Google was fantastic and contributed greatly to breaking the iron grip Microsoft had on the industry. They also completely changed the way we use the Internet, pushed network and security technologies forward and to the end user, and made sure iPhone/iOS have a worthy competition in the smartphone market.
It is very sad that they went down the censorship path. Especially since the open web made Google Search a viable business in the first place.
Are you referring to http2? The binary standard they pushed to help them crawl better and make things less debugable for the rest of the network community that's mostly small entry developers?
Whatever may be happening now, this is super-revisionist history.
Google fought a large number of very lonely fights in the early dates, all in the name of consumers, the industry, and doing the right thing. It took a very large number of lumps and made a lot of enemies for doing so, but did it anyway.
I was there, in the DC office, working next to the policy director (I started the engineering side when he started the policy side. It started out as just the two of us).
I know what the strategy was, I know why it did it, because I was in the meetings to decide those strategies, and know what leadership wanted and approved.
What, precisely, is your source of information to contradict this?
Because it neither accords with history or reality, as far as i can tell.
(I left DC in 2012, so i can't speak to anything that happened afterwards)
I found Adwords for Domains a pretty questionable way to make money, as it subsidized the domain grabbing industry, and I find it hard to find the value for either advertisers or users that they otherwise claim for search ads.
I don't think your experience contradicts my comment. At the time, they thought that was something worthwhile for them to do. They definitely did a lot of things that helped their reputation in the past. Google could do no wrong. Then their priorities changed and they did different things.
I'd be wrong if Google actually went out of their way and did things that were contrary to their business interests.
So if you were there, please explain why google supports ALEC and conservative republican senators like Inhofe?
Google doesn't share anything in common with people like him, other than not wanting to be sued by the govt. When I was at Google, there was a lot of complaining about this support and no explanation.
It is very sad that they went down the censorship path. Especially since the open web made Google Search a viable business in the first place.