Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.
I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.
That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.
That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.
Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.
This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.
That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.
Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.
> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia
See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:
Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...
(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,
mandatory to be installed by law,
just in case,
for some random chase.)
Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,
where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .
( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )
What are the odds?