Google, Inc. was a notable advocate against the bill and used their considerable voice to drive people to be aware of the issue, come to their own decisions and petition their government for redress of grievance. Google was congratulatory of the 7'000'000 US citizens who stood with them to defeat this in the name of "liberty".
But back in Google's own yard, liberty was being threatened not by the Congress but by Google themselves. In a strongly worded statement to a poster on YouTube, Google used language I'd not previously seen used by the firm whose motto had been "Don't be Evil.":
Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months.Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the permanent termination of your account.The poster, whom I shall call "Nomad" as that is what he calls himself, says he is baffled as to why the takedown had occurred because it was merely a parody of Google+ policy vacillation. I have every reason to take Nomad at his word, and considerable reason to expect he'd not knowingly violate YouTube policy and standards.
The problem with censorship is that I have to take Nomad at his word, because the violating video isn't available for me to consider.
This action puts Google at variance with itself. When it came to SOPA, they were very clear that they didn't want to be compelled to police their services and be held liable for failure. In the "Nomad takedown" it appears they are happy to police content on their own terms. And the policing they do is private, does not afford Nomad with any indication of what policy he may have violated, nor does it afford any avenue for appeal. Furthermore with recent announcements from Google that they will be changing their Terms to span their myriad services there is the very real possibility that Nomad could loose access to GMail or Google Documents if he makes additional violations.
So, be careful Nomad, if you do any more of whatever it was that you did that they didn't like and that they won't describe to you, they may just permanently terminate you. In the online world that Google is promoting, "termination" isn't actual capital punishment but it has some aspects in common.
The authors of the US constitution knew too well the privations that can obtain when justice is secret, the accused does not get to know the charges against him, and punishment can be arbitrary and unusual. Google claims to want to be a significant player in the nascent cyber-society and would do well to look to history.
Evil authoritarianism can enter a bureaucracy by giving minor functionaries too much power and too little accountability. And all it takes for evil to flourish is for people of good conscience to say nothing.
Prompted by someone's comment on this article elsewhere I was prompted to write this postscript:
ReplyDelete“Never appeal to a man's "better nature." He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.” — Lazarus Long
I have trusted the GOOG more than I've trusted even my physician with the intimate details of my life over the last decade. Prior to this year I was counting on their self-interest as my protection. Do recall that we are not Google's customers, we are their product and the advertisers are their customers. I'd been perfectly content with that arrangement.
What I used to count on was that my trust of Google was of immeasurable value to them, and therefore it was in their self-interest to do everything they could to bolster my trust.
In a series of increasingly bumbling policy mistakes, they have managed to seriously dent 10 years of accumulated goodwill in a month. On their current course, they will have eroded it entirely by summer.
Two weeks ago, I purchased a personal domain so that I'd not have to rely on a firm that I have no contractual agreement with.
I really hope they can turn their mistakes around, visibly publicly, and definitively. I want to trust them.
Was entering your data into my android phonebook and it led me to see your very recently updated (2012) blog. I don't think I gave them any data on you that they didn't already possess (I hope not and ifso I apologize) - curious though to know if you now trust them more or less than in 2012?
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