Google doesn't like conservatives, what a shock

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I'm not shocked, nor am I particularly appalled by Google's latest "censorship" problems. As a private company, it is their right to choose who to aggregate and who to not include. It is hardly even an act of bonafide censorship because all they are doing is delisting website that they don't like from their aggregator, which just happens to be one of many online.

The most appalling aspect of this is that conservatives have finally stooped to the lowest levels of the left in their big for power. Since when is Google required to not be biased? How is supporting the lawsuit against them that claims that they are an "essential service" and must therefore be regulated any different than the "fairness doctrine" that forced talk radio and others to allow leftists time at conservatives' expense?
The grievances against Google can be summed as people being too lazy to attract new readers on their own and to find alternative means of making money with their blogs. That to me sounds a lot like an entitlement mentality, but then given how big the "big tent" of the right has grown these days, that's hardly surprising.
What Google is doing is stupid and should be stopped, but it should be stopped by the stockholders, not by the courts or the government. If they aren't careful, they are going to get killed just like Netscape because of their bias. It's easy to forget that Google's business is built almost entirely on advertising and that they are competing against two media powerhouses: Microsoft and Yahoo whose pockets are quite deep. All it would take to get Google very badly exposed would be for Microsoft to do with MSN what they did with IE 4.0 and declare themselves officially neutral to all legal web content.
If you want to do something about this, then stop using Google or at least stop clicking on their sponsored links and ads unless they are hosted on a blogger's website. Do your part to make them more dependent as a company on being impartial toward all legal content. It's also a good to stop using Blogger.
Legal issues aside, it shouldn't be that hard to make your own aggregator. The hardest would be getting any money to pay for the costs of operating it because the bandwidth costs alone could be very steep. You couldn't use any advertisements because the sources that you aggregate would probably have a legal entitlement to part or all of the revenue because of your use of their copyrights. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that copyright concerns are the primary reason that you don't see Google's ads all over Google News.

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5 Comments

They're offering me free bandwidth and storage. I'm not sure what if anything they're getting in return.

If they ever "delist" my blog from their search engine results I might consider it. But in the mean time, between haloscan for comments and blogger for content, I have a blissfully trouble free setup.

They're getting a bigger potential audience for their other services. If they put AdSense on all of these blogs to "help the bloggers make money blogging," they'll make a killing off of that because of how high the AdSense payment limit is. I've gotten paid by AdSense in the past, but I'm stuck around $66 right now that they owe me between ad clicks and Firefox referal fees.

Thing is, I can't bring myself to divorce myself from them because my favorite browser, Opera, is dependent on them for much of its income.

Hi. Just wondering if I can get a copy of your 2005 piece "Christianity and libertarianism." I saw it quoted elsewhere and really liked the quote, but the link to the entire article was dead.

Thanks,
Andy

As it currently stands, I seem to have lost it when I did my "blog reset" late last year. I **might** still have it on my old host, but I'm having a hard time getting my login information from them right now so I might not be able to check right away.

I found a database dump that contains that entry. I reposted it as a "page" in WordPress, so you won't see it on the main page. Here's the link, but I would advise you to read this warning first.

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