to catch you up: bloomberg business news published an article which attempted to humanise the crisis @google. the article included personal insights into Sundar Pichai (dude, try chocolate for motion sickness) and was very sublime in emotive coverage.
the problem is actually quite simple: it is not up to or for google to decide the morals and ethics of the planet.
the problem is not WWGD (what would google do) this problem should not be a google problem in the first place.
google as a multinational, and now evil business (evil not by intent at all, google probably intends to be non evil, just that they and their 70 000 army, has become evil by what they are and not what they do, so much) has to adapt to changing focus in real time, or as close as possible to real time, in order to match the state of flux found in societal expectations. (basically- what is hot tight now is not hot just now – similarly – what is acceptable right now may not be acceptable just now – and that from a regional (geographic), cultural (any and all cultures which google chooses to recognise) and boxed (as in community of diverse people) perspective.
the reason i care and why i even bother to vent this kak, is because i love google. and emotion is as emotion does.
so the business problems that google are solving should not exist in the first place. the only real solution to this entire problem is to break up google and place each broken section under it’s own independent operating executive. it could still all be under the google umbrella, but not under central control and the broken sections should be enticed or guided to trade with others that are not @google sections.
this will probably not happen as we do not live in a perfect world. world domination is much easier when there are fewer players. the big 5 are now worth way over 3 Trillion US Dollars. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. how the digital colonization of planet earth is going to proceed is uncertain as China, Russia, the EU and many others are starting to recognize the fact that there is a digital colonization.
the big problem is far greater than privacy, rights or even the very real threat non human intelligence brings to the party. i predict that sooner than anticipated we will make another shift. as we shifted to the information economy, the new shift will happen in the same fashion as previous shifts and will shake and as with all shifts, disrupt.
i happen to know that not even the big 5 understand what is coming.