Google Grows Up. Now a Lobbying Powerhouse. Oh Yeah, Forgot, They are Now Buying Our Policy Frameworks as Well.

Below is my letter to the editors of the Washington Post regarding their Sunday, April 13th piece titled: Google’s Power Play.

I congratulate you for going after it. We seem to be so enamored with this sexy American success story that seems to be lulling us into thinking all is good with the world and that Google is on our side.

Think not.

As a “techno utopian” with over 30 years experience with the Internet and telecom, I love tech for its power to innovate and solve real problems. Social problems. Environmental problems. And not necessarily for the creation of the newest iPhone.

I am very concerned about Google’s amassing power and here is why.

Google is not your traditional brick and mortar company with limited expansionary potential of the ‘physical’ kind. Google is in the vanguard of digital and big data expansion in the digital realm and as such, the combination of its search engine, its capacity to integrate and create algorithms at will, and its ability to run analytics on, well, everything, makes it too powerful now and in the future.

It must be reined back.

Harvard Business Review (HBR) produced a Big Data issue in 2013. In one of the pieces there was the notion that Big Data could eventually render management unnecessary due to the power of big data and predictive analytics. And this just for starters. 

Our collective actions - every creative impulse online on our iPhones, in our cars, etc. -  are what makes this big data and it is now quickly becoming the property of the Google’s of the World.

Data and analytics are the new gold currency. And, we will need this data and analytics to help us solver our wicked problems. 

If in fact our collective actions and data are seeding the destruction of our future jobs - as HBR seems to be hinting it will do - do we want to continue to give Google that much power?  

I think not.

We are missing the forest for the trees. The combination of lack of vision from our regulators, the analog mindsets in Capitol Hill, and now the power of Google money will make Google an even more formidable monopoly.

If the choice is between the NSA scrapping my data to protect us, or Google scrapping my data to make more gobs of money that now is clearly using to buy our policy frameworks, I’ll take the NSA, thank you.

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