Gregory's ServerIn a city called The Dalles, in Oregon, USA, local people were worried that Google’s water use was soaring. As is so often the case, the city officials, who had given Google hundreds of millions in tax breaks, had no intention of letting anyone know how much water Google was using. It was up to a local paper, The Oregonian, to try and find out. They were forced to bring a case to court. City officials were ordered by Google to claim that Google’s use of scarce public water was a “trade secret”.
|
74 comments
The State and Big Tech, working hand-in-hand, to suppress citizen rights. Big Tech knows everything about us. We know nothing about them. Google’s bullyboy, arrogant, untouchable, imperious tactics were not over. In 2024, David Wren writing for The Post and Courier, warned that in Dorchester County, USA, the amount of public water Google was demanding “to cool computer server farms and other equipment it plans to build is a closely guarded "trade secret."  @gerrymcgovern They can hide it from others outside the trade, but they can't hide it from the citizens who own the water.   @marnanel @anne_twain @gerrymcgovern I am going to guess that their competitors already have a pretty good idea of the amount of water and electricity that Google is using. They have similar set ups, so the only variable is the actual volume of data traffic (which I understand is what they are trying to hide). But surely Meta and Amazon have pretty good estimates of how much data Google is moving. @MylesRyden @gerrymcgovern @marnanel @anne_twain Agreed 100%. BigTech is also depending on the misperception on the part of the general public that Data Centers are totally benign -- just taking the computers that would be found in the average office building and putting them in a warehouse, right? BigTech does not want the public to know the actual amount of resources that are actually being consumed by their "clean" industry. @anne_twain @gerrymcgovern Water rights in the US are regionally determined and can be really strange. It's not always a public resource. Some laws are even "hands tied" by agreements made a hundred, or more, years ago. Check out the documentary "Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008)" to see how corporations are trying to lay claim to "public" resources. It's really amazing the noose people will willingly put their own necks into. @DelRider @anne_twain @gerrymcgovern Mos Def "New World Water (1999)" Some people have known about this for quarter of a century, and even published popular music about it. That's not to say there is nothing to be done, but it's probably more pitchforks and molotovs at this point than polite discussion. @DelRider @anne_twain @gerrymcgovern I was shocked to learn that the Colorado River doesn't reach the sea any more @marnanel  @DelRider @anne_twain @gerrymcgovern Took a class on (US) water rights in grad school. Fascinating. "Riparian" generally east of ~100° W and "prior appropriation" (that's the "agreements made > 100 years ago thing") to the west. First Nations areas have different rules as does Hawai'i.  Democratic rights have become a Big Tech trade secret. Google imposed a gag order on city officials elected by the public, warning them that they must not tell the public anything about the Google project, particularly how much public water Google was taking. Using a slew of aliases to buy land, getting secret tax breaks, getting electricity at less than half of what ordinary people pay, being sold public land for less than half the market value, all in secret, this is how Big Tech rolls. 1998: "Do no evil!" 🙏 2024: "Holy motherfucking shit, have you tried snorting pure uncut evil off a stripper's ass? Got-DAMN, come over here, you gotta try this shit! GYATT!" :02smug:  @gerrymcgovern how on earth is Google imposing gag orders? Is that done through the courts? Everything is sooooo messed up these days @gerrymcgovern a combo of two - being buddy-buddy with rich and trying to bring businesses at all costs to their area in order to look good in front of unsuspecting hard working citizens Making public officials promise that if any taxpayers file official requests for information, Google will be the first to know, this is how our democracy is stolen. Every day, we sell our democracy and basic rights to Big Tech for convenience, “cheap” data storage, some always-on entertainment and a few “free” services. We sell ourselves and our environment so cheap. We live here. My wife is intimately involved. It's even more sketchy and scary than @gerrymcgovern makes it sound in this thread.  @gerrymcgovern This is how fascism starts. And no, it's not an exaggeration; check the role of Krupps, BMW, Volkswagen, Bayer, and Commerzbank, for example, in supporting and having secret agreements with the German government during the 1930's and all the way to 1945. If private companies can operate in secret, evading public scrutiny on deals involving public property and consequences for the general public, then...you don't have a democracy anymore.  @gerrymcgovern the corpo lawyer who came up with trade secret water use should be put in blocks in front of their main church until 7/4 We need more local activists to get ordinances passed forbidding tax breaks or incentives to for-profit companies.  @gerrymcgovern     @gerrymcgovern @lin11c They play one poor or ambitious region against another. They are constantly on the look out for tax loopholes, anything to avoid. They try and subcontract and outsource where possible, anything to avoid decent jobs because decent jobs hurts their voracious hunger for more profits, more power. Big Tech--the most powerful companies in the world--are on corporate welfare. Always with their greedy hands out for more, more, more. No wonder they trade in secrecy. @gerrymcgovern  @lin11c @gerrymcgovern no no, kickbacks and other forms of bribery are illegal, and nobody would ever suggest our fine, upstanding elected officials would do anything illegal. However, it's perfectly above board for politicians to move on to well paid positions as consultants and lobbyists when their time in elected office is complete. @womble @gerrymcgovern @gerrymcgovern @lin11c every era is the same. It used to be big tobacco, or big oil, or big steel. The problem is capitalism. People will inherently do everything they can to hoard resources. I don’t think people understand the possibly of a post resource scarcity world. @randy5235 @gerrymcgovern  @acm_redfox  @lin11c @gerrymcgovern it's basically "we'll provide your city with jobs if you give us this tax break; if not, we'll go somewhere else with our jobs." or, conversely, "hey big tech, we'll give you massive tax breaks if you bring us more jobs." taking hostages, or bribery -- either way it's disgusting. @rothko @gerrymcgovern @rothko @gerrymcgovern The Dalles is less than a two hour drive from where I live. It's a pretty small community and giving that kind of tax break revenue had to be subsidized by the state of Oregon and possibly the federal government. Still doesn't make Google's claim any less ridiculous, however The Dalles is adjacent to the Columbia River which is rather massive, and i don't know what the water infrastructure looks like out there. @gerrymcgovern I hope no one gets the idea to sabotage the water pipes or damm the supply in the middle of the night. @gerrymcgovern is this why our water tastes like paint thinner now? I know I'm not the only one who noticed, the water section of WinCo is always nearly sold out and there is always a line at the dispenser... both new occurrences since 2020  @gerrymcgovern This ridiculous. There is no reason that they couldn't be using closed cycle phase transition (vapor) cooling. They only needed to acquire a small amount of fresh water. The secondary cooling (to return the vapor back to liquid) can be any water, even seawater.  @gerrymcgovern , that should be the point where we all start to de-google all our devices.  @Antigrav @gerrymcgovern Luckily Google makes this easier by preemptively shutting down all the Google services you're using. @gerrymcgovern I have a feeling that if I wrote "this is a trade secret" on my tax return it wouldn't go well for me. @gerrymcgovern @msbellows Why is this legal? I would’ve told Google to kiss it and pound sand. @msbellows @gerrymcgovern In this case it was obviously a threat. I would call the bluff.  Interesting. It looks like that data is being released though, probably due to pressure from the public and dwindling water supply. (Credit KGW8) "Google's data centers used 355 million gallons of The Dalles' water last year (2021), 29% of the city's total water consumption." @the_Effekt They were forced to disclose. But then they go to other places and try and bully their way around. Definitely. I'm sure they would try to keep that data as buttoned up as possible even if it leaks in certain locales.  @gerrymcgovern @mastodonmigration Hey, do you remember Google’s old motto? I do. It was “don’t be evil.” Those were good times, amirite? @gerrymcgovern Google went pretty swiftly from "Don't be evil" to "Yes, we do genocide".  @gerrymcgovern (I live in Oregon and watch the big public records cases fairly closely and this was such a clusterfuck.) @kissane @gerrymcgovern Ah, so that's how you organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. @kissane  @gerrymcgovern @mhoye Wondering if I could get away with that at a job. Just do something totally unexpected and with zero regard for anyone around me and if anyone starts to ask questions, just tell them that no one had been told previously because it was my trade secret.  @mhoye @gerrymcgovern Just reminded that this is almost always the start of people with crazy wealth: First, get some seed money of $1,000,000-$100,000,000 from your family. Next, be lauded years later by the media as being a self-made billionaire.  @gerrymcgovern The fuck? I thought like 80% of the reason they built in an old aluminum plant was because it came with two turbines at The Dalles Dam next door and direct access to Columbia River water so they wouldn't have to use city water... Also there's a Dallas, Oregon and the Marion County road department thinks it's funny to post The Dalles signs pointing in the opposite direction of Dallas signs, even though there's no reason to post The Dalles anywhere in the county...  And we do well to bear in mind it never ends; the fight is never over with a civic leadership so divorced from the community’s overall interest and stake in things: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/stratford-ban-city-hall-1.7196575 |
After more than a year in court, city officials were forced to tell their own citizens how much public water Google was using. “But most troubling in the affair,” Binoy Kampmark wrote for Scoop in 2023, “leaving aside the lamentable conduct of public officials, was the willingness of a private company to bankroll a state entity in preventing access to public records.” This is the type of surveillance capitalism top secret future that Big Tech is implementing for all of us.