Google's Internet search service malfunctioned for nearly 55 minutes Saturday morning, upending users around the world with search results that carried false safety warnings and Web links that did not work.
Wow, a whole hour without Google. And yet the earth continued to turn? Just how important is Google?
There was a great piece in the NY Times Magazine a few months back about the power that Google maintains in foreign countries as it pertains to censorship. It also discussed how items are flagged as inappropriate on YouTube.
Over the past couple of years, Google and its various applications have been blocked, to different degrees, by 24 countries. Blogger is blocked in Pakistan, for example, and Orkut in Saudi Arabia.
Google has
enormous control over a platform of all the world’s data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data.
All this talk about regulating the banks.. what about regulating Google?
The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63% of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world.
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