I never did!  Something about that company never sat right with me and I resisted using its products and services for years.  Unfortunately, with its talons into just about everything these days, Google is nigh impossible to avoid.

It's much harder to take on Google as an antitrust case, because they were seed funded by the CIA.  Who investigates antitrust matters?  The Executive branch.  Who seed funded Google?  The Executive branch. 

OTOH, there is an Achilles heel:  the EU.  They are more about antitrust than the US.  Especially when it's US companies involved.  

An Achilles heel yes, but only to a point.  Decisions on anti-trust, etc, will affect EU members only and aren't global, which is why major US tech companies aren't going to change anything domestically... or for countries with little to no bargaining power.  In other words, it's business as usual.

There was a time when the customer was always right.  Nowadays the customer is irrelevant.

The Damon thing is what finally got me to sell off my Google stock.  Not out of a sign of protest but because I fundamentally don't have confidence that a company that is so insular in their politics is capable of doing real innovation.

If a Stardock employee did what Tab Atkins did, they'd get fired because we don't want a company culture that has such naked malice towards other people.

If I were as bad as he thought, I would have already obliterated him with the lawyers.  But unlike him and the general Google culture, it seems, I can tolerate other points of view.

Exactly why Government needs to regulate Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Google should be forced to hand over its search engine to competitors via anti-trust law.

Facebook example

Use anti-trust laws to break them up. Give facebook's source code to several startup competitors and allow free profile movement between them and interlinked connectivity between the companies. Everyone would still be connected through the Facebook platform but would not be controlled or governed by any one company. AT&T was broken into smaller companies and their infrastructure allowed to be used by competitors, so the same concept can be used by precedent against social media. You may have sprint and I have AT&T but we still use the same phone line to call each other. Same concept for Facebook. I have company A, you have company B, but we still see each other's profiles, posts and can message each other.

The Damon thing pi***s me off.   I'm not nearly as pessimistic about Google's financial future, but it's because I'm pessimistic about humanity in general.  I know of a mutual fund that follows the stocks in Congress' retirement plans, and mirrors that.  I have to admit, it makes sense.  Socially responsible?  Not so much.  But in terms of pure numbers going up, it seems a viable strategy to me.  It's the sort of thing I would do in a heartbeat if it were just a computer game, where only computer bits get hurt.

I remember when during the GW Bush presidency if you searched for miserable failure it would direct you to the white house website.  Google claimed it wasn't manipulating the results.  Mysteriously, on January 20th 2009, Obama's inauguration day, the same search no longer pointed to the White House.  This is not an urban legened!

Let's avoid politics...

The problem of course is that those of us who don't like politics shoved down our throats are having it shoved down our throats when simply want to search for something.

The short time I was in DC, the culture was interesting.  The media really is just a tool, and you really are just a number in all the lobby games they play.  It's like sure, there is free speech and free thought in America--just that you're being manipulated every step of the way.  The NSA and CIA are even developing these elaborate machine learning algorithms to anticipate exactly how you will behave in such-and-such a scenario.  They only need to be 90% right--it's just a numbers game.  And you are just a number.  It's no secret that Facebook and Google are very heavy into machine learning.  The sheep are this big ship, and they only tilt the little rudder this-or-that way a little bit. 

The lawsuit against Google by the former employee has started. I suspect a lot will be revealed.

The NSA has had two very powerful things on internet for a very long time now, Echelon and Spider.  Both are very powerful and can do a lot of things that most people wouldn't think are possible.

It's not just Google that has been manipulating your internet experience.  I noticed this begin during the health care disaster.  It was like an iron curtain fell onto the internet and everything started working a lot differently than it had in the past.  As just one example, you've probably never heard before that the specific reason the health care law was unconstitutional was that it was a violation of the 4th Amendment.  Government cannot seize your property.  Commanding you to turn your property over to whatever private entity you are ordered to turn it over too, or your property will be seized and given to that company, is a clear violation of the 4th ammendment.  Any mention of this was essentially erased from the internet in real time as it happened.  Attmepts to make posts stating this, the posts would never appear.  Any article mentioning it would not list in search engines, etc.  It was, almost obviously, a massive campaign to squash any dissent of the subject and prevent anyone from explaining what the actual issue was (it was a form of slavery called "indentured servitude").

Ever since then, the internet has been effectively controlled by people who decide what opinions you will see and which ones you won't see.  The software that does this is far more capable than most imagine it too be, much like the NSA's Echelon and Spider.  This is no longer a free country.

Was it ever?  Really?  Right from the get-go, powerful men like bankers, politicians and businessmen rose to the top and took control.  The only difference today is that now they have assumed absolute power, and in this electronic age, it's more noticeable when your freedoms and liberties are being stripped away.

Oh, and it's not just in the US.  There are other so-called democratic countries doing the same thing.... legislating against regular citizens instead of the people who should be better controlled.  In many cases that's themselves - the rich and powerful - but that's not going to happen, is it?

Every time someone tells me that we can trust Google I feel the urge to remind them that they have a culture where their employees feel free to use their inside knowledge to sabotage the search results of people they have a problem with.  I can't think of any other company that would tolerate that.

I saw at least a few people saying Google and all other search providers hand over their source code to the government and/or competitors for review.  I for one think that's an absolutely horrible thing to suggest as it'd be like telling @Frogboy he has to give the source code to all his games to say the US Government or EA for review.

What I believe needs to happen is the laws that protect us from discrimination "Gender/Race/Sexuality/Religion/Political Stance" should be expanded to state the end product served must be done so without bias in any of the above... everyone knows our news sources need to start adhering to that...

There was never a time when Google was honest or trustworthy.  The sooner people accept that the better.

I swear there’s something in the drinking water out there that makes the people justify behaving like assholes in the name of virtue.

No, there's nothing in the water.  Some people don't need justification, self-appraised or otherwise to behave like assholes.  To some it comes naturally, others were born with it, and then there are those who picked it up along the way and thought it was too darned cool not to.

In any event, they are, or become complete assholes without remorse or regret... it's a lifestyle to them.

Isn't that politics? So the opposite of left is right. That tells me where Frogboy is at.

Just sayin'

http://time.com/5380039/trump-google/

You joined in 2005, and you're just figuring that out now?