Google Carries MoveOn.org's Water

By Erick Posted in Comments (25) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If you haven't seen this yet today, Google has decided to carry MoveOn.org's water.

RedState friend Bob Cox writes

Internet giant Google has banned advertisements critical of MoveOn.org, the far-left advocacy group that caused a national uproar last month when it received preferential treatment from The New York Times for its “General Betray Us” message.

The ads banned by Google were placed by a firm working for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ re-election campaign. Collins is seeking her third term.

Earlier this week, Google told Lance Dutson, president of Maine Coast Designs, that the ads he placed for Collins had been removed and would not be allowed to resume because they violated Google’s trademark policy.

Google's position, as David All notes, is that

companies and organizations that can demonstrate that they own trademark rights can request that their trademarked terms not be used in any ad text.

The problem, of course, is that the company attacking Susan Collins has a name. Her advertisement used that name. And Google decided to shut her up. This goes beyond trademark law. Superfically, according to Google's contractual position, it can do this. But this is actually total nonsense.

Put another way, were Susan Collins able to trademark her name, Google's policy would mean no one could actually run an ad on Google using her name, though she is a United States Senator.

Of course, as Bob Cox points out

Google routinely permits the unauthorized use of company names such as Exxon, Wal-Mart, Cargill and Microsoft in advocacy ads. An anti-war ad currently running on Google asks “Keep Blackwater in Iraq?” and links to an article titled “Bastards at Blackwater — Should Blackwater Security be held accountable for the deaths of its employees?”

Google can play at semantics because it's about all they have.


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Sue to either have her ads allowed or all those other ads removed permanently.

Carlos: "What? Were they [Democrats]?"
Seth: "They look like [Democrats]? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires.
"[Democrats] do not explode when sunlight hits them."

If it weren't such a pain to change email addresses I'd dump my Gmail account. But at the very least I'm switching my search engine. Those commercials for Ask.com seem nice. I think I'll try that.

has been my friend since the china stuff broke and i looked into google.

then the page-rank derivative that Goog uses. Ask.com is definately a handy tool.
====
"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison

I use Ask all the time, it's a fantastic search tool to add to your arsenal. It is a learning system too, so over time the results are just getting better and better. I also use smoe paid placement engines on occassion, as this can bring good results that simply don't carry the weight to get to the top of algorithm engines.

Ask.com should be part of any comprehensive search, as should Google.

absentee

I was eager to give Larry and Sergey a break even when the real leftists out there in the world don't want them to fly their jet plane around.

I think Google is getting awfully political as a company. Maybe it's time for people to explore other options. YouTube is one of their new babies, but there are other alternatives, including Photobucket.

Is that in any other medium, the advertisements that appear in the product that people see is controlled by the editors of the site. The New York Times knows that very well.

I think that a very new model of internet advertising needs to be offered as an alternative to Google's algorithms.

as I prefer Yahoo for my search engine. I'll close my gmail accounts now too.
Fred08

I have closed everything associates with Google, and removed anything on my computer, such as googletalk.
Fred08

Maybe everyone knows this already but Moveon.org allows anyone to sign up as a volunteer and use any contact information that they'd care to submit. I mean, if one were so inclined, one could sign up their friends as volunteers using their friends' email and phone numbers and just wait for the laughs to ensue. From what I've learned about Telemarketers, it takes weeks to get taken off one of their call lists!

I'm tempted to sign up my good friend, Charles Schumer (D-NY) (charles.schumer@senatenews.net), as a Moveon.org volunteer! I'm sure he'll appreciate the phone calls and emails, no?

.

Guess you struck a nerve, Erick. It won't be the first time. :)

I despise mobys.

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

We could sign up every politician in DC and see how long it takes them to say something negative about MoveOn...

Carlos: "What? Were they [Democrats]?"
Seth: "They look like [Democrats]? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires.
"[Democrats] do not explode when sunlight hits them."

You say that like they are 2 separate and distinct entities. I would bet a few bones that the list of MoveOn volunteers and Google employees overlap quite a bit.

___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.

Appearently he serves as a "Senior Advisor" to Google.

The libs control most of the news.

And the schools.

The world's biggest search engine.

*sigh*

On a side rant....

What's next? What do WE control? I guess ours is *really* the party of "the little guy" 'cause the folks with money on our side of the aisle aren't willing to use it to advance their politics. This really irritates me. I'm a man of modest means. Where's OUR George Soros??!!

www.scottbomb.com
Click here to donate to the Fred Thompson campaign.

There was a day when the Republican Party was the party of business. That day is fast fading, perhaps already no more. We've become a party focused on a very few deeply felt social issues, more and more narrowly defined, less and less tolerant and accomodating. Does it seem like virtually all of the media, all of the rich and powerful, damn near everyone, has at least a liberal bias? Have they all moved left? Or have we redefined right?

So what do we do here. We don't like the decision Google has made on this ad. So we label the whole company as liberal and decry everything they do. We don't want the mail system anymore. We won't use their search engine. Hell, maybe we'll even decide not to use the letter "G" at all for a year or two.

On the surface, Susan Collins may have a good case against Google, but the facts of this case are far from clear yet. If Google's decision was an error, was it a politically motivated corporate error? Or an error of someone somewhere within Google? Either way, is it right to label Google and its 11000+ employees as liberal because of this one event? One more huge chunk of mankind "not on our side".

Let's be clear here. What Google did doesn't look right. Fight to fix it. Don't fight to alienate everyone associated with Google. Don't dump Google stock. Buy it. Then call up and complain as a shareholder. If every conservative dissassociates himself from Google, then Google will become a liberal organization (whether or not it was before). It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do this enough times in enough ways and the whole world starts to look liberal. Do it enough times in enough ways for long enough and the whole world becomes liberal.

in ways democrats were only able to dream of in prior years.
And Gore is an insider who has been enriched by the largesse in vast ways.
Google can literally, in real time, change the record, hide views, bury or erase reports.
They already do this for China.
Their algorthms are incredibly powerfful, and they have the best and brightest writing code for them daily.
The networth of the Google insiders is in the multiple billions.
We need to ponder carefully the implications of an overtly politically active company, that has proven to have few scruples, whose inside people include the Goreacle, and that can literally change the documentary record.

Don't use them and they won't distort the facts YOU get, it's simple.

HTML Help Central for Red Staters

Is it any coincidence that we have to look at Bill Clinton's mug every day on the front page? That ad has been there for a long time.

What are some good search engine alternatives?

We need some opensource google replacement like openoffice.org or mozilla firefox replaced microsoft.

Power to the people!

Ask not what I can do for my country, ask what my country can do for me. Washington Elected Elite

To be useful you have to have a LOT of the Internet tracked, and have GOOD means of distinguishing genuine content from spam traps.

That's expensive in brainpower, connectivity, and storage. So while I'd love to see more competition, I'm not counting on it, heh.

The 'open source' part will get you as far as improving the code once you have something written that works, but that's about it.

HTML Help Central for Red Staters

a good time to dump Google stock. Regardless of who runs it, you can bet there are some Republicans heavily invested in the stock. Wonder what a large selloff would mean for their stock value.

I'm no economist or business person, so I could be way off base with this. If so, feel free to correct me.

http://hillbillypolitics.com

... to stop anyone from censoring online content. Anti-free market corporations like AT&T and Verizon want us to believe that Net Neutrality is a liberal issue. It's not. It's an issue for anyone who wants to keep the Internet free of corporate or government gatekeepers.

Net Neutrality is an issue for true conservatives.

 
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