The ongoing antitrust case brought against Google by US regulators exposes once and for all the company’s long-standing efforts to alter queries to generate more advertising revenue and boost its profits.
Despite Google’s best efforts to keep the hearing secret, an annex to an internal document revealed a few days ago how the company was modifying the searches entered by users to, in some cases, “enrich” them with synonyms that could provide a better result, and in others, accompany them with trademarks that would lead to a transaction.
Let’s be clear here: we’re talking about the prostitution of “organic results” from its sacrosanct algorithm. As a result, the search engine can no longer be trusted, and should be regarded as no different to those it replaced many years ago, because, like them, it sells its results to the highest bidder. If after knowing that, you still think a Google search produces “organic results”, a term that we can only use properly in quotation marks, you have a problem.
Over the last two decades, Google has been undergoing a process masterfully defined by Cory Doctorow in January 2023 in an article later republished by Wired: the so-called enshittification, which now has its own Wikipedia page. This is something that happens to all businesses as they grow and then go public, focusing on shareholders’ interests at the expense of those of its real stakeholders. Google users were always raw material the company sold to advertisers, but at least, for a while, it gave us reliable and objective searches. But as US regulators are now showing this has not been the case for some time.
Testifying at the hearings, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said “it’s is really the Google web”, reflecting how the company has been able to build a monopoly driven by an algorithm that supposedly sought the best results, but in practice was constantly manipulated by criteria of all kinds. If you trusted Google, it’s time to stop doing so: it is rotten to the core, and there is no cure for a company whose motto was once “don’t be evil”.
Sadly, Google is merely a very large tip of a very shitty iceberg, the product of a capitalist system that is a victim of itself, of the ultra-simplistic mantra of Milton Friedman’s appalling dictum that the sole social responsibility of companies is to increase shareholder value. The result of this approach has been the death of trust and corporate sustainability, and has contributed in no small measure to the environmental, political, economic and social mess we’re in.
In short, Google’s is just another sorry spin on the “greed is good” mantra.
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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