#292 / Google And The Government

There are complaints in Great Britain that Google (and, to be fair, other U.S. technology companies, too, like Facebook and Amazon) are not paying enough taxes, and that Google and the other high tech businesses are "seducing" the government. Click the link to read an article to that effect.

The way Dave Eggers appears to see it, in his recent book of fiction, The Circle, Google may soon go far beyond any effort to "seduce" the government, and simply "supplant" it. 

When all knowledge comes through a unified internet (the spectre that Eggers describes), there won't be any more need for a "democratic education." When the circle has been closed, and virtually all of our human contacts, as well as all of our knowledge about the world, comes through the integrated network, the ruling principle becomes this: "Privacy is Theft."

It is important to retain an antidote to the truth that "we are all in this together." We are, but we are all individuals, too, and all new things, in fact, begin somewhere in the mind and heart of an individual person. 

That's where Google began. And that's why privacy must be defended.

Image Credit: 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9844225/Government-seduced-by-tech-firms-like-Google.html