Can't say that learning that Google manipulates our search queries to make up its own variant to drive monetization. There is a reason that most searches yield unsatisfactory results and there are no good alternatives to Google notwithstanding DuckDuckGo and Bing. Ultimately money controls the aperture through which people see the world. Between manufactured queries to boost ads, blacklisting of sites for no good reason and lack of other credible search options, those who pay Google for visibility control what the rest of us see or not.
More illuminating is the lack of coverage in the media of Google's antitrust trial. I was not aware of the reasons for it but they make sense from Google's perspective. By keeping this business out of the public eye, they can create a narrative that this whole things is irrelevant and so there is nothing to see.
..deference of Judge Amit Mehta to Google’s neurotic demands to keep as much as possible of the evidence presented in court out of the public eye.
Early in the proceedings, for example, he denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial. As a consequence, the hearing is only available to people who can attend in person. And even if you can attend, as the writer and former policymaker Matt Stoller reports on his BIG newsletter, “it’s hard to see the trial because huge portions are fully sealed”. This is no way for a democracy to go about checking unaccountable corporate power. Justice needs to be seen to be believed, even if Google disagrees.
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