On the road to Bandol

I am French, and I must admit that my government spends a lot of time innovating about technology, in particular in relation with artistic creation. After enacting a wonderful antipiracy law that will cause problems to people with poorer network security skills than their neighbors, a recent report is suggesting to tax Google because it is making money from people who search about artists (musicians, in particular). So, I searched about a few of them, just to see how Google coudl make money out of this.

A search for “Beatles” returned a surprisingly small amount of adds; “Michael Jackson” brought tabloid stuff, and “Muse” worked great. All advertisements were about Muse concert tickets and merchandising. So, OK, Google is making money, but it is also helping Muse make money, as well as legal concert ticket resellers. Actually, I was quite amazed that there would be no reference to ancient Greece or general culture on the first page search for “muse”.

One last search for Florida bluesman “Sauce Boss” led me to his Web site and many references to him on the Web, but Google didn’t make much money, because the advertisements were about “Hugo Boss” and some sauce, which I was not interested in. However, it worked for me, because that’s exactly how I found the guy, more than 15 years after last seeing one of his concerts, and it worked for him, because I .

Our government seems to be spending a lot of energy on saving one problematic business model, but things are hard for many of us, including the companies I work for. SIM card vendors are having a hard time with these Google guys, who are moving all our nice SIM Toolkit applications (and their value) away from our SIM cards and into their Android phones, which do not even support SIM toolkit. This is almost antitrust matter: not supporting SIM Toolkit basically means that they are refusing competition.

So, taxing Google definitely looks like a universal good idea, and many of us could gain from it. Maybe we could save the last Minitels that way. However, we all need to get our act together and make money from Google by working with Google. The examples above show how Google can benefit to both big and small music acts. I am sure that somebody will also find a way to make money from them with security in a way or another, and I hope that I can be part of it somehow.