How disgusted I was to find out the news that Google has gone to the dark side. Maybe it was already there. Maybe the power became too delicious to refuse. Maybe they have convinced themselves that this will be good for “the internet.” They have disappointed me, a loyal user, beyond belief. I am grateful for their email, google voice, adsense, youtube, ad manager and all. But I am ill to discover that they are ready to take the power they so easily took from us, the unsuspecting public.

Just remember, ass, grass or ass – nobody rides for free. And now google, after luring in billions of users, is turning around and fucking us by making an upcoming proposal with Verizon to start controlling how content is dispersed to users.

Way back when the internet was a completely free medium. Not that it was free to access — you have to pay somewhere along the line to have broadband connection at home, or wireless connection via your phone or your iPad. That is where this agreement is going to give back to the users who pay more and fuck the users who can’t pay or won’t pay.

The New York Times outlines the proposal pretty clearly – there will be “two internets,” just as there is now “two TVs.” There is cable TV, which we all pay for, and there is, supposedly, public TV. Although there really isn’t public TV anymore because you can’t just use your antennae and hook up to TV anymore; and just any old person can’t have a TV show, the way they used to in the beginnings of television.

With this Google/Verizon proposal, there will be a two tiered system. Those who pay to play will have faster access to sites, and pay close attention here because this effects business owners like me who have websites, that are part of their evil cluster of corporate control. So let’s say premium subscribers get faster download times to the NY Times, TIME Mag and Ebay, while “free subscribers” who only pay a big chunk via their cable subscriber, will not be able to access those sites with ease.

This is incredibly unfair and potential destructive to the internet as we know it.

This is not what we expected from Google back when they were of the “information wants to be free” model. And I feel PERSONALLY BETRAYED by them. Now that I have my whole life backed into their company I desperately want out and I feel like I was really stupid to so willingly go along with their longterm plan.

Google can no longer be trusted. And what a shame that is.

I hope that that the public become so outraged they will do something about it. I hope that people will wake up and fight this thing. One of the problems with our democracy is that we don’t want the government around regulating content, but meanwhile, the corporations come in through the back door and THEY control the content and no one says anything because that’s supposedly free enterprise. How is it free enterprise exactly?

Articles you should read to become more aware of the situation:

Five Sentences From Google/Verizon That Could Change the Net Forever
From Wire Magazine, A Tale of Two Internets:

On the flipside, the Google/Verizon blueprint would grant content companies looking to deliver services that require too much bandwidth for the “regular” internet to do so in return for payment, via a second set of pipes.

That bombshell is the carrot that would seek to convince ISPs to accede to the basic tenets of net neutrality on the internet we know. But the from-left-field proposal to anticipate an entirely new information highway for “fast lanes” comes in the midst of an already contentious net neutrality debate and would seem, at first glance, more likely to exacerbate the discussion the FCC is trying to shepherd than bring it to a swifter conclusion.

Reaction was swift and largely negative from net neutrality advocates — they are quoted at length at the end of the post. The FCC seemed none too pleased with the proposal itself nor the fact that it was drafted outside a delicate process with industry players that blew up last Friday after the New York Times reported that Google and Verizon were working on a parallel track.

So what is net neutrality? That is really the key to this whole bloody mess. Here is a good NY Times piece on it.

What an open internet has meant to me all of these years is real democracy not just here in America but all over the world: anyone can start a site and make a success of it. That is the American Dream in a nutshell. If you start getting into “faster access” offered through At&t and Verizon, you start mucking with that. Net neutrality ensures that there is equal access to all sites. Meaning, when a site is clogged with too many connections, the internet provider must expand their server to accomodate all people. What if only premium subscribers of At&t and Verizon were the only customers who could access those sites? Can you imagine?

I am hoping enough people, and the FCC, take necessary steps to prevent anything like this ever coming to pass. Give me liberty or give me death.

Twitter and Google have me running scared. Recently, there was a web-wide virus attack where my own site had some weird code in it that alerted Google. So far, so good, right? You don’t want a virus attacking your own computer via a website. But once the virus was cleared up and removed and even Google removed the warning, Twitter continues to leave my account suspended. It’s the most frustrating thing ever. I even navigated through their bizarre contact area in order to ask them (very nicely I thought) to remove my “suspended account” warning. The lesson here is that the bigger these websites get, the bigger Google and Twitter get, the more control they have over everything and everyone. Beware, folks.

I’ve been happily and innocently using Google Adsense for a few years now and have never had a single problem with it, other than the fact that it generates very little income. I used to think, Oh that Google, the homegrown, grass roots, bare-bones search engine who does such nice things to we bloggers, like paying us for ads and monitoring our traffic, even giving us funny little widgets or gadgets. Well guess what? Google has no customer service should something go wrong. People like me, faithful, albeit low-earning, devotees of Google are brushed aside when a problem arises that only a short conversation with a customer service rep would solve.

Google shuts completely down and it’s one slammed door after the next. It’s been five days since my last communication with a tech support person who gave me some random, generic response to my problem. Fifteen emails to them later and still, stony silence. Nothing. There is no way to reach their tech support by phone either. Basically, you’re shit out of luck.

You can’t complain to anyone because hey, Google is doing YOU a favor by paying you for ads, right? You can’t complain to such a benevolent corporation who doesn’t charge you anything to use their email or their search engine or their gadgets, those cute little useless gadgets that only exist because they can.

No, you are nothing to Google. You are one in a bazzilion who happens to leach off of their generous services. They don’t give a rip. Their silence tells you: go bug someone else with your questions.

And so, here I am, scrambling around to try to fix a problem Google won’t even acknowledge, let alone help me with. I know Google rules the world but I secretly hope someone comes up with something better, more attractive, less domineering, with a customer service staff to help those meaningless specks of dust that float through Google’s internet combustion machine.