As much it is tempting to bash America and whatever it represents it still comes back to my face that their forefathers in the enlightenment movement produced an electoral republic known to this day as Jeffersonian democracy. Things did not quite move as the forefathers of America had envisioned and before anybody knew it America was trapped in the terror of less than enlightened Nixson, the Bushes, and root of all evil, Ronald Reagan, who were keener to serve corporate entities rather than the American public, and certainly did not feel any need for consistency between their words and they actions as they supported phenomena like the School of Americas and Middle-Eastern tyrannies while kept shouting about democracy and assassinating popular democratic South and Central American leaders like Allende.
Any form of mass media from the time of published books to newspapers, radio, and television was at first democratic and a hope for the "little man" to turn the monologue of the power structure into a dialogue. This was most apparent as the ham radios attracted thousands of citizens to form their own broadcasts, but the huge cost of ownership and turning the air waives into commodity made it impossible for the amateur broadcasters to reac h out to the world.
Internet in contrast was a new hope as it was two-ways and bottom-up by nature. No one owned it and no one regulated it but the users. A perfect model for direct democracy and the blogs were the rebirth of coffee houses in Habermas' public-sphere. Came out of this new school of communications the founder of Google with their ideals and idealism that is the defining character of the visionaries and revolutionaries, and then they have no choice to become the players of Corporatocracy.
First they turned the web-traffic into a commodity and we did not care for visibility and creativity were still connected. In fact their ownership of the digital packets of the internet were much different that the private ownership of the airwaves, for they could be used in the pursuit of independence by the individuals. Then they started letting people bid on their keywords, and even though the sponsored search results are presented with proper tags and separate location, it still can be said that one needs to know the rules of surfing before dipping into the world of Internet.
And now they have mysterious blacklists. A parallel to the time that time of the red-scare in which American Intellectuals and filmmakers were deprived of their basic rights for being communist sympathizers. Of course every American official denied it for it was unconstitutional, but the blacklisted intellectuals are still alive and indeed suffered to the edges of depression. Now google blacklists websites without even publishing the rules based on which it ranks the pages. No one knows when and what would cause an abrupt removal of a website from google indexes.
The Associated Press just recently reported that Google has being sued over such practice by another company. I found out about this when I was looking for an answer about why my blog suddenly disappeared from search engine results after being performing so well. I had started to receive hits from four three continent with people spending time in my blog and reading the content I had produced, and now it is all gone. you might find it interesting that the content of my website was about the necessity of a regime change in Iran due to the dangers the current government imposes on the country itself both from the national security perspective and social-economical. Let us not forget that this is the same Google that was not even needed to be pushed to self-censorship in China.
I demand for a release of key-point for what google looks in a site and what it blacklists as well as a center for responding to the blacklisted sites.
