[throwaway41968]

Your points are sound, but I'm puzzled by your last line:

>It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.

The way I read it, it seems as though it's unfair that they get away with doing questionable stuff when "others do worse". Why yes, if you have nefarious intentions but no power to act them out, people are going to throw less "vitriol" at you than if you do act them out.

[tartoran]

Thats right. Is google the most evil? Well, no, I really don't think so. But they exert a lot of evil to the world because of their size, power and ubiquity more than others. Same with Facebook and Amazon.

I always keep in mind the motto Google carried when they stepped in: "Do no evil". I used to love Google back then, but they were something else.

They killed good products that people loved, they abused their trust, they are what they are not because they keep on innovating but because of their current size. They killed a lot of small fries who in aggregate could have given us a lot more value.

[thu2111]

What I mean is that offline businesses have been running experiments to see what works forever. They run a billboard campaign in city X and run a slightly different one in city T to compare the results. They count customers as they come through the door. They issue loyalty cards that people sign up for in their millions, making a special effort to share data with giant supermarkets because they're (effectively) given a share of the resulting revenue increase.

Nobody cares or talks about any of these things. But when Google does the online equivalents, it's suddenly the next coming of Hitler (literally, look at the comment I replied to above!).

This isn't really proportionate, it doesn't make sense, and it's quite offensive to people who work or used to work at these firms.