Julian Assange Wants to Dismantle Google
Ashley Allen / 10 years ago
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks – the non-profit media organisation notorious for leaking sensitive and confidential information, becoming the scourge of the world’s governments – has outlined his fears regarding the powers of internet behemoth Google, and his desire to see the company broken up into its constituent parts, citing monopoly rules and even government collusion.
Assange, speaking to Serbian news magazine Nedeljnik, said:
One way of looking at Google is that it’s just business. But, for an American internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance, it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing, and let politics take care of itself. What’s a megacorp to do? If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original empire. Great part of Google’s image is that it is “more than just a company”, and it comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation.
It is luring people into its trap with gigabytes of “free storage”, which gives perception that it is acting contrary to the corporate profit motive. Google is often perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise, pouring funding into “corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social change,” exemplified by Google Ideas. But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of US influence. Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly intertwined with the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower.
Therefore, it would be imperative that we solve the situation with Google’s search and internet service monopoly, to break up its dominant position by regulators, and to do it before Hillary Clinton has an opportunity to become the President.
Is Assange right? Is Google too much of a global superpower, and a potential threat to commercial and governmental freedoms?
Thank you Nedeljnik for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of CoinDesk.
