[ocdtrekkie]

Page and Brin have repetitively again and again compromised their stated moral positions in pursuit of money. They are billionaires that put thousands of smaller businesses out of business on a regular basis. The company they operate has paid off a large number of government officials to protect them from prosecution, and they have a level of power and influence that rivals oil companies.

If you were trying to show altruistic examples of scientists and engineers, you fell very far astray.

[NotSammyHagar]

Please be specific about this payment of govt officials to protect them from prosecution. I have never heard any whisper of such a thing, I think that's BS. They have influence in that people use google.com. You can argue they compromoised to keep their power, but you need to be specific. They don't like NSLs, they just have to obey them.

[ocdtrekkie]

I'd like to strongly present these two points in particular to answer your queries. I could go into the number of Congressmen Google has paid for, but I'll just refer you to opensecrets.org there.

1. Google had a previous FTC Commissioner in their pocket under Obama (named Joshua Wright). The same former FTC Commissioner is now part of Trump's transition team for the FTC. The FTC is charged with regulating companies like Google. The best source I can give you is The Intercept, which not only describes his quadruple-revolving-door, but links to the various stages of it. And yes, an investigation of Google by the FTC was quietly closed during his tenure.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-th...

> "Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government."

2. In their original paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page argued that advertising had a fundamentally corruptive influence on search. If you compare the quote from their paper below, which indicates a strong need for an uncorrupted academic search engine, with their multibillion dollar advertising empire, the only logical conclusion is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page value money and power over any sort of highminded desire to benefit society. You'll also notice that Google displays paid ads for websites that should naturally be the top result, like showing a paid Best Buy link above the official Best Buy website search result when searching for "best buy", just as they originally indicated was a trait of a "worse" search engine.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

> "Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."