A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.
The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.
It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.
I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.
None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.