On: Scroogled (2007)

[simonw]

You can tell this is from 2007 because Google employees are obsessing about what Yahoo! are doing. Today, it would be Facebook.

[icebraining → simonw]

Or because Google did move out of mainland China and stopped censoring searches in 2010.

[RyanMcGreal → icebraining]

This is an important reminder that events do not progress in a straight line.

[fuzzix → RyanMcGreal]

"This is an important reminder that events do not progress in a straight line"

Yes, Google+ is the intermediate step in the all seeing "identity" service depicted in this story ;)

[roc → RyanMcGreal]

Or a reminder that sometimes symptoms are misidentified as causes.

(Which is to say: Doctorow seems to have seen being in China as a big step on the way to relaxing "Don't be evil". But perhaps Google was only in China because it had already relaxed on "Don't be evil". And thus staying in China, or even going there initially, was relatively irrelevant to its corporate trajectory.)

[philwelch → simonw]

Also because it's Google that's evil, and not Facebook. Everyone worried about online privacy seems to have completely forgotten about Google since Facebook exploded.

[rickmb → philwelch]

Only for values of "everybody" that don't include Europe.

[mike-cardwell]

  mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s http://www.scroogle.org/doctorow.html|cat -n|grep -i yahoo
     231	Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already..."
     234	"No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn't the
     331	"The government said they'd block us otherwise. And Yahoo was
     333	Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the
  mike@Fuzzbutt:~$

[newsoundwave → mike-cardwell]

CLowned.

EDIT: It's supposed to be Command Line Owned, but I can't stop seeing "clown".

[jamesbritt → newsoundwave]

Maybe CL0wn3d?

Hmm. Still seeing clown. :(