Over 1,000 Google employees sign petition to use market dominance to starve Breitbart of ad revenue

Google has a knife that it holds over the jugular vein of all internet publications that depend on advertising revenue. It holds a dominant position in the digital advertising market and could, by denying ad revenue to any digital publication it targets, drive that voice out of business.

Now, according to information from Project Veritas, a very large number of Google employees are demanding that Google drive Breitbart.com out of business. Alana Mastrangelo reports at Breitbart:

An internal Google petition "to end Google's business with Breitbart" was recently leaked to Project Veritas. The petition — which over 1,000 Google employees have signed — calls for labeling Breitbart News as "prohibited content" to block the news outlet from "all Google-served ads."

A Google insider says that a petition has been circulated among Google employees, calling on banning Breitbart News from Google's advertising networks, in order to cut off news platform from ad revenue, according to a recent report by Project Veritas.

This is nothing new, and it is not exactly a bottom-up effort in its origin:

Last year, emails leaked exclusively to Breitbart News revealed a similar story, in which a group of Google employees — with encouragement from the tech giant's director of monetization — had begun plotting the downfall of the website through removing Breitbart News from Google's market-dominating ad services.

This should be an obvious danger to free speech. True, Google is not the government, so it may claim that the First Amendment does not apply to it. But Google also enjoys government protection:

"This is important, because Google claims protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act," noted O'Keefe, "Basically, they say they are impartial publishers of content and therefore, not liable for any content

I think it would be DISQUS since that's what they use for comments; they have their own moderators as well as DISQUS.

Banning would be like:

We welcome thoughtful responses and inputs. Comments with personally identifiable information, harassment, threats, or other violations will be removed.

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.

https://www.breitbart.com/contact-us/comment-feedback/

What did you post to have you being banned?

Agree, they are public utilities in so far as people now depend on them for a functional life in this world of global interconnectivity. That said I am all for government imposing rules defining what they can and cannot do. If it isn’t a censored site at all I’d be more likely to contribute a monthly fee to sustain it, much like our utilities.

I feel it’s the governments job to ensure our 1a rights are not trampled upon. Currently they are and will continue with impunity until something is done to prevent this. I think we are going down a rabbit hole which will prove difficult/dangerous to get out of.

What did you post to have you being banned?

That's the problem- I don't know. When I used contact-us on their site and asked (several times over a couple of weeks) they didn't give me the courtesy of a reply.

As far as DISQUS is concerned, I've used it on other sites since then without any problems.

Once again, let us worry about massive communications corporations's "property rights" to a publicly used communications infrastructure instead of worrying about how this control of communications will be used to destroy millions of lives if they are allowed to keep doing it.

So 1% of Alphabet's employees signed a letter.

What was management's response?

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