The Lord’s Prayer by a Two Year Old

This is too cute.   She does a great job and is adorable to boot.  Enjoy.

Swiggle is up!

Yeah, we finally got it all together!  Please take a look at the new blog/comic strip site at inkswig.com.  I’ll hope you’ll participate in the discussion!

Alive and Well

Got home from the hospital on Saturday.  The surgery went well.  The hardest part was the I-V in my foot.  OUCH!!  Well, the nausea was really awful, too.  I felt car sick for many hours after the surgery, which I hate.

I have drainage tubes in me with storage bulbs that I must empty and measure every so often.  I did a video for Swig today and noticed that you can see the sack that these bulbs are in, which I have to wear constantly.  Looks a bit weird in the video.  Oh well.

I’m still on pain meds, but I haven’t taken any since early this morning and now it’s 9pm now, so I’m doing well.  I don’t like to feel so tired and groggy all the time, esp. when I have so much to get done.  But don’t worry, I’m taking it easy for the most part.

Just wanted to let everybody know that all is well.  Thanks for all your emails of prayers and support!

New Swig Blog with ongoing Comic Strip called Swiggle - UPDATE

UPDATE:  I’ve been so busy trying to get a million things done before my surgery tomorrow, that we got behind on this.  I was going to post the first strip tomorrow morning and set a publish date for the second on Monday, but at 5:30 this evening, the hospital called and told me they moved the time up.  Instead of noon, I have to be there at 7am.  So now I have tons to do before I can go to bed and it’s almost 11 already.  I think we’ll wait till whenever I can get back to it on the other side.   In the meantime, Happy Easter to All!!

We’re launching a new blog within the next day or two.  I’m writing a comic strip called Swiggle about our business, including what we’re doing and why.  It will be a no-holds-barred, behind-the-scenes look, using some fanciful characters as well as real people.  It will run three to five days a week. 

Matthew Meskel, a cartoonist right here in Portland, OR, is going to be the artist.  Matthew and I worked together when I had Full Tilt Features.  He’s a very nice guy and a good artist, with a style that matches the tone of the strip.  I wanted somebody who can come in-house when we hire people and get space.  Matthew will be our resident cartoonist and Swiggle will be an ongoing feature.

Why Swiggle?  The name of my company is Swig.  INKswig will be our first permanent site.  INKswig2008 is the site for political cartoons that I hope to get up and running in May.

I’ll announce when the new blog launches here.  This Dawnkey blog will continue, focusing more on personal things and longer essays.

The Ten Million Dollar Question: Will People Pay for Cartoons? — I need cartoonists’ input ASAP!

Technorati Tags: Cartoonists, editorial cartoons, political cartoons, cartoons

For some months now, I’ve been trying to get venture capital in order to create and launch a cartoon website.  I have ideas for it that nobody else is doing and while several people have been very interested in my business plan, it always comes down to potential investors wanting me to prove FIRST that people will pay for cartoons in a Web culture that demands that everything be free. 

Most of the VCs I talk to won’t even consider a pay model.  They want all the cartoons to be free, saying we can add advertising later, after traffic goes way up, as the way to monetize the site.  I won’t do it this way, and here’s why:

1) The “free” expectation alienates artists from their art, which I recently wrote about here.

2) “Free” inevitably exploits creators.  Look at all the free sites that don’t pay anything at all to the contributors but rack up millions (billions!, in the case of You Tube) for the owners.

3) “Let the advertisers pay for it” is a poor strategy because

1. There is not an infinite number of advertisers and the more sites that use this model mean an increased vulnerability for all.
2. When you’re in bed with the advertising industry, then they have invariably try to exert control over what you talk about.   Ask any working newspaper or magazine cartoonist how many cartoons they have had rejected because of editors’ fear of offending advertisers.

4) Most cartoonists “just want to draw” and either don’t have the skills, the desire or the time to do all the business and marketing that it takes to earn money in non-direct ways, like pushing T-shirts and such.

5) Even if the VCs were willing to share a great percentage of the advertising with contributors, by some difficult and convoluted means of determining who deserves what, cartoonists would have to contribute work FOR FREE for a long time before traffic was high enough to earn substantial money.  (See #2 above.)

Here’s the reality: the vast majority of people will not pay to read cartoons.  Yes, I totally agree with that.  There are many ways for them to read cartoons for free, so why should they? 

But look at the fortunes that have been made by cell phone companies charging several dollars for ONE little square drawing that people can use to personalize their cell phones.  That’s the key to the solution.

No, people will not pay to READ comics, but many WILL pay to DISPLAY comics.  I’ve already confirmed this with lots of people I’ve talked to personally and on various blogs and forums over these past months.  They will pay to:

1) Show-off their personality, sense of humor and political beliefs

2) Help drive traffic to their blogs and secure reader loyalty

3) Support their favorite artists

Instead of expecting people to go to countless cartoon websites, our approach is to put cartoons where people are already going in massively huge numbers (tens of millions): on individuals’ Facebook and MySpace pages and on blogs.  This will be done through widgets that serve as kind of “refrigerators” or cubicle walls…people will post their favorite cartoons for visitors to enjoy and talk about.  This is why I originally named it “MyFridj,” but I dropped that months ago in favor of INKswig.  (INKswig is actually just a part of the bigger company simply called Swig.)

This is the way it works:

1) We’re going to provide feeds so that people can read all the cartoons they want to FOR FREE!, but if they want to grab a copy to display it, then it will cost whatever amount the cartoonist sets (at least in the beginning…we’ll be programming the site to set the price automatically based on a number of supply and demand factors as soon as we can).

2) There will be a limited number of copies of each cartoon, so they are like “limited edition” prints.  Again, the number is set by the cartoonist. 

So say that a cartoonist sets a price of 25 cents and thinks he can sell 2,000 copies.  That’s $500.  He or she would earn 50% of that, or $250 for that one cartoon.

I know what everybody is already screaming: You can’t limit the number of copies!!  Actually, we can.  The technology to do so already exists, but it’s costly.  It’s yet another reason why I need venture capital.

But even before we get that technology in place, I believe we can still get a lot of people to pay, because our widget will make it easy for them to collect and display favorite gags.  They’ll pay for convenience, just like many people pay the syndicates to get  select cartoons emailed to them daily.

Here’s the plan…

I’ve been working to find a way for cartoonists to earn a good living from the Internet since January of 2003.  I’ve put several years of research and thought and networking and experimentation into this effort, not to mention about $80,000 of my own money.  I and others (some of whom are a heck of a lot more impressive than myself, if only I could tell you) believe I have the business plan to finally reach our goals.  But I’m in this classic Catch 22: I can’t get the big dollars I need to create the company (it’s MUCH more than I’ve described above) until the company proves itself.

So what I’m on the brink of doing is launching a very scaled down version of INKswig called INKswig2008.  It will be focused on comics about the election.  These comics don’t have to be traditional editorial cartoons.  If you do a web comic, they can be in the same format as usual, using your existing characters.  You just need to have them talking about the election.

Of course, editorial cartoonists who have lost their jobs would be very welcome indeed!

The goal is to get up a quick and dirty site by early May that is similar to You Tube, but has political cartoons focused on the national level and all 50 states, so that we can make sure there are cartoons on a more local level.  As we all know, local editorial cartooning are all but dead, so this is a way to give cartoonists’ valuable input and voice during this critical, historic election year.

Like I said, the cartoons there will be free to read, but if somebody wants to grab a copy for their MySpace, Facebook or blog, they will pay whatever amount you set.  You also set the limit on the number of copies that can be sold.  So you can try to sell 4 copies for $25 each or 10,000 copies for 25 cents each, or whatever you want to experiment with.  Again, you’ll earn 50% of whatever is sold.

You’ll be able to attach an “artist’s comment” to the cartoon, if you wish, and people will be able to comment on the copies that are purchased, just like blog posts, so you’ll be able to enjoy feedback on them.

This is what I need to know from cartoonists…

If I get this site up and running, will you contribute cartoons to it?  Obviously, we need lots of good cartoons for this to work, so I need to know that enough talented artists will be willing to participate.

Either leave a message here, or email me at: dawn at inkswig dot com.

If we get this site up and get only 10,000 readers using it (believe it or not, that’s a very small number, and given the interest in this year’s election campaign, I expect our userbase to be much larger), I’ll be able to secure the money I need to hire developers and start creating the permanent site.

Remember, if you are willing to contribute political cartoons to this site (they need not be exclusive to us!) either write a comment to that effect or email me.  Please do so now — we don’t have a whole lot of time left before November, and just getting this bare-bones site up will take weeks.

Oh, and just think, nothing drives traffic more than politics (besides sex, of course), so INKswig2008 should be a good way to reach people who wouldn’t normally run across your web cartoon.  You will be able to link to your own site.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this long post!  I hope I hear from several of you.

Chris Anderson is wrong. FreeDOM, not free, is the future of business

Technorati Tags: Chris Anderson, Free, Brad Fitzpatrick, Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson, Hugh MacLeod, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, Karl Marx, Calvin and Hobbes

UPDATE: This post was syndicated by CenterNetworks.  It’s generated several comments, so you may want to read it there.

I respect Chris Anderson and his work regarding The Long Tail.  But his prediction that free is the future of business is wrong.  There are many reasons why.  I’ll start with the one I think is most critical.

“Free” increases alienation of labor

At the beginning of the industrial revolution, Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, workers inevitably lost control of their labor, and hence became separated from:

1) their humanity, being treated more like machines

2) their community, because everybody was equally interchangeable and no longer dependent on each other’s varied skills and interests

3) the act of production, since people had to do what they were told and couldn’t enjoy the process of creating from their heart

4) the product they produced, since it was now owned by somebody else (the capitalists)

What I and people around me were most excited about in the mid 1990s, when the Internet began to really take off, was the hope that we could reclaim our creativity and our labor.  Musicians wouldn’t have to “sell out” to record labels, writers could bypass “clueless” publishers, artists of all types could reach audiences directly.  This was the promise of the Web.

But now, over a decade later, instead of being brought closer to our labor and its fruits, people like Chris Anderson and Fred Wilson want to tear us farther away by putting a lot of convoluted monetization schemes between what we do and how we get paid. 

The people who enjoy the benefits of your product or service should be the ones who pay for it.  The more we remove the payee from the payer, the more problems and the less fairness we’ll have as a result.

Take the writers’ strike.  Those three dry months were the direct result of uncertainty regarding what would be fair compensation in a digital world where monetization doesn’t have a clear link to production.

If you write a story or draw a picture or record a song, the more you’re pushed away from the person who enjoys those things, the less likely it will be that you get compensated swiftly and fairly.  Instead of only you having your hand out, now there are several more hands (not to mention sharp elbows).

Furthermore, if you can’t see a clear and direct connection between what you do and what you earn, your work will suffer, because you will be less motivated, less energized, and less happy. Compensation is the best feedback there is. The more removed the compensation is, the more confused and frustrating the feedback will be, if it exists at all.

“But everything digital can be easily copied, so it must be free.”  Nonsense.  There are already existing technologies to stop, or at least minimize, wanton copying.  And I don’t mean DRM. 

It’s not really a technical issue at this point. It’s the attitude of free that needs to shift. Tech caused the copying problem and tech could solve it, if it wanted to.

Here’s the truth about the “free culture” movement:  geeks started it, geeks push it and geeks almost solely reap the financial rewards from it.

In January of 2003, I made a handshake deal with Brad Fitzpatrick who started LiveJournal and now works for Google.  The deal was that I would gather up cartoonists to sell comics on LiveJournal, and we would all share the proceeds.  After I spent considerable time, effort, and money, Brad reneged on the deal, deciding that LiveJournal’s culture wouldn’t/shouldn’t support paying for cartoons (or anything else, presumably). They preferred to steal comic strips and panels from the feeds that were set up by syndicates to supply cartoons to their client newspapers.  When I told Brad this was wrong, because the artists weren’t being paid, and free distribution would depress the price for online comics (which it did, severely), he actually told me that if the syndicates didn’t want their comics taken, they wouldn’t make it so easy for him to swipe them.  About two years later, syndicates (not known for keeping up with technology) started sending out cease and desist letters to get their feeds taken off LiveJournal.

From the beginning, geeks didn’t want to have to pay for any form of information or entertainment or service on the Internet.  And since they essentially were the Internet at that time, and because payment was difficult and vulnerable, anyway, the “everything must be free” culture took firm root.  Sure they needed music and art and animation and photos and stories and video to make what they created more interesting and more attractive, but they didn’t want to pay anybody for it.  They created the means to take it freely, and they did.  “Copyright is dead!” is the still the war cry of Robert Scoble and most everybody else in the tech world, who think of themselves as the good knights who have slaughtered a dreadful beast, those “greedy record labels” and everybody else who gets in their way of free.

Of course, they — the geeks — are the good guys here, in their own mind.  After all, they give stuff away all the time (Fitzpatrick was one of the original Open Source advocates), so why shouldn’t everybody else? 

Here’s why:

Geeks are in short supply relative to their high demand.  Giving away free code never put their jobs or their incomes at risk.  In fact, it enhanced their ability to earn money.  They could hack free code in their spare time for the fun of it (literally the FUN of it, as geeks are as passionate about their work as any other creator), but still earn high wages at their day jobs.  And they soon learned that the more platforms and applications and features and such that were out there, the higher in demand their skills were.  This worked for them uniquely, because hacking is still very new in the grand scheme of things.  Being a nascent industry made giving away their work an opportunity rather than a risk. 

It’s like Anderson’s Gillette example of giving away free razors so that people would buy the blades. 

A “free” strategy worked and still works for geeks.  But what about other professions?

The argument is that there is always something to sell, despite the profession.  For example, musicians can sell tickets to live performances instead of (gasp) making people pay for recordings. Okay, but what about singers who happen to be young mothers and don’t want to be on tour? And what happens when you get too old or too burned out or too sick to perform?

Hugh MacLeod is a popular cartoonist who gives away his work and does well financially by selling wine and whatever.  Okay, but what if the cartoonist isn’t a marketer like Hugh is, and what if her style requires a lot of time to produce, like Hugh’s doesn’t?

Well, then she needs to sell T-shirts and mouse pads, of course.

Can you imagine a lawyer or a doctor or a software engineer being told they must work long hours for free, but nevermind, they can make up for it by being a salesman after hours?

If a newspaper publishes a story that a nonstaff member writes, or a cartoon that a nonstaff member draws, they pay for that content, up to several hundred dollars, depending on the size of their readership.  This is justified because it’s this content that helps draw eyeballs to the ads that generate the revenue.  But TechCrunch is said to make over $200,000 a month in ad revenue — more than many newspapers do.  But does Michael Arrington pay for animations or any other outside content that he publishes?  No.  The people who create it are supposed to just feel happy and grateful that he ran it and gave them “exposure.”

Web culture scorns newspapers and magazines, known as “dead tree media.”  But “old media” generated income for great numbers of writers and artists and editors and photographers.  By contrast, the Web seemingly doesn’t care that those jobs (with their steady salary and much needed benefits like health insurance) are going away, but Web users still want all the skilled output of these talented, experienced, professional people to entertain and enrich them — for free.

Just like capitalists, geeks brought opportunity.  And just like capitalists, they’ve kept most of it to themselves, while collapsing the ability of countless others to even eke out a living, much less get mega-rich as so many geeks have.

If Karl Marx were alive today, instead of the dreaded capitalists, he would hate geeks.

But Marx was an angry extremist.  I’m neither anti-capitalism (I’m a Republican and an MBA, for pity sake) nor anti-geek (my beloved late husband was a geek at Intel).  But I do believe, as I’ve said many times, that we need to get other professionals more involved in molding Web culture.  The tech world has created a culture that uses non-techies for its own financial benefit, whether intentionally (which I don’t believe) or by misguided accident (yep, that one).  And “free” is at the basis of this exploitative, alienating culture. 

Despite what Anderson says, Free will not be the future of business, because justice and prudence will win out and not allow it to be.

Revenge of the Non-Nerds

My company, and I’m sure many others, are working to monetize non-techies via the Web. Among other things, this means changing web culture so that copyright is respected and protected.  The most successful way to bring this about is to give all Web users a clear and reasonable stake in doing so.

In the coming few years, I guarantee you’ll see less “take whatever you want, copyright be damned” attitude and more “hey, stealing content isn’t cool.”  The wealth the Web generates must be distributed fairly within the U.S. and to all countries overseas, and across all digital professions.  And it will be, as more non-techies gain power through tech companies like mine that take the “tech” for granted and focus on changing the world in a more thoughtful, deliberate way, not just blindly disrupting it.

See, the thing is, free isn’t the Web’s essence.  FREEDOM is.  People should be empowered to use their talents, skills, experience and passions to make money any way they can legally do so.  If one cartoonist wants to sell T-shirts or wine or cow dung, more power to him.  But if another wants to sell his drawings, then nobody should stand in his way or thwart his ability to do so because of their own “must be free” religion that denies artists the ability to be directly compensated for their work.

Everybody is different, and artists are especially unique.  One of the best comic strips of all times was Calvin and Hobbes.  There is no free business model that the creator, Bill Watterson, would have allowed.  He is so anti-commercial, he gave up millions of dollars by refusing to license Calvin and Hobbes for merchandise like T-shirts and stuffed animals.  Attaching ads to his work would be unthinkable.  And he’s so anti-social, to this day if somebody recognizes him in public, he will literally run away.  So public book signings, etc. wouldn’t work either.  In Chris Anderson’s world, Calvin and Hobbes would never have existed.   Surely, that’s not what we want.

More Problems with Anderson’s article (and coming book)

1) The concept of free is nothing new, as Anderson himself makes clear.  But he wants us to believe that “freenomics” is exploding and will change everything.  I don’t buy it.  Yes, “free” as a business model is now a lot more consciously held, and it certainly is getting (overly) emphasized, but we’ve always had it, and in a lot more pervasive ways that Anderson cites.

Ever stop at a McDonalds because you desperately needed a bathroom?  I expect we all have, and 95% of us likely purchased something while we were there, if for no other reason than to keep from being embarrassed.  What we really wanted (a toilet) was free, but we paid for an icy drink to get it, which in turn increased the likelihood that we would need another McDonalds down the road, and so it goes on any cross country trip — freenomics in action for the past half century!

If you think about what you actually want compared to what you’re paying for, you’ll see that “free” has always been a part of every transaction:

WHAT I WANTED THAT WAS FREE	WHAT I PAID FOR TO GET IT
Comfort and ease of stress	A Snickers bar
A quiet place to work	A Starbucks vanilla steamer
An escape from work	Tickets to “Vantage Point”
My neck to quit hurting	An expensive pillow from Select Comfort

Free is already universal.  Making it a deliberate part of a business model is anything but earth shattering.

2)  “Free” is a misnomer.  As Anderson admits, the “free lunch” may be free for you, but somebody else is paying for it.  If “$0.00 is the future of business,” then why do we need “six broad categories” to set prices for this “priceless economy”?

Turns out that it’s not really free, after all. What a surprise.  But you can feel good, because you’ve been manipulated into thinking it’s free, and if you’re really lucky, some other sap is subsidizing you.

3) In all Anderson’s long description of how marginal costs are dropping to zero – thus supposedly securing the success of our free society – never once does he mention human beings. Any business person will tell you that human labor makes up the bulk of a company’s costs.  These costs will never, ever go to zero nor anywhere close to zero, because humans must be fed, housed and cared for on a daily basis.  Humans require regular paychecks, not to mention benefits, even if it’s just paying into social security and medicare by government mandate. 

4) Anderson uses all this sensational “free is the new norm” gimmickry to state his true thesis which is (I think…it’s so buried under hyperbole I can’t be certain) that as marginal costs of the digital economy go to zero, we will see increased processing power, storage and bandwidth being used for applications that were once cost prohibitive, and this will transform the world.

Yeah, okay.  So what?  Isn’t that what we already expect?  We’ve all lived for years with falling prices and increased performance.  I don’t think anybody is expecting innovation to end.  I doubt there is one single person in the world who thinks the Web that exists today will be the same in five years.  Or even next year.  How is this big news?

I must say I’m disappointed in Anderson’s thinking regarding free.  This Wired article just made me decide that I won’t buy his book when it comes out.  Without this free article, I likely would have, because of The Long Tail.

I wonder what he’d say about that ironic backfire to his free strategy.

What do we mean when we say they want change?

Technorati Tags: Change, New York Times, Politics

I submit that what people care about, above and beyond economics or even national defense, is changing how things get done, or more precisely, that we need to start getting things done.  Together.

This is what we want changed:

1) Toxic partisan government that demands that no matter how bad things get or how good things are, we can’t let the party in charge have any sort of victory.  Beat the other side up, no matter what they do.  Don’t allow good things to happen under the other guy’s watch.  Hope and pray for things to go south, so our side can get back in power.  Brutally attack our leaders personally and demand superhuman perfection from them at all times, unless they’re on our side and then makes excuses for and condone virtually anything and everything.  Allow the fringe extreme on both sides to define the issues.

2) Toxic partisan journalism like the New York Times article smearing McCain that throws out once-treasured standards and replaces professionalism with political agenda.  Don’t report the good news, exaggerate the bad news.  Deal in “he said, she said” discord to sensationalize the news.  Broaden the audience by dumbing-down reporting.  Encourage spin rather than report facts.  Become the mouth piece of your chosen side instead of being the independent voice people can count on for objectivity.

The United States has very serious issues to deal with, and our political and media leaders are stuck in six grade “love me hate you” psychology.  I, for one, am sick to death of all of it. 

Hitler the Cartoonist?

Technorati Tags: comics, cartoonists, Hitler, World War II

A Norwegian museum director says he has discovered cartoons which he believes were drawn by Adolf Hitler during World War Two. 

The article says, “There was no independent confirmation that the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, who tried to make a living as an artist before going into politics.”

So if Hitler could have made a living as a cartoonist and not gone into politics, perhaps millions and millions of people might not have died.  Wow.

Now if only investors would help me get my startup off the ground so that we can create opportunities for today’s cartoonists to make a living, perhaps we can avoid World War III.

Bug Light VCs

Technorati Tags: VCs, startups, online advertising, venture capital

I was pointed today to this blog post titled Why Most VC-Backed, Ad-Supported Companies are Doomed to Fail. 

When it comes to venture capitalists — what motivates their funding decisions, and what their expectations are — I have to say that I haven’t been real impressed by a significant portion of them.  I’ve come up with a (okay, admittedly snarky) name for this group: Bug Light VCs.

Bug Light VCs are those who:

1) Follow the tech crowds to the latest shiny distraction in stupefied wonder.

2) Deeply believe in, evangelize, and defend with hurling Twitters (okay “tweets”…I hate that) the doomed “everything must be free and ad supported” doctrine.

3) Invest in features, not companies.

4) See no hope of revenues anywhere in sight and pray to be acquired.

and, sorry, but

5) Deserve to get fried.

All of us who have lived in the South know that the fatter the bug, the longer they sizzle.  Now does that mean that the richer the VC, the hotter the burn rate?

Google choosing evil?

Technorati Tags: Google, don’t be evil, Chris Pirillo, freedom of speech, privacy

Despite Google’s “Don’t be evil” code of conduct, I keep running across quiet stories like this one from FoxNews (notice the “exclusive” tag) that reports Google was censoring a news source, presumably for political motives.

They recently did the same thing to an ad network called PayPerPost.  If you remove pages from Google’s search machine, it’s practically gone from the Web.  What a convenient way of getting rid of competition and other enemies.

And then there’s Google’s data mining — even mining private emails for personal information they can use to target ads to you.

If the government were doing all of this, the blogosphere would be having a Danish-cartoons-type fit.  But because it’s Google, a brand not only beloved but treated like a God by the tech world, there’s little expressed outrage.

No matter how big or powerful Google gets, the Internet actively psyches itself up to keep the faith.  Chris Pirillo (a nice and knowledgeable guy who I affectionately like to think of as the king of geeks) wrote in 2006:

Google is everywhere. I want it to be everywhere, but I also don’t want it to be everywhere - because that’s very scary. I trust that they will continue to “do no evil” (as opposed to “do know evil?”) - but perhaps there’s such a thing as “too big?” I have to prepare for the worst.

But then Chris goes on to reveal how financially and practically and emotionally he is dependent on Google:

In a recent show, I challenged myself to live without Google for a week. Now, this doesn’t include tearing down my AdSense blocks (that would be totally insane).

Days later, after several intervening descriptions of pain and suffering because Yahoo Search can’t produce satisfying results (laments right up there with the “dark night of the soul” experiences of saints when they lose discernable connection with God), Chris wrote:

I’m back on the juice. Life is once again peaceful in the Pirillo household. Google rules.

See?  Saying that Google is treated like a God is not an exaggeration on my part.  Omnipresent.  Omnipotent.  A worshiped ruler.

But I, for one, do not believe that Google is benevolent.  In fact, I contend that Google is a very real threat to free speech for three reasons:

1) If they choose to (and there are mounting indications that they do choose to), they can make any publisher on the Web essentially disappear.

2) Because of Google’s hegemony and the sucking in of all advertising dollars, few print publications will survive and even television is in danger.  We are increasingly dependent on the Web as our news source.  See #1.

3) Because of Google’s hegemony and the sucking in of all advertising dollars, independent publishers, bloggers like Chris, are financially beholden to Google.  How many “citizen journalists” will bite the hand that feeds them?  Self-censorship is a serious future prospect.

Furthermore, Google is not just a threat to privacy, but an insatiable machine that will increasingly obliterate the quaint notion of privacy.  Afraid of privacy abuse by government?  Individuals within Google have more access to information about you than the watch-dogged FBI or CIA who are too busy hunting crooks and terrorists to care much about blackmailing you or destroying your reputation. And government doesn’t have profit motives like selling your medical data to potential employers and insurers.

What’s the answer?  A strong competitor to Google.  And I don’t mean another search engine.  We need an entirely new competitor to keep the Google monster in check and less able to do evil.