If you happened to be scripting a James Bond movie and were looking for a role model for a fabulously sinister corporation, there can be little doubt where you would look for inspiration today. Gold no longer matters to the global economy, oil is running out, and old-style media magnates are too busy fretting about tumbling circulations to threaten the free world. Right now, only one company has the right combination of fabulous wealth, hidden power, global reach and slightly crazed megalomania that made Ian Fleming’s villains so memorable. It is, of course, Google.
Since it was founded in September 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the California-based search engine has become the world’s most breathtakingly successful business. More recently, however, it has also been getting stranger and stranger. It agreed to allow its Chinese site to be censored to stop Chinese surfers stumbling across sites mentioning such dangerous things as democratic elections.
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