YGingras^.net

I have a conjecture. It seems that most modern evil is the result of publicly traded companies. Why? I don't know, maybe its the way power and accountability applies to publicly traded companies. Share holders are not accountable, share holders vote with their money and shareholder have (mostly) no way to tell the board of director what they think except by fluctuation of the share value. The net result is that even though shareholders have ethic values, the only usable metrics for the board of directors become the stock price and the balance sheet.

I was expecting a counterexample when Google went public. That was wishful thinking. Google started to censor search results in China. This is no minor evil, and its really bad for Google. Google was better because we could trust it. When a search result comes up in a second grade search engine we never know if its because its a good result or because someone paid to put it there. Now, with Google is the other way around. Where a result come up, is it because its good or because someone paid to filter out the real hits ?

Now that Google is publicly traded, it has a new metric and if we don't like what Google does, we have to say it using that metric. How? The first thing I did was to cancel my Google account (google account -> preferences -> account -> delete acount). But unfortunately you can't tell why you did it in this form so you must also use the feedback form to let them know. Yeah, its going to be hard to avoid google search but at least if we cancel enough accounts, delete enough Google cookies and avoid enough the other Google services, we can make a visible gradient shift on the share value metric. So far so good, the publicly traded company conjecture still holds.