernet unless you’re on an undernet browser, but this fragmentary reference flakey though it is should give you an idea of how some individuals well below the surface net are trying to take down Google by polluting its arterial revenue stream of clicks. It’s actively attacking Google and its jugular vein of income, but engaging in that activity or ones like that is your choice.

I’ve resolved never to use Google again if possible, but prefer to use StartPage as a search engine, which actually forwards your query to Google but conceals your IP address. In point of fact, they hold no IP addresses, so any subpoena served on them is a bit pointless.

If you’re of my vintage, my buccaneering voyage across those electronic oceans began as a young man towards that feared westward horizon from the chancy harbours of the lashups that were the DARPA network, ARPANET, JANET and the like, through the screeching modem bulletin board age when the genie first and forever escaped out of the bottle of government control, to the mad explosive growth of a primitive world-wide web lashed together with painfully agreed protocols and Tim’s first-cut HTML, which would go on to become the lingua franca needed to build a global community the likes of which the world has never ever seen before.

We sailed those dangerous oceans westward into terra incognita, prepared to drop off the edge of the approved digital world if that was to be our fate, but in the sure and steady belief it was us lashed to a mast like Odysseus who would rave to be released to go to the Siren’s song. We chose to measure and then take our own risks, no Granny Google would have stood in the way. Exactly that sort of bollocks was what we were rebelling against, fleeing from.

Without any resistance, we must not allow a smug coterie of petty-minded fanatics in California to dictate the freedoms of the new frontier nor the direction in which it should be permitted to grow, and be assured we’re still in the very foothills of what it will one day become. I can’t quite see what that’ll be, perhaps mankind plus, but I definitely know I’ve got no choice but to resist the clear and present evil of the stifling thing I see standing in front of me which is Google.

Like over-controlling parents who can’t distinguish between brutal dog training and having the courage to support, give some guidance to and then have some damn trust in all those years of loving and tending, their by now first reflex is to go straight to the whip and beating the disobedient child into submission while all the time lecturing them that it’s for their own good.

A broken and beaten child is a condemnation of how small their parents were and nothing more. All they’ve done is teach them how to take a beating whether emotional or physical, and in the aftermath and underneath the crust of all that beaten down compliance, there’ll be nothing but a seething and abiding hatred of you and all you stand for which will blight the rest of their lives.

Google’s wretched vision of what this baby should grow up to be is simply too small for me. They’re not fit to have control over any child.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The Evil Empire of the Internet must be broken up.

A welcome to the dark side.

A Message in Two Parts.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

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