The Plot to Kill Google

Google, the powerful online search service, is coming under attack from enemies including Microsoft and AT&T, report Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein. The company's enemies include business competitors; traditional advertisers, who are losing revenues to online advertising; and internet service providers whose interests clash with Google's support for net neutrality. Last year, Thompson and Vogelstein note, the anti-Google coalition got the U.S. Department of Justice to kill a proposed business deal between Google and the Yahoo! company. "Microsoft hired lobbyists who knew how to drum up support among rural and Latino groups, and before long organizations as far-reaching as the American Corn Growers Association and the Dominican American Business Network had voiced their opposition," they write. For PR support in that campaign, Microsoft turned to LMG, a secretive Washington DC public affairs firm that specializes in astroturf campaigns. Thompson and Vogelstein expect the anti-Google campaign to intensify in 2009, with a focus on painting the company as a threat to personal privacy.

Comments

Here's some interesting background of the culture within Microsoft and their evangelism in the technical world from a talk given in 1996.

http://boycottnovell.com/2009/02/08/microsoft-evilness-galore/

Similar techniques are probably used with regulators.

As scary as the thought of Big Google collecting records of your every online movement is, the thought of Big Brother-Big Business silencing net neutrality and controlling your online behavior should be even scarier. Any attempt to dismantle Google and its fight for net neutrality is an attack against the Constitution of the united States and should be treated as treason.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Voltaire