REGARDING ERIC SCHMIDT'S COMMENTS TO NPR (thomasmonopoly.blogspot.com)

If you’ve been following my situation with Google this article, unrelated to my case, was published this morning in Business Week, written by Mathew Ingram. I've explained a lot of my own thoughts regarding online identity ownership in the past few weeks to a few magazines and bloggers, but Eric Schmidt’s comments to Andy Carvin the other day seemed worth pointing out. The Ingram article speculates that Google wants to be a bank. My response to that is who the hell doesn’t want to be a bank? So I’m inclined to agree with the speculation, even without taking into account the glaringly obvious NFC product named Wallet that Google is currently prepping which could understandably be seen as a step in the financial direction. So I can’t imagine this would really come as a surprise to anyone if it were true, I for one took it for granted.

During my own tirade against Google a lot of people thought I was hoping to strike a blow against them. I wasn’t really, that would be pointless. But what’s not pointless is demanding accountability from a corporation that regulates such a large percentage of the fundamental elements of the way we communicate. My own problems arose when they turned off my account. (I plan on writing more about that at some point and more about the fact that the head of Google’s webspam team confirmed that I had violated the Terms of Service at first but then later recanted that statement once it was made publicly known that it was an automated system that erroneously flagged an image in my Picasa account as pornography, at which point he stated, and I don’t fault him for it, that he had not in fact viewed the image himself, out of fear and uncertainty surrounding child pornography laws. And that it took the senior vice president of a company with, according to the BBC, 349,758,716 unique users in 2010, to express the autonomy to review the flagged image and make the obvious call of reinstating my account.) During that time, while I was receiving several messages a day from other Google users concerned for their own accounts, one user commented that Google’s customer service problems are only going to get worse because trying to function online without a Google account will eventually be like trying to get by without a Visa or MasterCard. I agree, and that is what I meant by calling them a monopoly. People think I’m trying to bend the definition of a monopoly. I’m not. I realize that the things they’re doing aren’t illegal, but I think some of them should be. And I think their current ToS are a bit predatory. The Terms of Service, for any service, are complicated, and to Google’s credit they do try to simplify them. But they simplify them by basically saying you have no rights. They read:

…you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license 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...

Simplified yes. And while they state next that you maintain a copyright on your content, and that the language used is to, in effect, cover them legally while publishing your data, the preceding statement sort of degrades the definition of “copyright” in my opinion. And the only reason they and some of the other social sites get away with it is because they do have a virtual monopoly in many online sectors. I'd rather have complicated ToS that protect my personal information in a way I am comfortable with than be given simplified ToS that compromise my ownership. But the major issue at stake here is who owns your online identity. Because right now Google does, or whichever company you happen to use. Google allows me an account, I allow Google to store my information so that they can in turn go to their advertisers and say, "look, we have X number of users. You should advertise to them and pay us X amount to do so." But me allowing Google to store my information doesn’t mean that they own it. And I should be free to...