Google squashes competition, dominates multiple markets, and controls what people have access to on the internet. It’s been increasingly clear that more than any other tech company, Google could very well be called a monopoly. 60 Minutes investigated how Google became the massive empire that it is.
Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer that previously persuaded the justice department to sue Microsoft in the 1990’s, explains that without a search engine, you can’t access what you’re looking for online, “Google is the gatekeeper for the world wide web, for the internet as we know it.”
The Rockefeller’s found a way to impact all of society using their monopoly Standard Oil and Reback says, “Google is every bit as important today as petroleum was when John D Rockefeller was monopolizing that.”
Define Media Group found that Google accounted for a whopping 93% of online and mobile web organic search traffic worldwide, leaving Bing and Yahoo to account for a mere 6% combined. Google accounts for more than 40 percent of global online ad revenues.
Johnathan Kaplan digital media expert and director emeritus of Annenberg innovation lab at USC says, “Google’s business is advertising, and it’s most valuable asset is data collected on us. Other companies can’t compete because they don’t have the data.”
The data collected and used by Google is their most prized asset, it’s used to teach artificial intelligence, it’s used to influence the user, and a sinister video leaked would lead us to believe it’s used to adapt human behavior at a societal level now and in the future.
“People tell their search engines things they wouldn’t even tell their wives. It’s a very powerful and intimate technology, and that gives the company that controls it a mind-boggling degree of control over entire society” says Reback.
A creepy internal video from Google was recently leaked that combined thought from epigenetics with behavioral modification on a cultural level using user data. The video was made in 2016 by Nick Foster head of design at X and co-founder of Near Future Laboratory.
I couldn’t find the word epigenetics in the dictionary. An very brief explanation of it in this article would help a lot.