Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Google may be a form of God, as Jeff Jarvis has announced (really), but God is not all beneficence, all the time, as the world can attest to. Ditto for Google.

In the Yahoo Semel ousting post mortem, the question du jour is “Can Yahoo ever beat Google”?

Jarvis’ latest Google rules get used to it affirmation is at the expense of “old media” Yahoo. Google is a mighty platform while Yahoo is a mere “thing,” he asserts.

In support of his who needs Yahoo argument, Jarvis does a Dell on Yahoo services:

I haven’t used Yahoo in ages, maybe years. I complained that they shut off my email and killed my identity — my identity — because I didn’t follow their rules and use it enough. I can’t remember the last time I went to Yahoo. And it didn’t come to me. When I last tried to use Flickr they yelled at me for not having a Yahoo identity (well, I would have one if you hadn’t killed it).

Quite a Yahoo indictment. Where does the ruling Google stand on such matters of user identity and integrity vs. a vs. its services?

Google love is apparently blinding Jarvis, and millions of others, to the hard-nosed, $160 billion market cap Google Inc.-centric ten page legally binding “Terms of Service” that Google subjects all of its user “relationships” to.

After a Googley “Welcome to Google,” Mountain View’s Tterms of Service then proceeds to dictate, in no uncertain terms, how “YOUR” relationship with the Googleplex will work, take it or leave it. The scenario Google traces for the millions of people that put their personal and professional lives in the Google Cloud is a SCARY one.

Here are some of the egregious Google Terms of Service that all of its “accounts” operate under daily, the “binding contract” that Google demands its users enter into:

PROVISION OF THE SERVICES BY GOOGLE

You acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you.

You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.

You acknowledge and agree that while Google may not currently have set a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions you may send or receive through the Services or on the amount of storage space used for the provision of any Service, such fixed upper limits may be set by Google at any time, at Google’s discretion.

CONTENT LICENCE FROM YOU TO GOOGLE

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media.

GOOGLE TERMINATION OF LEGAL AGGREEMENT

Google may at any time terminate its legal agreement with you if:

The partner with whom Google offered the Services to you has terminated its relationship with Google or ceased to offer the Services to you,

Google is transitioning to no longer providing the Services to users in the country in which you are resident or from which you use the service,

The provision of the Services to you by Google is, in Google’s opinion, no longer commercially viable.

HOW GOOGLEY IS GOOGLE?

Can any shrewd, ruthless corporation ever be any user’s friend? Yahoo, Microosft…Google? There are NO differences in corporate motivation: SHAREHOLDERS RULE.

Google is a business, NOT a friend. SEE Google is WRONG On Consumer Privacy

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN