fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Seems that everybody’s late darling Google is experiencing quite a bit of acceleration in terms of losing public media love. And while it remains to be seen if U.S. politics will follow up, specifically whether the Obama administration will actually endorse monopoly investigations (as indicated in this NYT piece by Stephen Labaton: “Administration Plans to Strengthen Antitrust Rules”), the wedding party is most definitely over.

Update: Another good overview of the current state of affairs re possible/likely anti-trust proceedings is offered by SearchEngineLand writer Greg Sterling in “Google’s Anti-Trust Problem Appears Very Real”.

One indisputable gem is ZDNet’s Richard Koman’s succint though fairly tame “Google’s entire business model is the commoditization of other people’s content”. (Yes, that’s how you define a parasite, by the way…)

Privacy maven Bruce Schneier outlines the wider context of modern day privacy protection issues without focusing solely on Google in his “Privacy in the Age of Persistence”. (Here, you may want to read yours truly’s comment.)

But there’s worse, and in the venerable Financial Times, no less. FT writer Willem Buiter is anything but a nobody, too: Professor of European Political Economy, London School of Economics and Political Science; former chief economist of the EBRD, former external member of the MPC etc. etc. Here’s what he wrote (among many other things) in his article “Gagging on Google”:

Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women’s rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property.  The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business.  It would not be missed.

In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.

While Buiter only addresses a minute segment of the issues at hand, it’s a pretty strong, unabashedly opinionated piece of the kind you wouldn’t normally expect on the FT site. You may also want to read my contributory comment (last time I checked it was #53 though it had been #52 before that), pointing to our own take on things.

Unsurprisingly, Google’s spam mullah Matt Cutts was anything but amused, complaining about it on Twitter (timestamp is mine):

Speaking Google officialdom: in my recent piece The Data Kraken: Google’s Deadly Sins – and What They Mean to You I pointed – and linked – to Google’s own view of their Google Voice service. This was routine stuff (name your sources, try to present a balanced view of controversial topics, and all that) and there was no black hat hanky-panky of any kind involved. This is important to mention because it came as a bit of a surprise (and some considerable amusement) not merely to us but to many other members of the SEO community when Google’s official blog suddenly displayed a trackback link (nofollowed) to our post. Here’s the screenshot:

And as we don’t want to compromise our very own cloaked sleeper in the ‘Plex, we’ll surmise here that this link wasn’t intentional to begin with and probably automated.

Expectably, the fun didn’t last long (roughly for a couple of hours or so) until they pulled the link again. And oh greatness: that link actually brought us exactly 9 unique visitors…

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