Open Search versus 21st Century Enclosure

One of our current clients, Steve Anderson, runs COA News (not our site yet, but it will be) and, among other things, is also writing a thesis on the anti-competitive practices of digital media gateway companies (AOL, Google, as well as TimeWarner, Disney-ABC-- oops, sorry, AOL is TimeWarner) being akin to the enclosure -- the taking of common spaces and making it private property -- by feudal lords and new capitalists in 18th and 19th century Britain.

It's fun having cool clients. As I wrote to Steve:

Awesome. It's so important, way too many people take the position that corporations should be able to do anything they want with their "private property"-- and then the "U.S. Property - Do Not Trespass" government adopts the same view. So what exactly is public, and what private, and how and why does it get that way? Rock on!

I also re-sent by his request what I wrote on Google nixing MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. (That's bad.)

At the time I wrote to Google, using their form remade here:

Dissatisfied with your search results?

Thanks for helping us improve our search. While we aren't able to respond directly to comments submitted with this form, the information will be reviewed by our quality team.

You searched for Google stop showing Yahoo Maps Mapquest.

Please tell us what specific information you were seeking. Also tell us why you were dissatisfied with the search results.

I was looking for someone to tell me it wasn't so. I was looking for an
apology from Google for the mistake, and the return of the service of links to directions when searching for an address.

Instead, concerns confirmed. Google is putting promotion of its own services over user search experience.

At the time I also commented on the online debate about Google's power grab.

It's really frightening how many people instinctively take the side of the corporation, the monopoly, the biggest guy in the room.

"Do you really expect a corporation to promote its competition?" is what their argument comes down to. So these people expect every newspaper,
every television channel, every radio station, and every web site will hide and lie to favor their owners' financial interests.

That's what progressives say when we're angry at the world, and then people tell us we're conspiracy theorists.

The most frightening thing about people who most ardently defend corporations privilege to screw the rest of us is that this is the only world they can imagine.

On to open source search!

"Help us make open source search possible"
http://www.opensourcesearch.org/wiki/index.php/Open_Source_Search

Search Tools with Open Source Coded
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/tools-opensource.html

Open Source SQL full-text search engine
http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

Down 2007 Feb 2
http://activista.org

Nothing to do but keep working on the top secret OpenZuka distributed search: diverse, easy or effective or e-something, fair, transparent (DEFT).