Google's threat

Just to be clear: I'm not one of those people who worries much about Google taking over the world (or, at least, becoming everybody's gatekeeper to everything in the world). Still, I think Wired News columnist Adam L. Penenberg says he's not the "paranoid type" either, but he does a great job summing up the concerns about its growing influence:

The problem is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the geeks who coded Google from the algorithm on up, are inserting themselves into our lives. They wish to accompany us everywhere, forever. They want us to see the world through Google-colored glasses.

They can do this because Google has a grip on the interface. When we boot up and get online we hardly notice that Google dispatches a cookie set to expire in 35 years. Then Google filters our reality, dictates our aesthetic, collates and catalogs our memories, chooses what information we mine. The Google experience becomes a collective Rorschach test, which shapes our worldview and affects who we are and what we will become. ...