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Google and people deep in Silicon Valley do not have the capability to judge whether they are seen as evil because evilness is a matter of taste and ideology. Of course no one sees themselves as evil - that is never the question. The question is, "do others see us as evil?" One perspective is that monopolies are not inherently evil, because 1) It's a matter of perspective - what is Google a Monopoly in - advertising? Or web search? They may be completely dominant in web search, but they are a tiny player in web advertising in the grand scheme of things, which is interesting because that is their main business. 2) Monopolies are regularly supplanted by new monopolies, and provide stable financial ground upon which other "hard innovation," can happen, as with AT&T in the 50s and IBM in the 70s. Of course, if you are someone like Theodore Rosevelt, then you would say, "trusts, a form of monopoly, are horrible, and more competition increases the amount of innovation, so therefore Google must be broken up." However if you are a Peter Thiel type ideological person, then you might say, "Yeah well, times change and monopolies will provide a huge amount of value for the time that they exist, and then they will inevitably die out, like Sears." So, the conversation people are having around the world today, regardless of what is being talked about in Silicon Valley...is - has Silicon Valley (as a construct, rather than a physical place) created a feudalistic system, and should we create legislation to take that power and money away from them? Silicon Valley, similar to Wall Street (also a construct, not a physical place), will either innovate a way to maintain that power and convince the rest of the world that they are "not evil," or change the conversation in some way, or politics will keep moving in the direction where they eventually break up all the huge tech companies. You can scream and say, "hey, we're not evil!" all you want - I'm not sure whether that communication strategy will work or not. Post 2008 folks on Wall Street seemed to have embraced the fact that they were perceived as evil and that they monopolize banking, and it seems that their power has been curtailed very little. I could see Mark Zuckerberg and all the tech execs coming out with a unified message saying, "yeah, online data isn't about us, it's about supporting millions of other small businesses, so an attack on cookies and pixels is an attack on freedom," - a similar tack that Wallstreet takes, and I could see people going forward in believing in that. Regardless of whether spying on people is actually evil, they could create some argument that it's a necessary evil, and therefore is not evil, and get anyone who might oppose them politically on their side, and hence we will continue forward in the United States having a completely separate legislative philosophy around data than Europe. |
It's not clear at all that Google will be safer from anti-trust investigation now that Thiel has political influence either:
> “Peter has indicated that if he takes the P.I.A.B. position he intends to take a comprehensive look at the U.S. intelligence community’s information-technology architecture. He is super-concerned about Amazon and Google”—and Facebook, less so. “He feels they have become New Age global fascists in terms of how they’re controlling the media, how they’re controlling information flows to the public, even how they’re purging people from think tanks. He’s concerned about the monopolistic tendencies of [all three] companies and how they deny economic well-being to people they disagree with.” When I asked this source how likely it is that Thiel will assume the post, he answered, “He’s heavily leaning toward it. He feels there’s a lot of good he can do and it’s worth putting up with all the bullshit and scrutiny that will accompany his appointment.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/donald-trump-peter-t...