Google Paid Ad Promotes Terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki - It Is Time to Break Up Google! - Terrorist™ Role Model: Anwar al-Awlaki - Get Some Free Terrorist™ Advertising and Promotion on Google

Source: Populist 

by Lee Stranahan | Apr 23, 2017 | Featured, Politics | 2 |

Google, the world's top search engine and one of the world's largest companies, is running paid ads promoting Anwar al-Awlaki, the deceased American-born imam who was directly and indirectly responsible for some of the world's most famous and deadly terror attacks in the past few years, including the 9/11 terror attack, the Ft. Hood massacre, the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. As this story goes to press, people searching on Google for Anwar al-Awlaki are likely to be presented with a paid advertisement for al-Awlaki's website.

The simple website consists of a number of videos of al-Awlaki speaking – all hosted on Google's YouTube video sharing service – plus a request form to join a mailing list.

A search to determine the owner of the site showed that the domain's ownership has been masked.

Google and YouTube, based in Mountain View, CA, are part of Alphabet, a holding company, whose CEO is Eric Schmitt, a top Hillary Clinton campaign supporter.

Given al-Awlaki's status as the inspiration behind some of the most famous and deadly terror attacks in the past few years, you'd think that both Google and law enforcement agencies would have put some safeguards in place to make it more difficult for people to find the propagandistic proselytization of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Even years after his death at the hands of an American drone strike, American-born Imam Anwar al-Awlaki continues to be a motivating factor behind deadly attack after deadly attack.

Terrorism Inspired by Al-Awlaki

Omar Mateen carried out the deadliest attack on U.S. soil at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida after watching hours of al-Awlaki videos. A friend of Mateen's submitted an OpEd to the Washington Post in which he explained how Mateen had been led to terror: "I wondered how he could have radicalized. Both Omar and I attended the same mosque as Moner, and the imam never taught hate or radicalism. That's when Omar told me he had been watching videos of Awlaki, too, which immediately raised red flags for me. He told me the videos were very powerful."

Another man who lived in Fort Pierce and attended the same mosque as Mateen had carried out a suicide bomb attack in Syria in 2014 and was inspired by Awlaki. 22-year-old Palestinian American Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, acted on behalf of an al Qaeda-linked militant group, driving a massive truck bomb into a restaurant filled with government soldiers after watching hours of Awlaki videos. In a video Abu-Salha made before the attack that killed people, he said "In a lecture, Anwar al-Awlaki said when you make a journey for jihad it's like a cliff, jump off the cliff and you don't know if the water is deep or shallow. Don't know if there's rocks or if it's going to be very deep. You just have to jump and put your faith in Allah that it's going to be deep and you won't be harmed, that you're going to be safe after you land in the water."

Nidal Hassan, the Muslim terrorist who killed 13 people and injured more than 30 at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. Hassan's attack required no money and no organizational support but we know he had indoctrination in the form of email exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki. As the New York Times reported in 2009:

The communications provide the first indication that Major Hasan was in direct communication with anyone who espoused militant views. On Monday, Mr. Awlaki praised Major Hasan on his Web site, saying that he "did the right thing" in attacking soldiers preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Awlaki added, "The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal."

Mr. Brachman said Mr. Awlaki was especially appealing to young Muslims who are curious about radical ideas but not yet committed. "He's American, he's funny, and he speaks in a very understandable way," Mr. Brachman said.

The deadly Boston Marathon attack was carried out by two Muslim brothers who learned how to make a pressure cooker bomb from an al-Qaeda magazine called Inspire! using easy to find materials. Inspire! magazine was founded by Anwar al-Awlaki. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tweeted a few weeks before the attack to listen to al-Awlaki and '"you will gain an unbelievable amount of knowledge.'"

Please go the Populist website to read the entire article.

RED ALERT: Google Paid Ad Promotes Terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki 

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Yeah, sure. If "Anwar Awlaki" is a Muslim jihadist - we're all Tibetan monks. Maybe Anwar Awlaki's eyesight got worse from studying too much from the holy scriptures in the Quran...the western intelligence agencies and Google's poster-boy for Al-Qaeda. An advertising campaign because it is good for business...

...chuckle...chuckle...

Google Terrorism™

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 Source: Investigations Office

It Is Time to Break Up Google!

By JONATHAN TAPLIN

Credit Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty Images

In just 10 years, the world's five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.

They're all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.

We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about "the curse of bigness" were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson's counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) "in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people." We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the "fake news" business to know that Brandeis was right.

While Brandeis generally opposed regulation — which, he worried, inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator — and instead advocated breaking up "bigness," he made an exception for "natural" monopolies, like telephone, water and power companies and railroads, where it made sense to have one or a few companies in control of an industry.

Could it be that these companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market's demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities?

Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications.

In 1895 a photograph of the business district of a large city might have shown 20 phone wires attached to most buildings. Each wire was owned by a different phone company, and none of them worked with the others. Without network effects, the networks themselves were almost useless.

The solution was for a single company, American Telephone and Telegraph, to consolidate the industry by buying up all the small operators and creating a single network — a natural monopoly. The government permitted it, but then regulated this monopoly through the Federal Communications Commission.

AT&T (also known as the Bell System) had its rates regulated, and was required to spend a fixed percentage of its profits on research and development. In 1925 AT&T set up Bell Labs as a separate subsidiary with the mandate to develop the next generation of communications technology, but also to do basic research in physics and other sciences. Over the next 50 years, the basics of the digital age — the transistor, the microchip, the solar cell, the microwave, the laser, cellular telephony — all came out of Bell Labs, along with eight Nobel Prizes.

In a 1956 consent decree in which the Justice Department allowed AT&T to maintain its phone monopoly, the government extracted a huge concession: All past patents were licensed (to any American company) royalty-free, and all future patents were to be licensed for a small fee. These licenses led to the creation of Texas Instruments, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor and many other start-ups.

Changes at the Top

The five largest companies in 2006 …

All figures in 2017 dollars; 2017 companies as of April 20. Source: S&P Dow Jones IndicesBy The New York Times

True, the internet never had the same problems of interoperability. And Google's route to dominance is different from the Bell System's. Nevertheless it still has all of the characteristics of a public utility.

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don't inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

It is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale. To begin with, the platforms of Google and Facebook are the point of access to all media for the majority of Americans. While profits at Google, Facebook and Amazon have soared, revenues in media businesses like newspaper publishing or the music business have, since 2001, fallen by 70 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspaper publishers lost over half their employees between 2001 and 2016. Billions of dollars have been reallocated from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms. All content creators dependent on advertising must negotiate with Google or Facebook as aggregator, the sole lifeline between themselves and the vast internet cloud.

It’s not just newspapers that are hurting. In 2015 two Obama economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman, published a paper arguing that the rise in "supernormal returns on capital" at firms with limited competition is leading to a rise in economic inequality. The M.I.T. economists Scott Stern and Jorge Guzman explained that in the presence of these giant firms, it has become increasingly advantageous to be an incumbent, and less advantageous to be a new entrant.”

There are a few obvious regulations to start with. Monopoly is made by acquisition — Google buying AdMob and DoubleClick, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon buying, to name just a few, Audible, Twitch, Zappos and Alexa. At a minimum, these companies should not be allowed to acquire other major firms, like Spotify or Snapchat.

The second alternative is to regulate a company like Google as a public utility, requiring it to license out patents, for a nominal fee, for its search algorithms, advertising exchanges and other key innovations.

The third alternative is to remove the "safe harbor" clause in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows companies like Facebook and Google's YouTube to free ride on the content produced by others. The reason there are 40,000 Islamic State videos on YouTube, many with ads that yield revenue for those who posted them, is that YouTube does not have to take responsibility for the content on its network. Facebook, Google and Twitter claim that policing their networks would be too onerous. But that's preposterous: They already police their networks for pornography, and quite well.

Removing the safe harbor provision would also force social networks to pay for the content posted on their sites. A simple example: One million downloads of a song on iTunes would yield the performer and his record label about $900,000. One million streams of that same song on YouTube would earn them about $900.

I’m under no delusion that, with libertarian tech moguls like Peter Thiel in President Trump’s inner circle, antitrust regulation of the internet monopolies will be a priority. Ultimately we may have to wait four years, at which time the monopolies will be so dominant that the only remedy will be to break them up. Force Google to sell DoubleClick. Force Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram.

Woodrow Wilson was right when he said in 1913, "If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government." We ignore his words at our peril.


Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of "Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy."
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