Alan Jacobs annihilates Micah White's case for a "public search engine" similar to a public library, without advertising:
What exactly is White asking for? A universal prohibition on internet advertising, brokered by the U.N.? An international tribunal to prosecute Google for unauthorized indexing? Yes, it would have been wonderful, as Robert Darnton has pointed out, if universities and libraries had banded together to do the information-indexing and book-digitizing that Google has done but they didn’t.
So here we are, with an unprecedented and astonishing amount of information at our fingertips, and we’re going to complain about ads? the same ads that give us television, newspapers, and magazines? Please. Why not just come right out and say “I want everything and I want it for free”?