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Google made a major mistake (Score:2, Funny)
They forgot to bribe the Russian mafia.
Re:Google made a major mistake (Score:4, Funny)
More like the government instead of the Mafia. China is the same too.
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Re:Google made a major mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Google made a major mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
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Controlled propaganda (Score:2, Interesting)
I imagine that Sergey Brin has already invested quite a bit of money into the Russian economy. Although if you control the advertising you control the propaganda.
Re:Controlled propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
what kind of propaganda has Google put out? controlling the media is the way to put out propaganda. advertising is mainly used for branding and manipulating consumer purchase decisions. perhaps they're promoting consumerism in Russia, but it's still the media conglomerates who control TV/radio/newspaper/etc. that write the propaganda and influence societal perception & cultural attitudes.
although in a consumerist society advertising dominates our culture, it's still the media that are the gatekeepers of information and our window into the world. the internet has actually democratized the media by allowing the public to bypass traditional channels of media distribution which are largely been consolidated and tightly controlled by a handful of media corporations.
by supporting net neutrality, public internet access, open wireless networks, and generally promoting a free & open internet, Google is actually helping to decentralize media control and content distribution. YouTube lets anyone create video content and distribute it to millions of viewers. Google search also helps people browse the sea of information on the web on their own terms--compared to TV networks that restrict what you watch and decide for you what information you want to access.
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seeing as you don't get that, I'm not surprised you see a difference between advertising and propaganda. same shit, different "smile".
maybe you can understand these words: don't put all your eggs in one basket.
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I looked up this "beautiful agony" thinking maybe it's gore or something, but I'll summarize for the unaware here:
Women masturbating (presumably) and moaning with only their face shown to the camera.
Given that youtube wants to remain a family-friendly site, and your beautiful agony videos can be pretty easily found via Google, I don't see the problem. Youtube is a video site with a few rules, and they are allowed to enforce those at will. They host the content, they write the rulebook. Google is a search en
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Noone is ignoring the fact that google is doing evil by our standards, and that censorship is bad. Yes we all get that.
But currently, its chinas country and their rules. Its far better that google is in the country, providing searches and telling the population that these searches are being censored than not, both from a business and ethical point of view.
Google staying out of china couldnt change something, and they arent doing evil by the standards of china, you cant just put the entire world under your i
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IMO, Google's behaviour in China is the least bad of the available options. To select it, therefore, is not "doing evil" even if the same actions in different circumstances would be evil. Cutting people with knives is usually evil - but not if you are doing life-improving surgery. If Google had the option of not censoring, then to censor would be evil. But it does not have that option; I can see no way it could open up that option; and therefore it is not evil.
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advertising is mainly used for branding and manipulating consumer purchase decisions.
advertisements are commercial propaganda
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Where the partiality is typically fairly obvious. Unlike propaganda which masquerades as "news" or "balanced opinion".
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Interestingly enough, there was an article on Slashdot sometime in the past two years (not sure when) that referenced a study that showed that the "democratizing effect" the internet has on media has actually led to *less* information being available. All of the traditional sources of media
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actually, my data comes through lines owned by my ISP/telecom. and, no, Google's privacy policy prohibits their selling personal user info to 3rd parties. they may pass aggregate non-personally-identifiable data (i.e. how many users searched for a particular term) to 3rd parties for processing, but any personal information cannot be shared with 3rd parties without opt-in consent [google.com].
i apologize for ruining your paranoid delusions.
Kudos for the Russian regulators for... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey, American people: if you want to look for reasons why we are no longer on top, look straight to your government. You have looked to them solutions but they have been delivering the opposite.
Try thinking for yourselves for a change.
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Blocking big corporate takeovers in unAmerican, right?
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Hey, American people: if you want to look for reasons why we are no longer on top...
Luckily, our strategy is to drag everyone right under us once more...
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There is a name for this (Score:3, Informative)
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Really??? (Score:2)
Sorry, dude. Hoist by your own petard. A monopoly (or near-monopoly) is still a monopoly, no matter how it got there. Once it does, it can choose to play by the capitalist rules, or remain a monopoly. Sadly, Google has some chinks in its "do no evil" armor. And they are pretty damned big.
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How is Google not playing by the capitalist rules? Just ten years ago, Google was a grad student research project, and now it is the global leader in Web advertising. It's crucial to realize how Google came about, because the firm that ultimately dethrones Google will emerge unexpectedly from humble roots.
Look, nobody is forcing Internet users to rely on Google for search. The reason for Google's continued dominance isn't because it is an evil monopoly, but because Google managed to build a platform that a
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Exactly.
People really ought to think of monopolies in the old Classical economic school way. As in created by the State's coercive power.
In the free market monopolies can only maintain themselves only for as long as they provide the best service for the lower price. Raise prices after dumping the competition and new competition will take you on that bid. As long as the market remains free of hindrances and regulations, including 'anti-trust agencies'.
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In the free market monopolies can only maintain themselves only for as long as they provide the best service for the lower price. Raise prices after dumping the competition and new competition will take you on that bid. As long as the market remains free of hindrances and regulations, including 'anti-trust agencies'.
After you have driven a few start-ups out of business what sane investor would put money into a start up that is going to be just driven out of business?
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One who ranks his chance to make a profit higher than his chance to be driven out of business. Predatory pricing cannot be sustained for more than the short-run.
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how long has ms been ontop now?
faeries do not run the free market, its not perfect (hence the bailout) accept that the free market has its flaws and move on!
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I use Linux. So can anybody else. Or MacOS, or *BSD. A monopoly is a monopoly, not a 90% market share.
And c'mon, did the free market create the bailout? Did it set the interest rates that made money practically free? I'm no economist and I know that growth based on credit expansion is unsustainable and always ends with a bust. Keynesian central bankers don't seem to get it, but please don't tag 'free market' on them.
Closing on a lighter note, if the fairies ran the free market, it wouldn't be a free mar
That is where you are wrong. (Score:2)
Marx may have been an idiot, but if so he was a well-paid idiot. Never forget that.
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
It's not Zao Begun (Score:5, Informative)
Please, translate correctly. It's "Begun Inc."
ZAO means "Zakrytoye Aktsionernoye Obschestvo" (Privatly Held Corporation) in Russian, it's not a part of the name.
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ZAO means "Zakrytoye Aktsionernoye Obschestvo" (Privatly Held Corporation) in Russian, it's not a part of the name.
Funny thing is that "zao" is adjective meaning "evil" in Serbian.
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Or possibly "Begun Ltd"
ZAO means "Zakrytoye Aktsionernoye Obschestvo" (Privatly Held Corporation) in Russian, it's not a part of the name.
On the other hand "GmbH", meaning "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung" is often left unchanged when refering to a German company. The current approach with proper nouns is to avoid making changes unless required by different alphabets. Thus you have "The SNCF TGV" rather than "French Railways/Railroads HST" or e
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Well, "GmbH", "LLC", "Inc.", "Ltd." are very well known. Also, GmbH is written in Latin alphabet.
In Russia a practice of adding company type to its name is also widely used (like "OOO Stepanov" - "Stepanoff, LLC").
But they are usually translated, not transliterated in international documents. In fact, I even remember that the official US visa application guide for Russians even had a table of company type translations.
Now, if after a while FAS reverses its decision (Score:2)
Now, if after a while FAS reverses its decision, we will know that Google bribed the officials. Nearly any problem in Russia (or in the US, for that matter) can be resolved with a large enough bag of money.
ZAO, not Zao (Score:5, Insightful)
The official name of the company is ZAO Begun. However, "ZAO" is simply the Russian abbreviation for "proprietary joint stock company"; in the West, an equivalent formal corporate name would probably be "Begun Pty Ltd."
In any case, the summary uses "Google" instead of "Google, Inc."; and "Rambler Media" instead of "Rambler Media, Ltd." Seems rather odd that of the 3 corporations mentioned, only Begun was listed with its full official (though miscapitalized) name.
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How is that odd?
Here's a hint, the author doesn't know a single word of Russian. The author has no idea what ZAO means and hence doesn't realize including it is strange given the other company name uses.
Sure a competent journalist would look it up, but that an article is written by someone lazy also does not seem "odd".
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They wouldn't actually need to understand Russian (or even Russian abbreviations) just looking at a Russian business directory should be enough to clue someone in that it means something akin to "Inc", "LLC", "Ltd", "PLC", "GmbH", etc. just that the Russian convention is to prefix rather than suffix.
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Again, you are assuming the journalist will actually do some work.
The fact that that they don't is not "odd". I promise they didn't look at a business directory for any of the other company names either.
Google overseas (Score:3, Informative)
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I was curious about that actually.
I'm a Aussie and I got a new phone recently.
It had the Yahoo button preinstalled.
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Hardly unique to Japanese. The same thing can happen with Semitic languages such as Arabic. IIRC Saudi road signs are notorious for some of their Arabic to English translations.
I'm sure they are after targeted advertising (Score:2)
I'm sure they are after targeted advertising... as in Soviet Russia, Google searches you!
(Be kind, this is my first usage of a Slashdot meme =) )
irony (Score:2)
the entire country is a monopoly. russian government is nothing different than a mafia, complete with goons murdering outspoken reporters and opposition voices, even overseas dissidents. russian democracy is dead. that the russian government should have any apparatus called a "Federal Antimonopoly Service" is a pretty good definition of sarcasm
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That's why you got Bush...twice.
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Actually "democracy" could well include making it more difficult for foreign people to visit and foreign businesses to operate in their country. Fears of people coming from elsewhere and exploiting the locals are
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As a Russian, I don't like the current regime myself, but what you describe has very little to do with democracy. And Russian don't exactly have free pass to America, either.
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from taking a well earned portion of their economy
WTF is it supposed to mean? It's not "the economy of Russian Government," whatever that means. It's a private corporation owned by, well, its owners - the only ones who have earned something in this context.