San Diego OpEd

Does Google Owe You?

Kinderstart.com vs. Google
By Mark S. Burgess
Posted on Mar 23 2006
Last updated Mar 24 2006

There are some people that think that if you erect a lemonade stand on the corner that you have to be there everyday to provide lemonade. If you fail to show up on the day they stop by for a drink, they intend to call the police to forcibly take you out to the corner and serve lemonade with just the amount of sugar and lemon that they prefer.

Sound like something the old Soviet secret police would be enforcing? Maybe something you'd hear about happening in Castro's Cuba?

No, it's the position of a web site company in England called Kinderstart.com who is suing Google (read the actual filing) in the 6th U.S. District in San Jose for how they handled the Kinderstart.com web site listing on Google.

This law suit against Google is a bad idea. After years of pushing search engine placement for our development customers ahead of our own site - our last two large customers currently occupy positions 2 and 10 on Google for the keyword "san diego" - we are on page 3, position 36. Who's fault is that? Now that we're focused just on our own site, www.sandiego.com, and gotten out of the custom web development business so now we have the choice of trying to get pushed higher by behaving as Google appears to operate ..or not. There is no monopoly but what we grant in this business.

Ok, assume there is no Google. Now where are we? Sergei Brin and Company at Google had a good idea and the pluck to carry it off, and we all participated in using it, riding it along for the good things we got from it. Google doesn't owe anyone a listing and so we can't penalize them for not giving it to me.

To take a position otherwise, is to marginalize our own efforts to build our businesses. Doesn't a lawsuit seeking to tell Google they have to do things differently than they choose to do, put us directly in harm's way for those who would dictate to each of us?

I'm reminded of the morality tale of the enterprising Little Red Hen. Taking the initiative to grow grain and make it into bread, each of the other barnyard animals have a reason not to help, but complain loud and long when the finished product is available and the Hen keeps it for herself. There's a version of that story, updated for our modern culture of entitlement where each of the other "interested parties"call out discrimination, disenfranchisement and priviledge as grounds to claim a portion of the bread, effectively enslaving the Hen and delivering a penalty for her initiative and industry.

Yahoo, MSN, A9 allwould love our attentions diverted from Google. I say we vote that way rather than through the bludgeon of the courts.

Think on this, the court system to be used to get a ruling against Google recently made it possible for public groups to take over private land, not for other public groups, but to give it to a different private owner. Lest you open the door for Eminent Domain to be exercised by those same courts against the virtual real estate we all use today, let's not start the process of precedent building in the wrong direction.

This is America. To, in effect, nationalize Google would hurt us all. In America, we're at our best doing business through the markets, not the courts.

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Comments

Posted by jerrysitton	March 24, 2006
my daughter,visiting the city had her car [rental], ticked and towed, she was looking pehaps to relocate, the cost was over 300, they say this is not uncommon, why so much and where does that money go.

Posted by Reggie Lake	March 27, 2006
I just read the complaint, it makes sense to me, and I am no socialist- I believe in free markets- competition. Google controls in excess of 70% of the search traffic and more than a majority of the search revenue, sounds like a monopoly to me. They are destroying small web sites in my view, and creating a industry of SEO's trying to trick the system. I think the SEO';s and Google are in bed together- to limit competition and force companies to use a SEO or pay for Adwords- It may not have been the original plan (scam) but that the way it works- and you know it!

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