An ad hominem attack does not negate the points made in the article, nor does the fact that the article author probably has a bias and some of his claims may be overstated mean that his other claims are without merit.

Google do collect vast amounts of information, and they do generate increasing concern from everyday people over privacy. Note the village who obstructed the Google Street View car as reported in the news last week: the locals quoted in connection with that story were hardly geeks who have thought deeply about privacy issues in the on-line world, but clearly felt that the behaviour was a violation of their privacy nonetheless.

Google do mostly run their services on the back of information provided by others, without adding much or any original content themselves; ironically, Street View is a rare exception to this. On the other hand, Google Search, Google Mail, Google Groups, Google News and so on are all services based on nothing more than presenting an interface to work done by others. They create no original content, do no original research, and provide nothing that couldn't be found through other means.

It would be wrong to assume that such organisational services have no value, of course. If they didn't, no-one would use them.

But it would also be wrong not to consider the implications for the providers of the underlying source material of allowing such services to operate unrestricted. We already have a situation where some sorts of business live or die based on an arbitrary decision of a huge external company that wields awesome power because of its market dominance, yet makes mistakes (ducking the question of whether some of the dubious behaviour is actually a mistake at all).

When a service is fundamental to society and the field is dominated by a small group of organisations that are not directly accountable to the public, there is always a case for government regulation to protect society from abuses by those organisations. This is what we have things like anti-trust laws for, not to mention applicable general laws covering privacy, data protection and the like.

We shouldn't stand in the way of progress without cause, but neither should we assume that new approaches to things are always better, nor ignore the implications of modern technologies and the need to reevaluate old legal standards in the light of new practical capabilities. It is good that the media question the way that a business like Google operates, because for society to function effectively, someone must always question the behaviour of those who wield disproportionate power.

It's very misleading to say that Google "run their services on the back of information provided by others, without adding much or any original content." The people who invented chemistry and physics also did that. They didn't provide any original content; all they did was figure out and describe how things worked; but that was immensely useful.

And it's simply false to say that Google has done no original research. They've had to solve all kinds of problems no one had solved before. If they cared they could have generated thousands of conference papers. But why bother?

Sorry, but I think that's a very poor analogy, unless you happen to be using Google to search for information about how to mine large data sets or how to make enormous amounts of money through on-line advertising.

Experimental physicists and chemists aren't useful because they develop novel experimental methods. They are useful because of what the results of the experiments tell us about physics and chemistry. The methods are merely a means to an end, and if we discovered how physics and chemistry work through other means instead the information would still be the same and just as valuable.

Similarly, Google is not useful because of all the clever algorithms it uses and the fact that they didn't realise "downloading the Internet" was supposed to be a joke. They are useful because of the web pages, newsgroup postings, etc. that they help visitors to find. The content is what matters, the content would be just as valuable however a visitor found it, and the content is written by other people.

IMHO, a far better analogy is that Google is just a middleman trying to get the market to finds content through its services rather someone else's, just like publishers and record labels. Just as in those other cases, it's the people who create works and the society that consumes them who really matter. The middleman is only worth as much as it helps the other roles to function better than they otherwise could.