Yeah, he has the gold buys the elections.

Google didn't steal from anybody. He saw a need and filled the need. Thanks to him the internet is far more accessible for the rest of us. Information is far easier to find on the internet than it was before. That is a personal benefit to me. And I don't have to pay for it. All I have to do is be aware that some links are paid-for advertising.

He has created NEW WEALTH that wasn't there before. He has not hamed the middle class at all.

manufacturing has gone up in the USA....it is just done by machines. How are workers going to participate in this new world? We need to fix that. The 1% managed to marginalize the left in regards to trade talks and government/labor/business partnerships that you see in places like Germany or Singapore. The IMF has finally called for an increase in taxes at least.

Automated dialing replaced the switchboard operators who connected every call. Every. Single. Call. Even into the 1960s, long distance calls had to be hand connected. Now you can direct dial everywhere and it the same price as a local call - free. Think of all those ladies that saw their jobs vanish.

Traffic lights replaced traffic cops at intersections.

Deisel engines in trains did away with the fireman (guy who tended the fire in the locomotive) in trains.

What Luddites never see are the new jobs created elsewhere in the economy due to greater efficiency.

do far more to suppress advances in development than the technology-adverse luddites...

at a time when there were many competing efforts to improve access to info on the web. The indexing and search improvement would have been just fine without Schmidt and his company (I think it was his baby from the beginning, not sure though).

The real genius of Google was that while you used it to make access to the web easier, it used YOU to collect all the info it could about you, and to use that info to the fullest extent possible to make money off of it, a fact that came as a surprise to most users of Google, though we all know about it now. And they still do it. It's perhaps the greatest marketing coup ever, where the hunter (you and me) is captured by the game. I know some of the ways they monetized that, though much of it is still a mystery to me, but that's what Google is about, not about giving you better access to info on the web, that's just the vehicle they use to capture your web activity and personal info.

Is that creating wealth? Maybe, in the way that marketing creates wealth (basically they are a sales affiliate, or a potential customer provider for countless businesses that are making or selling actual merchandise and services), but not in the way that resource development or product manufacturing create wealth, they've created an info clearinghouse for targeted marketing.

I have no objection to being shown ads that I might really be interested in. Information is also wealth.

My wife and I have decided that upon death we each want to be cremated. Even as recently as the early 2000s that would mean looking in the yellow pages, phoning different places, and making appointments with salesperson. I would not have information on the integrity of the creatorium and price comparison would be difficult. With Google I had all that information and with a little time reading different pages I knew who we wanted and the price. That is certainly a benefit to us, and a benefit is wealth.

When we bought a used car last year, I was able to use Carmax to get the insurance claims and regisration history of the car. That is information that simply wasn't availble at all a few years ago. It enabled me to make a far better decision. That is a kind of wealth.

Instead of paying big money for an encyclopedia set that quickly becomes outdated, Google can bring me up-to-date information on any topic, and all I have to do as payment is look at some ads.

Facebook costs me nothing and enables me to keep in touch with people without the cost of a letter, or the time of a phone call.

Anything that benefits me, is a form of wealth for me. And the best part is that most of it is free to me, costing only seeing an ad.

Luddites are extreme pessimists, looking at a lost past and never a future gained.

This OP is not about stopping technological progress, it's about defining progress as something that helps the many rather than the few.

As technology advanced, productivity increased by leaps and bounds. This allowed capitalists to hire less workers, since they could accomplish the same tasks, and tasks never before possible, with fewer workers. The benefits of this went to the owners, not to the workers.

The up-side of internet firms like we are discussing (mostly arbitrary, could have the same discussion or similar about other industries, but the OP article used tech firms in her example), aside from the benefits of the internet itself (which are huge, no argument there, the internet is incredibly powerful) is that they hired a lot of people to develop their software, development their hardware, and staff their companies. It's pretty much an R & D economy, a relatively few researchers and developers did well, while ownership did obscenely well, consolidating huge pools of wealth into a very few hands. Also ownership used models to maximize their profits rather than to allow these profits to provide for the well-being of their employees. They outsourced much of the work to the lowest-regulated poorest paid labor markets. They hired contractors who were paid a good hourly wage but were then abandoned when the project was complete. Most of these companies didn't practice profit-sharing, though some did.

We now have a few extremely wealthy people whose control our society. They aren't running society in the public interest. This is the point of the OP, not stopping progress or development.

I got side-tracked with the Google arguments, because much of what you are arguing about Google is really just the capabilities given to us by the internet, not by Google itself per se, your understanding of that seems very limited to me. It isn't an important part of the question here, though, as the question here is about how do we advance as a society rather than advancing the fortunes of a very few wealthy people. For that, I found the OP excellent, and will at some point watch the TED talks on the subject.

Indeed, it's actually an unintentional misspelling of "googol".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol

I used "Google" as his name because I was too lazy to google for his name.

I used to despise this woman, I would see her often on C-NBC and Morning Joe in the time preceding the crash, and she seemed to me to be a true believer in unbridled market forces. Either I was wrong about her, or she turned a corner in her thinking. I've seen several talks by her that led me to reconsider my opinion of where she stands.

Link to the whole TED talk:
http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/

I don't know how much of her you saw in the past. I saw way too much. Glad to see her speaking out for the people though, hopefully she is a real convert and not just an opportunist.

hands off the programs for the poor and middle class. Also it they had any true patriotism and kept the jobs in the USA.

What programs for the poor and middle class have Google, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Yahoo and other similiar companies put their greedy hands on?

San Francisco, it puts pressure on the budget.