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# Don't be Googil
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dont-be-googil/
- Published: 2007-11-06T11:11:48.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:38:09.000Z
- Author: Tony Curzon Price
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:31

Google's been busy at behemoth work these past few days.

Google announced an "open" social networking protocol, and then of an "open" mobile phone system. Sounds like we at *open*Democracy should be cheering along all this boundariless bounty from the kings of search...

Well, remember the basic trade of what Google calls "open": "you get free X, Y, Z just as long as you click through the localised, social-network savvy ads often enough". Whatever the context --- looking at at a map on my google-phone to find that contact I've just made through your social network --- my world will have advertising deeply embedded (as I have [written about before, here](http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision%5Freflections/google%5Fproblem%5F4546.jsp)). It's not as if you're going to some place and have a social network, and, accidentally, an advertisement is added - like the billboard along the road. Who I'm going to see will be partly a function of advertising, because my social-network software is one of the advertisers' prime battle grounds. The road I take will be partly function of advertising, because mapping is a key service to hang ads off. In other words, this isn't the innocent world of the billboard---we're entering a time when the billboard makes the world. And Google has the franchise.

Good thing they "won't be evil".