Why the Government Should Stop Google

Article written in 2008 after news of a possible Google/Yahoo! merger

I am not into big government. I’m not sure that anti-trust laws are good. I am sure that they are enforced selectively and not uniformly. I’m pretty sure that monopolies are sometimes good when it can lead to standards essential to our lives. I’d prefer that only the best manufacturer is in charge of making seat belts.

But the notion that Google may take over Yahoo! should make your spine tingle. The resulting Yahoogle will create an online economy totally controlled by one entity. You would have the #1 most visited site on the internet (Yahoo!, mostly for their mail feature) and the #1 search engine in the world combining. As a webmaster for an ecommerce site, I know that nearly 90% of our traffic is generated from Google searches. With the takeover, this number would approach 100%.

Google is already known to tweak their search system to favor whatever agenda they are pushing at any given time. PageRank is the religion of webmasters. What if they had total and absolute power over your online business…and there was not a thing you could do about it? Sure, Dell would survive. They have multi-million dollar ad campaigns in all media outlets. YouTube would still get traffic. As would MySpace. But what about the little guy? It would be like opening a gift shop in a prison yard. The shop might be nice, but for some reason not a lot of people get to visit.

Isn’t this akin to the day they closed the patent office because every thing that could be invented had been? And this was before the television or the integrated circuit.
In this internet age where anyone with an idea can find a voice via the blog, the short video, the publicity stunt…wouldn’t Yahoogle have the power to silence all the voices who couldn’t afford a six figure Adwords account?

I’m all for the American Dream and I do not resent a billionaire who becomes such through hard work, luck and innovation. I am not for the billionaire who parlays their success into a power play to control the largest public medium in the history of the world.

I find myself editing my language in the hope that the future Yahoogle won’t blacklist my site because of this post. How different is typing this post from writing a pamphlet in support of revolution in 1775 Boston? A stretch perhaps, but from a strictly financial sense I cannot help but consider the risk or the comparison. And the risk is real. Do not doubt that.

So as you consider who to vote for this November…encourage your local or national media to ask this question: Do you support a world where one entity controls the internet? If so, is that entity the government (that is supposedly representative of every American) or a corporation that appears to be immune to the law?

If one company owned 90% of the stock market, would the government step in? If one company owned the majority of the railroads, would the government step in…oh, wait. If one company controlled the telephone technology in this country, would…oh, another bad example.
What is the solution? Sure, Yahoogle can be the most used search engine in the world, but shouldn’t someone, somewhere, without a personal interest in the internet economy have oversight in how those search results are generated?

Shouldn’t any and all sites be allowed in…and let the user filter the criteria for their own searches? Wouldn’t it be great to filter, say, a search to include only the top 1,000,000 sites based in a particular country? Or, say, only sites that have been updated in the last week? Or sites over 1 year old? Give us the option of deciding which database we wish to search.

So spread the word and save yourself from never getting to see the next great thing. Remember, YouTube was not launched with a PageRank of 9.