Keep this in mind : Google's services are a privilege not a right.
Yeah, you & I were doing just fine in your essay until you said that one, right there. Trite cliche, overused and worse it's overused by people that have no clue about what either of those two words mean.
(shee-it, wats he talkin' 'bout, Willis?)
It's a false dichotomy, this government-sponsored piece of propaganda, designed to lock the drooling masses into the belief that if it's not a right, then it must be a privilege, as if there were no other words, nor any other paradigm to describe the situation accurately.
And, to poke my esteemed colleague in his eye-socket, the right-honorable JazzC (who is an anarchist masquerading as a libertarian), there really IS such a thing as a monopoly, and the concerns of us dirt-bound mud people are valid because at some point the monopolies' economic power bridges over into political power and they use that power to prevent the competition that the Liberanarchistarians love to get stiffies over. (Talking about economic competion is like watching porn for a Liberararchistarian. It makes their weiners sturdy and their vaginal passages damp. Both, at the same time.)
Bet you didn't know that what that "t" stands for in "Liber-
T", did you? Well, now you know.
And so that's what we have right now, a Statist Corporatocracy where economic power and government power are all one and the same and the funny thing is you have socialists and liberanarchistarians BOTH advocating in favor of maintaining the monopolistic powers of corporations like Google (and Microsoft, etc...) One group LOVES the idea that all power & control is consolidated into a single entity (you might call it the "military-industrial complex", or you could just call it "government", while at the supposed other end of the spectrum, the liberanarchistarians deny that monopolies even have power, and all that's required in order to deal with them is to stand around and wait for them to fall apart as the natural result of inevitable "competition", as if it exists somehow as a KNOWN LAW OF THE UNIVERSE, like entropy. Or gravity, i.e. "What goes up, must come down". It's just a matter of time.
How much time? The liberanarchistarian doesn't concern himself with that. What concerns him is that someone might want to violate both law and some sense of god-given right in order to forcibly break-down the monopoly. He doesn't care about that. He cares about how dangerous YOU are. Because, if you are willing to go after Google, someday you might do the same thing to him. You see, he thinks he has the same rights as the monopolies do, and they have the same rights as he does. They are the same, and the standard to measure them all is exactly the same. And if you violate the "rights" of the one, you violate the rights of the other as well.
Which brings us back to the definition of rights. And please note the complete absence of that stupid word "privilege". It's a stupid word, used as filler by people trying to evoke the idea that you should submit yourself to their notions of what power is. (And they really don't understand anything about that supposed "power"; they just want your intellectual submission. My advice: Never submit to an intellectual inferior.)
The only word worth thinking about, and possibly using, is the word "rights". Are "corporate rights" the exact same thing as "individual rights", and if so whose rights get adapted in which direction. Does Google have to worry about going to jail for failing to have Liability Insurance on it's car, or do I have a right to hide billions of dollars of assets in foreign banks in order to avoid paying income taxes?
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_France#Quotes
