With so many of us tied into the new communicative technologies of the internet, it is justifiable to be concerned about how ideological bias, censorship, unfair competition practices, etc. could be employed to limit its usefulness. Here, for example, is a story from the International Herald Tribune that explores the potential for abuse by such extremely powerful players as Google....While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google's becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.
"If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google's partners, that is a real problem," said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
Money, of course, is very much at issue. The lower a site ranks in search results, the less traffic it receives from search engines. With a smaller audience, the site earns less money from advertising...
Critics say each new Google initiative in this area casts more doubt on the company's claims that it is not a media company.
"Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case," said Jason Calacanis, the chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that relies on editors to create pages on a variety of subjects. "They are competing for talent, for advertisers and for users" with content sites, he said.
Knol has been called a potential rival to Wikipedia and other sites whose content spans a broad range of topics, including Mahalo and About.com, a property of The New York Times Company that uses experts it calls "guides" to write articles on a variety of topics...
