Microsoft's Bing is truly looking to end the Internet as a method for average people to express themselves by controlling what we can find to only commercial and commercially viably sites. Do a search for most things on Bing.com and the same search on Google.com and you will find a disturbing disparity between the two results.
This raises some questions in my mind.
Who will the internet be by and for in the next few years?
Why do we keep letting corporations take over everything we once held dear?
And most importantly where has American Freedom gone?
Any Google search will return the commercial sites as expected but along with those there will be an ample mix of non commercial sites. Sites made by just some random person, not looking to make a buck or start the latest internet craze. Just an average person passing on some info or maybe a great set of pictures.
Bing on the other hand seems to produce a top 25 or so of a very different nature. Completely commercial sites seem to top the lists. Mixed within are personal sites but only those hosted within the big players like MySpace and such. Very few of the usual personal sites I am used to finding on Google will show up even in the top 100 results in Bing.
What does this all mean? Well this is only my opinion but here it is.
Microsoft is seeing for the first time the potential for real competition coming from Google. With a Mobile phone OS that is far superior to any of its MS or MAC competitors and a new PC OS that, is granted in its infancy, but is none the less making strides towards greatness. Microsoft can or at least should be seeing its monopoly loosing its stronghold..
What about MAC and Linux? Neither has ever been a real concern to Microsoft. Linux is just too open and free (not to mention messy) to ever be of concern and MAC is way too closed and limited to be any real threat. The middle ground of Microsoft is what has kept it high on the ladder for so long. And now Google is climbing that ladder with great strides.
Microsoft's response seems to be to stamp out Google before they become a problem by out advertising the former leader in internet searching. Well that along with some dirty tactics by redirecting Internet Explorers default search engine to Bing. In the end I suspect that America will succumb to apathy and advertising long before they realize they were cheated. But the corporatizing of America is a long and old battle. One we just don't seem up to fighting anymore. "Cheap and Easy" is the new American motto.
The consequences of a corporate controlled internet are rather sad, though. Those of us who just liked to "surf and find" are going to have a harder and harder time just wandering into something fun and useful or at least interesting. Commercial and "professional" sites have much to offer but are not always what we want. Sometimes we just want to find some enthusiast who has taken the time to slap together a site all about "X".
Those are the sites that Bing is pushing out and away. Those are the people that Bing is burring under the carpet. You are the person who in the end looses their little piece of the internet. You are now relegated to buying yours from now on. And yes you do pay for your MySpace page in the form of having to be inundated with all those ads all the time. Not to mention all the censorship that corporate run Internet sites maintain.
One by one we are loosing our individual pieces of the world pie. Local TV stations have all but completely vanished. Corporate record industry long ago crushed the real garage bands. The "Mom and Pop" shop is rapidly being swallowed by the "mega chain" and the entrepreneur is succumbing to the corporate development team. Now we will add the internet vanity site to that long list of lost freedoms as Microsoft bombards us with slick advertisements and reprograms our browser defaults to Bing away.
Maybe its time to stop trying to reach for our piece of the pie and accept that we will have to buy it from one of the corporate giants from now on. Maybe its time to realize that freedom is bought not with lives and sacrifice, as it once was, but rather with advertising dollars and corporate partnerships, in our new America. Maybe freedom no longer has the meaning it once held.
All of us have been giving up our freedom piece by piece throughout our collective lives. I think maybe I will put my fork down for a while and watch the sparkly stick burn.
Thank you and goodnight.
From just another American.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.
~Kid Kaos
