Over 1,000 Google employees sign petition to use market dominance to starve Breitbart of ad revenue

Google has a knife that it holds over the jugular vein of all internet publications that depend on advertising revenue. It holds a dominant position in the digital advertising market and could, by denying ad revenue to any digital publication it targets, drive that voice out of business.

Now, according to information from Project Veritas, a very large number of Google employees are demanding that Google drive Breitbart.com out of business. Alana Mastrangelo reports at Breitbart:

An internal Google petition "to end Google's business with Breitbart" was recently leaked to Project Veritas. The petition — which over 1,000 Google employees have signed — calls for labeling Breitbart News as "prohibited content" to block the news outlet from "all Google-served ads."

A Google insider says that a petition has been circulated among Google employees, calling on banning Breitbart News from Google's advertising networks, in order to cut off news platform from ad revenue, according to a recent report by Project Veritas.

This is nothing new, and it is not exactly a bottom-up effort in its origin:

Last year, emails leaked exclusively to Breitbart News revealed a similar story, in which a group of Google employees — with encouragement from the tech giant's director of monetization — had begun plotting the downfall of the website through removing Breitbart News from Google's market-dominating ad services.

This should be an obvious danger to free speech. True, Google is not the government, so it may claim that the First Amendment does not apply to it. But Google also enjoys government protection:

"This is important, because Google claims protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act," noted O'Keefe, "Basically, they say they are impartial publishers of content and therefore, not liable for any content

People used to worry about "the military industrial complex", the idea of large corporations with interests in selling weapons, influencing policy makers to pursue aggressive hawkish policies.

I don't think we ever went to war to sell more tanks. But if the left has their way we'd go to war with Russia, Iran, anyone so they can slam Trump. They are stone cold amoral evil. I never really used that sort of language before, I thought it was a childish taunt of a non-thinker. Leftists call us evil all the time for no reason. But as they laugh off ANTIFA, as google says it's okay to make death threats against wrong thinkers, as they openly censor all opposition, as they push for war for the sole purpose of being able to call Trump a failed war monger, I am past that. They are evil.

Over 1,000 Google employees sign petition to use market dominance to starve Breitbart of ad revenue

Ping to Semimojo.

Once again, let us worry about massive communications corporations's "property rights" to a publicly used communications infrastructure instead of worrying about how this control of communications will be used to destroy millions of lives if they are allowed to keep doing it.

You would be the sort that would say, "Well, rounding up Jews is the Law! So the German government has a right to do it, and we must respect their right to round up Jews!"

Penny wise and Dollar foolish.

IIRC last year a group of Gaggle employees petitioned management to have the company not work with US military on AI. Management agreed. However Gaggle works with a Chinese university on AI and the university works with the Chinese military. Gaggle is no longer a US company and should be booted out of the US and all federal contracts.

Breitbart advertising is so incredibly off putting and cheezy that it makes me visit less and less.

Whatever happened to real advertising??

Hard to push “honest reporting” when your pages are littered with the trashiest sleeziest kind of ads.

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