[Editor Charlie sez: Must read insight by Professor Jonathan Taplin on Google’s “surveillance capitalism”]

Google processes more than three billion search queries a day. It has altered our notions of privacy, tracking what we buy, what we search for online — and even our physical location at every moment of the day. Every business trying to reach mass-market consumer demand online knows that Google is the gatekeeper.

The fact that it is a monopoly, with an almost 90 percent share of the search advertising business, is a given that we have all come to accept. It’s Google’s world; we just live in it. So it matters how this company works — who it hires, who it fires and why.

When a company is dominant enough, it sets the tone for an entire era.

Read the post on The New York Times.