google has moved further into the dark side of the force. (for trekkies: google is borg, for pony fans: google is stormking.)
there has always been a struggle within the google corporate culture, between page and clone. one struggle was about the value of a domain name.
if a person or company registers a domain name, for example example.co.za – what, if any value should the mighty and all powerful google decide to allocate to that domain name?
google does, and always has, decided the value of anything on the internet.
but, while we have not been watching closely, google has taken over a large chunk of mobile browsing. google has achieved what facebook is trying to do: to be everything to everyone. (apple has the same goal: be everything to everyone. so has all of the huge multinationals. none of them wants to simply remain in their respective space. they want to murder, dominate and destroy all competition.
so, a new, young business or african startup starts by registering their very own domain name. yet, google does not value domain names much, any longer. in africa, where the vast majority of “users” search for everything as google has removed/obscured the URL bar in the name of ‘ease of use’ : google never compensated their algorithm for this change in trend.
result: you can register (or buy) a domain name, adsfadsfadsfadsf.example.co.za and you cannot find your domain name and you have to somehow, as a startup, gain more power (or value) than the fake news or quasi anonymous forums and other ‘valuable’ rubbish that google serves up as powerful pages. never mind that on some search terms, the entire first page of results are all advertising. greedy google. bad google. webspam much?
none of these small businesses are asking google for a ‘handout’ but in a fair and open world, they would not have to do anything as adsfadsfadsfadsf.example.co.za is their own (and unique) brand name.
we do not live in a fair and open world. large multinationals are saying the words ‘community’ but they do not understand what the word means. how can you use a word when you do not understand what it means?
easy, you convince yourself that you understand the word and then you just use it.
maybe that is why google circles is such a desperate failure? google sucks at understanding ‘fair’ sometimes. maybe the ‘products’ also saw the world dominance trend? (like some products have started seeing this in fb)
just to be entirely fair, mark zuckerberg did understand ‘fair’ once. a long long time ago. this little bit of fair, collected products like a snowball rolling down a snow covered mountain… the last billion. right. that is an article on it’s own.
google: please correct. please move back to the center. please try to move out of the dark side?
google: try harder, you are great at convincing yourself that you are where you are not. you have also, some time ago, fixed yourself.
can you do it again?
