to be clear, my "conspiratorial dander up" isn't an accusation of conspiracy. obviously i have no evidence of that. 1/

it's an expression of concern, that (1) there is a plausible political motivation to encourage Google to privilege forms of media most susceptible to state pressure, which very much includes TV; and (2) Google has shown itself susceptible to even obviously illegitiate forms of state pressure. 2/

of course, for any set of editorial choices, there will be innocent explanations and nefarious, and it will be difficult for outsiders to rebut claims that the explanations are purely innocent. 3/

but Google is not and has never been a "price taker" on what to surface. Google shapes the internet as much as it is shaped by it. it was Facebook that most ostentatiously, very publicly, provoked a pivot to video, for example. Google is not less powerful than Facebook. 4/

i don't at all buy these woe-is-me-its-all-slop apologies from Googlers. it's all slop because Google rewards slop, shifted from treating SEO as an adversarial practice to overcome to a source of influence by which to shape publisher behavior. 5/

Google has shaped. Google has participated actively in the destruction of the open internet, foisting trends like AMP, killing Reader, privileging more "professional" (financially motivated), sources of content. 6/

now, alas, these claims that the open internet is dead (news to those of us who still publish long-tail sites), and, so sorry, we've no choice but to replace it with massive influence agents that we construct and control. 7/

i suspect that Google's less-than-public-spirited decisionmaking about the internet in the past had nothing to do with anything like political conspiracy. Google+ succeeding would be awesome, RSS often skips ads why would we build infrastructure for it? "Business decisions" that make sense. 8/

but some of us really trusted Google in its early days, made apologies for it as it achieved dangerous scale on the theory that they were us, they shared our view of the kind of network we wanted to live on. that trust was betrayed, one business decision at a time. 9/

and now we do have a state interested in exercising active control over the internet, and a leadership at Google that very publicly and pathetically signals its willingness to play ball, so I don't think Google can expect much benefit of the doubt even in a Hanlon's razor sense. /fin