Google, evil?

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m getting older, but I’m starting to understand where media companies are coming from when they say they want to block (or at least require payment from) Google for serving up their content.

It’s not like these companies are saying, “Give people information for free? No way!” They simply want to stop Google from making billions of dollars off their content without any compensation.

Right now, Google crawls content from various sources, then puts AdSense ads next to them. This equates to pure profit generation off the intellectual property of others. This is the stuff us “freedom of information” folks go nuts about, yet most of said folks are typically staunch opponents of media conglomerates.

It’s pretty surprising that Google has been able to get away with this for so long, as on paper, it’s tantamount to someone copy/pasting an article and reaping all the benefit when site visitors click their ads.