Just Googling It Is Striking Fear Into Companies

The NY Times, Technology ^ | Nov. 6, 2005 | Steve Lohr

[summer]

Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, often intimidates its competitors and suppliers. Makers of goods from diapers to DVD's must cater to its whims. But there is one company that even Wal-Mart eyes warily these days: Google, a seven-year-old business in a seemingly distant industry.

"We watch Google very closely at Wal-Mart," said Jim Breyer, a member of Wal-Mart's board.

In Google, Wal-Mart sees both a technology pioneer and the seed of a threat, said Mr. Breyer, who is also a partner in a venture capital firm. The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.

Wal-Mart is scarcely alone in its concern. As Google increasingly becomes the starting point for finding information and buying products and services, companies that even a year ago did not see themselves as competing with Google are beginning to view the company with some angst - mixed with admiration.

Google's recent moves have stirred concern in industries from book publishing to telecommunications. Businesses already feeling the Google effect include advertising, software and the news media. Apart from retailing, Google's disruptive presence may soon be felt in real estate and auto sales...

...Such advances, predicts Esther Dyson, a technology consultant, will bring "a huge reduction in inefficiency everywhere." That, in turn, would be an unsettling force for all sorts of industries and workers. But it would also reward consumers with lower prices and open up opportunities for new companies.

Google, then, may turn out to have a more far-reaching impact than earlier Web winners like Amazon and eBay. "Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School...

[lawgirl]

I LOVE Gmail. It organizes everything by conversation- so you open one conversation and see all of the emails going back and forth in order. It makes everything SO organized. FRmail me if you want me to send you an invitation for a gmail account :)

[WOSG]

How is this a new thing with Google?
Internet search and internet access to information was around before google.

It's as if these people woke and realized it's not 1988 anymore.

[summer]

Re your post #76 - Thanks for that info. I really appreciate it.

[summer]

Thanks for the invite; someone else freepmailed me about it. But I am not sure if I want it, if it is true that google thinks they should own your email forever, archiving it, even after you terminate the account. Somehow that does not sound right to me with respect to a provider of email. But, again, thanks.

[dennisw]

Try froogle for prices.

[octobersky]

Hey, I use Road Runner and yahoo e-mail is extremely slow. They seriously need to upgrade their servers.

[summer]

People are already losing their jobs over what they post about their company on the Internet. Soon, if not already, as soon as you apply for a job, your prospective employer will Google up your name and what you post could very well come back to haunt you. You will not even be able to hide behind screen names. Eventually, somebody will find a way to link your screen name to your real name. Scary stuff but it's inevitable.

Well, I have read a number of news articles about that already, and there are many different views, and a number of widely divergent "facts" concerning this issue.

One view is the internet does us all a wonderful service, by enabling people to use a screen name, and speak anonymously, about matters that otherwise could not be spoken of if people had to use their real names, due to lawsuits, etc.

Another view is what you are saying, that there is no privacy. Yet, I recently a NYT article claiming even in a court action, the party seeking the real name of a blogger could not obtain it from the courts in a civil action. I meant to post that article and if I have time, I will.

Then there are others who say everything is public, and not private, as soon as you log on. So, I really don't know what to believe at this moment.

I do think the internet has totally changed the way people think, and gather information, and that such changes are very positive. And, very quick, which is what I like most about the internet. Everything you want to find out can be found out in a nano-second. Especially on a forum like this, where you have so much varied and interesting information constantly being posted and discussed.

BTW, I read an article recently concerning some social club type web site, which now tells you who stopped by your web page on the site. This has resulted in some very interesting disclosures, since people did not know, for example, that "A" was visiting their web site each day, and now wonder why. Also, "A" may not want you to know he or she is visiting your web site each day. Etc.

Thanks for your interesting comments, SamAdams76. Always nice to hear from you. :)

[summer]

RE your post #52 - I found your post REALLY interesting -- and I wonder if everyone on this thread who currently likes g-mail is aware of that fact. Thanks for sharing.

[summer]

PS Re your post #81 - see post #52 -- did you know that about g-mail?? Maybe you did; I don't know.

[summer]

re your post #77 - do you use that service? Someone else recently sent me a link to a service like that, but I really think there are many better ways to host photos on the web if you want to do that. I am not into that at all because it seems like too much of a violation of privacy if you want to actually be a private person.

[Windsong]

The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.

This just occurred to them?! Yahoo, Infoseek and AltaVista were doing this in 1995!

[summer]

Re your posts #51, #52 and my post #87

This is not the NYT article I was originally thinking of, but it's quite similar in content, as another court is protecting a blogger's identity here:

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger

October 6, 2005, Thursday

By RITA K. FARRELL (NYT); Business/Financial Desk

Late Edition - Final, Section C, Page 3, Column 1, 471 words

DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 471 WORDS -The Delaware Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that if an elected official claims he has been defamed by an anonymous blogger, he cannot use a lawsuit to unmask the writer unless he has substantial evidence to prove his claim. That standard, the court said, ''will more appropriately protect against the...

Correction: October 8, 2005, Saturday Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day on Thursday about the Delaware Supreme Court's refusal to help a city councilman identify an anonymous blogger referred incorrectly to the information he obtained from the blog's publisher. It was an I.P. address (or Internet Protocol address), which identifies a specific computer, not a Web address.

[kingu]

We have three servers for our enterprise right now; none of them host e-mail. We use gmail for all of it now. Occasionally we have to dive into the spam folder, but it is much better than the previous systems, plus it reduced a tremendous load off of our servers.

We use the gmail extension for firefox so that the e-mail boxes can be monitored for activity, and we've stuck pretty exclusively to the web interface because it is quick and responsive. The e-mail boxes are standing at 2.6gb of space available, and generally increasing at about a gigabyte a year which is plenty of expansion for us.

Just in case, if gmail was to die tomorrow, we've used the pop3 service to download to an archive machine every e-mail and response we've sent out. The conversation features also make it really easy to keep track of what you responded to a customer.

If you use a pop3 program (such as outlook) and use the e-mail relays that either your ISP or google provides, there is no reason for any consumer to know that you use an external server service. Much easier, of course, to do this on yahoo, but you pay for the privilege. (Which I do.. Ghads, I got e-mail coming out my nose.)

[Blennos]

I have stopped using Google entirely. I got tired of their agenda-pushing search results. I now use A9.com. It gives results that are just as comprehensive, and I get a discount of all Amazon.com purchases.

[summer]

More, below, from a person posting at Blogs at the Center for Internet and Society, cyberlaw.stanford:

Protection of anonymous speech online extended to Bloggers

The NYT reports that a Delaware Supreme Court has ruled that a public official who claims to have been defamed by an anonymous blogger cannot use a subpoena to unmask the blogger’s identity unless he has “substantial evidence” to prove his claim.

This is the correct decision. I was involved in some of the first cases challenging the use of subpoenas to learn the identity of anonymous posters on Yahoo message boards when I was at EFF. The problem is that in the course of normal civil litigation, courts generally do not like to get involved in the discovery process, and there is a general philosophy to disclose all information so that there are no surprises at trial. We had to convince the courts that subpoenas seeking the identity of a speaker were special, because the First Amendment protects a speaker’s right to speak anonymously. So there needed to be some burden on the party seeking the information to demonstrate that they have a valid claim before the identity of the speaker was revealed.

Here, the Delaware Supreme Court says that the burden is that the plaintiff must have “substantial evidence” to support their claim that they were defamed before the Court will allow the name of the blogger to be released. The timing is important because it prevents plaintiffs from filing bogus claims just so they can issue subpoenas to get the blogger’s name. As the Court said, this standard:

...will more appropriately protect against the chilling effect on anonymous First Amendment Internet speech that can arise when plaintiffs bring trivial defamation lawsuits primarily to harass or unmask their critics.

[summer]

re your post #93 - see your post #88.

[summer]

Meanwhile, political bloggers around the world are not having such an easy time:

Political bloggers jailed, detained

Alorie Gilbert, Staff Writer, CNET News.com via NYT

Published: November 4, 2005

Libya has sentenced a blogger to a year and a half in prison after he criticized the government in his online articles, according to Human Rights Watch.

The jailing, which the rights group reported Thursday, is one of several recent crackdowns on bloggers by authoritarian governments. The group also confirmed Friday that Egyptian authorities have detained a university student who had criticized the government and Islamic fundamentalism in his blog in what may be the first such case in the country.

Meanwhile, free press advocate Reporters Without Borders is calling on China to reopen a blog it shut down recently. The pro-democracy blog was nominated for a free speech award in Germany just days before its closure, the Paris-based organization said.

In the Libya case, a court in Tripoli convicted blogger Abd al-Raziq al-Mansuri, 52, on charges of illegal handgun possession earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said. But al-Mansuri and his family, which has denounced his arrest and sentence, say it's an attempt to silence dissent.

"The gun charges are a ruse," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "The authorities went after al-Mansuri because they did not like what he wrote."

The arrest came after al-Mansuri published some 50 articles on the U.K.-based Web site akhbar-libya.com, in which he criticized Libyan society and government. The arrest was carried out by the Internal Security Agency, who confiscated his computer, papers and compact discs and questioned him about his articles, he told Human Rights Watch. In a search of al-Mansuri's home the next day, agents found an old pistol belonging to his father, the rights group said.

The family said Libyan authorities asked them to proclaim that al-Mansuri is deranged. Human Rights Watch said the Libyan government has not responded to requests for more information about the case...

[summer]

Thanks for your comments. A couple of other people on this thread seemed to feel the same way you do. I know I feel that way with hotmail. I am just tired of seeing visually annoying ads on that site.

[Koblenz]

How would you like to be in the Real Estate multiple listing business at this point in time?

Don't count it out yet. Geac Computer Corporation Ltd. just sold its Interealty MLS software division a few weeks ago for $35 million, about 1.5x revenues, to another company. MLS may go away, but realtors are doing everything they can to stop it. Realtor organizations have already gotten a few state legislatures to pass laws banning the use of discounting.

[summer]

I read your comment and I thought: Gee, I don't know -- how many more "new laws" will some people now try to pass to stop what seems inevitable now, and in the future, due to the unlimited power of technology?