Comment by JuniperMesos
9 days ago
> However we left such a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies, that changed their algorythms many times in order to maximize their profits and not the public good.
No one "left" a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies. Private companies developed the search engine themselves in the late 90s in the course of doing for-profit business; and because some of them ended up being successful (most notably Google), most people using the internet today take the availability of search engines for granted.
Rather famously in at least the case of Google and others, with government funding:
"Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance" (January 28, 2025)
The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) ... program's stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm $QCOM +1.61%, Symantec, Netscape, and others.
<https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...>
The Internet itself (particularly its precursor, ARPANET), was also government funded, as was development of the World Wide Web (CERN). Oracle, the database company, grew out of the CIA's Project Oracle.
CIA Reading Room Project Oracle
<https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-01794r000...>
"Oracle's coziness with government goes back to its founding / Firm's growth sustained as niche established with federal, state agencies" (2002)
<https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/oracle-s-coziness-wit...>
Surveillance has been baked in since their founding.