Private political and social power
Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2015 12:28 pm
I've started to bring up more and more that power is wielded not only by government, but by private entities as well. Today's Fred On Everything column provides an example. What Google's doing in this article is in no way violent or coercive, but still amounts to the soft exercise of power over what people can say.
However, there is a pattern in the pulling of ads. In all three cases that I know of, the content of the sites has been of a sort objectionable to the government. Start with FOE, which has been highly critical of Washington’s wars and racial policies.
Earlier, Antiwar.com had its ads pulled by Google, again for posting a photo of an Abu Ghraib victim.
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Since Google is not actually altering the content of these sites, it is not, technically speaking, engaging in censorship. Yet if a site makes $200 a month from Google ads, pulling them amounts to charging the site $200 a month for keeping its content and, if the site depends for survival on the income, it amounts to shutting it down.
In effect, Google is a gigantic ad agency. It is as if one or two big agencies controlled the advertising in all the newspapers in the United States. When you know that Google is watching everything you write, and you need the ads, you per force find yourself thinking “Will Google like this?” You may not admit that you think it, but you do think it.
Which raises interesting questions. Google started as the project of a couple of kids in grad school at Stanford. It has become one of the most important organizations on the planet. If France disappeared, it would be of interest chiefly to venders of exotic cheeses. Tourists would look at the hole where it had been. If Google disappeared, chaos would result.
Google is essential. It is the card catalog of the world library, more powerful than the governments of many nations. It is virtually the only game in a very important town. It can subtly, or not so subtly, determine what entire populations can easily know. France cannot do this.