Google has too much specific knowledge, too much information, and too much technological potential for it not to become a target of the state, Lew. This occurred to me several days ago. I didn’t think about how this will play out other than it crossed my mind that the state would apply its usual regulatory and anti-trust pressures and that Google people would be having to contribute to political campaigns and be lobbying. Other routes of control are calling witnesses before Congress and judicial findings that encroach on companies. But the hiring of someone from DARPA opens up a back and forth movement channel between Google and government agencies. It opens up the fusion of Google and government.
Competition to Google, innovation that surpasses Google, and the mass marketing of anonymization procedures can keep one step of the government’s continuing attempts to control the internet. But the most worrisome possibility is legislative internet control and judicial judgments that approve such control or themselves initiate it.
The internet is one of the major battlegrounds of this century between freedom and repression: internet speech and communication vs. government control, spying, and restrictions. The ultimate aim of the government is to control the content of speech and thus ideas. It is to prevent the spread of revolutionary (and yet peaceful) ideas that subvert support for the unhampered powers of government.
9:24 am on March 16, 2012
