google skeptic

Sounds like a great idea:

Google Does Good

by Thomas Claburn, Jun 22, 2009 06:51 PM

If the U.S. government intends to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, it had better act fast. Given the pace and profile of Google’s philanthropic activities, the Justice Department may have to amend whatever legal documents have been prepared so far by changing the defendant’s name to “Saint Google.”

Google’s latest act of righteousness is the launch of All for Good, a new online platform for finding and sharing information about local opportunities to volunteer.

All for Good offers a search interface that organizes data from other charitable organizations and an API for creating applications that make use of that data.

[snipped description of how it works]

Other Google do-gooding includes various Google.org initiatives designed to save energy and the environment, the company’s mission to increase online access to information, its free services, its contributions of open source code, its occasional willingness to fight government information demands, and its ongoing effort to protect users from malware.

Given all that, does it really matter if Google maintains a search ad monopoly, wins an orphaned book monopoly, contributes to the demise of privacy and traditional media business models, compromises its principles to do business in China, and doesn’t allow users to delete search data stored on its servers?

Well, it depends who you ask.

[more] via Google Does Good – Google Blog – InformationWeek.

Is the penultimate paragraph meant as sarcasm?  No one seriously claims that Google is purely, remorselessly evil.  Very few people and institutions are.  Many of the people who work at Google are great folks.  But it does most definitely matter that Google “maintains a search ad monopoly, wins an orphaned book monopoly, contributes to the demise of privacy and traditional media business models, compromises its principles to do business in China, and doesn’t allow users to delete search data stored on its servers.”  That’s actually just a small sampling of “what matters” about Google’s practices.

A cynic would say that the Google PR department dreamt up this initiative because the company has been receiving so much bad press of late.  Probably not.  My guess is that this idea has been kicking around for a while and they just finally got it up and running.

Emphasis added.  Remember when trying to sell something you didn’t own was, like, illegal?

NEW YORK–Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was coy about exactly why he isn’t thrilled with Google’s attempt to forge its way into the digital publishing business.

“We have strong opinions about that issue which I’m not going to share,” Bezos said to interviewer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference. “But, clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited.”

In a court battle rife with twists, turns, and delays, Google has been attempting to push forward its Book Search initiative, which could potentially give the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant exclusive access to digital editions of some out-of-print books. That could, as Levy pointed out, get in the way of Amazon’s goal of offering every book ever printed in every language on the Kindle and its new, bigger Kindle DX sibling. And it sounds like that’s where Amazon has some beef.

“There are many forces of work looking at that and saying it doesn’t seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights,” Bezos said.

[more] via Bezos: We’ve got issues with Google Book Search | The Social – CNET News.

The stink from this rotten deal has become impossible to ignore.  Now we’ll see how much influence the Googleoids who have colonized the Obama Administration really have.

U.S. Steps Up Inquiry of Google Book Settlement – NYTimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — In a sign that the government has stepped up its antitrust investigation of a class-action settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers, the Justice Department has issued formal requests for information to several of the parties involved.

The Justice Department has sent the requests, called civil investigative demands, to various parties, including Google, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and individual publishers, said Michael J. Boni, a partner at Boni & Zack, who represented the Authors Guild in negotiations with Google.

“They are asking for a lot of information,” Mr. Boni said. “It signals that they are serious about the antitrust implications of the settlement.”

The Justice Department began its inquiry into the sweeping $125 million settlement this year after various parties complained that it would give Google exclusive rights to profit from millions of orphan books. Orphans are books still protected by copyrights, but that are out of print and whose authors or rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Attorneys general in several states are also investigating the settlement.

The complex settlement agreement, which is subject to review by a federal court, was aimed at resolving a class action filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from major academic and research libraries for use in its Book Search service violated copyrights.

Under the settlement, announced in October, Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

Critics said that the settlement would unfairly grant Google a monopoly over the commercialization of millions of books.

[more] via U.S. Steps Up Inquiry of Google Book Settlement – NYTimes.com.