Is it my imagination or are
Google
steadily taking over the world? The famous
advertising-company-with-a-search-engine are into a vast array of
things - from
operating
systems to
mobile
phones to
web
traffic analysis. They own
YouTube,
webvertising company
DoubleClick
and
map planet Earth,
the
moon,
Mars and even
the stars. They're
in the process of granting themselves the rights to
everything
ever published - and cutting themselves in for a cosy
37%
of all e-books published in the future. What's next, you may be
wondering?
How about the internet itself
- or at least a key piece of its infrastructure? Last week Google
announced the setting up of
their
very own Domain Name Server.
So what's left? How about real estate?
Yup, they're moving in there too. On the same day as the DNS
announcement they mentioned they'd soon start
mapping
properties for sale in the UK, causing shares in a property portal
called
Rightmove to fall
"more than 10% ... the sharpest faller in the FTSE 350 index of
companies for the day". Apparently they already
map properties
in
Australia - the only downside of that being that then you'd have to
live there ...
Now I'm certainly no fan of
parasitic real
estate agents, but this Googlisation of virtually everything leaves
me a little uneasy. Are we letting one corporation have too much power?
It reminds me of a favourite quote mine;
"Power
tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great
men are almost always bad men."
- John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
(1834-1902)
I know his birth and death dates because I looked him up on ... oh damn
...
You’ll never believe who’s been
caught stealing music!
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