Quis Googliet ipsos Googles?

Good to keep in mind, but it's important to also remember serveral things.

First and foremost, concentrations of power like this always happen for a very simple reason: only perhaps 1 in 10,000 people have the ambition, talent, and luck necessary to create a massively successful company in a given field (yes, I'm paraphrasing Pentti Linkola here). With so few at the top, it will always happen that a few will control almost everything; nature abhors a vacuum. You can cry "antitrust" all you want, but all that does is transfer power to the state (not desirable, since the state is the only "company" that can force you to buy its products) or delay the inevitable. The clearest example of this is the oil companies of the world: of the top 20, more than half are state-owned, and #2 is ExxonMobil, which is basically Standard Oil reconstituted 90 years after being broken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Second, if you're concerned about the need for net neutrality ("it also wants to own the cables that deliver the Internet itself"), the truth is that restricted service doesn't sell. This is why CompuServe and Prodigy went the way of the dodo. I'm not terribly worried about Google squashing speech online at the moment, since this video has been up for 16 days with a quarter million hits on YouTube, which is owned by Google, and if you Google the phrase "Google is...," phrases in the top ten suggested searches include "SkyNet," "scared of Islam," "making us stupid," and "the devil." Similarly, if you're worried about privacy, you can always take the appropriate security measures. The beauty of ubiquitous free email accounts and ubiquitous free Wi-Fi, combined with encryption, is that we're effectively back to the days of being able to make anonymous calls from back-alley payphones, plus we can now publish dissident literature this way. For the truly paranoid, you'd have to buy a "clean" laptop to do this, but basic laptops with Wi-Fi capability are relatively cheap nowadays, especially on the secondhand market; my own 6-year-old laptop is more than capable (excepting the nigh-useless battery), and the same model costs secondhand about 1/7th of what mine did.

Third, while it might be a bit frightening to contemplate one company in charge of your online life like this, your online life need not be identical to the whole of your life. Google can't "follow your friendships," it can only follow what you and your friends do online, with Google products. Useful as Facebook, Google chat, and their ilk are, they are not friendships in and of themselves. Plus, you are astronomically more likely to get spotted, and identified, coming out of a sex shop by someone face-to-face than by someone using Google Earth.

The final point of the video, that Google makes the vast portion of its income from advertising, does raise an interesting question that we need to ask ourselves as individuals and as a society: why is advertising so powerful? Like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, "advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need." This is not a problem that any government can solve, it has to be a conscious choice on an individual's part to be less neurotic and oversocialized. I applaud you if you're working past this.

For the moment, I'm still willing to trust Google. But that's a conscious decision, and I'm fully aware of the need to keep my powder dry.

(explanation of post title)