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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Knuckleheads’ Club
Zack Maril
[email protected]
New York Times Features New Study of Google by Knuckleheads’ Club
New Think Tank Launches Website Detailing Google’s Secret Source Of Monopoly Power
Washington, DC – They said you have to be a knucklehead to take on Google, so Zack Maril decided to start a club. As seen in The New York Times, we’re announcing the Knuckleheads’ Club – the new think tank dedicated to taking the internet back from Google. We’re asking anyone angry about the level of control Google exercises over their business or personal lives – please join us in fighting back!
Google currently controls 90% of the search engine market. Zack Maril is a software engineer who has spent the last two years and thousands of his own dollars researching the antitrust implications of Google’s search engine monopoly. His story is the basis of today’s breaking news in The New York Times:
“When he was working at the music site Bandcamp, Zack Maril, a software engineer, became concerned about how Google’s dominance had made it so essential to websites.
In 2018, when Google said its crawler, Googlebot, was having trouble with one of Bandcamp’s pages, Mr. Maril made fixing the problem a priority because Google was critical to the site’s traffic. When other crawlers encountered problems, Bandcamp would usually block them.
Mr. Maril continued to research the different ways that websites opened doors for Google and closed them for others. Last year, he sent a 20-page report, “Understanding Google,” to a House antitrust subcommittee and then met with investigators to explain why other companies could not recreate Google’s index.
A report this year by the House subcommittee cited Mr. Maril’s research on Google’s efforts to create a real-time map of the internet and how this had “locked in its dominance.” While the Justice Department is looking to unwind Google’s business deals that put its search engine front and center on billions of smartphones and computers, Mr. Maril is urging the government to intervene and regulate Google’s index. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.”
Read more about what Zack found on the new Knuckleheads Club website – live today! If you’re interested in hearing more from Zack, please reach out at [email protected] to arrange an interview!
Google is a natural monopoly and needs to be treated as such. Zack is using data science to prove Google’s web crawler is permitted a level of access that definitively prevents any competition. Furthermore, if Google hadn’t taken advantage of this – someone else would have come along!
New reporting inThe New York Times shows that Zack’s research has direct implications for how any antitrust investigation should approach Google:
“Now, as regulators around the world examine ways to curb Google’s power, including a search monopoly case expected from state attorneys general as early as this week and the antitrust lawsuit the Justice Department filed in October, they are wrestling with a company whose sheer size has allowed it to squash competitors. And those competitors are pointing investigators toward that enormous index, the gravitational center of the company.”
The Knuckleheads’ Club is excited to announce the launch of knuckleheads.club, a website that details Google’s web crawling advantage over other search engines. The official launch date for this website is now, subsequently following the publishing of an article in The New York Times about the Knuckleheads’ Club.
So Zack can finish this research and help regulators do something about Google, he’s asking anyone angry over Google’s monopoly control over the internet to become a founding member of the Knuckleheads Club.
To learn more about the club’s research and where the Knuckleheads’ Club is going next, please don’t hesitate to email [email protected] today! And follow the club on Twitter at @KnuckleheadsClb and Zack on Twitter at @ZackMaril.
Accompanying the announcement of the Knucklehead’s Club, founding member Zack Maril released the following statement: “With the support of enough Knuckleheads, we can complete this study, meet with regulators, and produce draft legislation and litigation that would make the internet open and fair again for everyone. By joining the club, you can pay for a days worth of server time of this research. We invite you and everyone to join us in the fight to fight for a better internet.”
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