This is not magic thinking.. this is magic ideology.

Great article.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

By July, that had grown to 43.7%.

And in December,

Google Sites captured 47.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.4 share points from the previous month.  Yahoo! Sites grew 0.3 share points, maintaining its second place ranking with 28.5 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.5 percent), Ask Network (5.4 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.9 percent).

At what can we agree that it has acquired the characteristics of a national public service or de facto monopoly?

But even should it meet those criteria, is the state then automatically justified to nationalize Google?

I first wondered about this when I read this in Guillotines, da Vinci, peak oil and discount rates:

But in many industrial sectors, supply is far from being flexible: it can take years to build a new production factory, and thus market conditions may be quite different at the time of the decision to invest and at the moment the capacity actually becomes available. <...>

Our governments have slowly learnt to manage our economies so as to smooth out such cycles and avoid the worst of the boom-and-bust which is inevitable in pure market driven economies. <...>

But even today, sectors like electricity or oil are prone to such cycles, due to the long lag time of investment decisions.

Does Google fall into the same category, in that there is too long a lag between investment and productivity, or where supply can otherwise be said to be inflexible?

Also, richardk in a comment in Virtual people need more energy than most of the planet wrote:

... the computer industry, especially in microchips, is very mature. Maturity means there's little room for spontaneous innovation and that makes it ripe for regulation.

Can it be said that there is little room for spontaneous innovation in the search engine industry?

I don't know if know if those two criteria are generally agreed upon as being cause for regulation, but whatever the criteria are for nationalization of a company, it seems to me that the bar for that should be higher than the bar for regulation.  And assuming that a bar for nationalization can be clearly defined and agreed upon, I am not sure that just being a "monopoly" that fulfills a "national public service" is reason enough for appropriation of that company by the state.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

Yet, it is important for progressives to have better control of the notion of freedom. So far, conservatives dominate the rhetorics on freedom.

I would make a distinction between factual  freedom (factual as in de facto), and nominal freedom.

Nominal freedom is the principle that you can do anything you want, within boundaries of law and established moral code. More precisely, you can anything you have power to do, within the boundaries of law and established moral code. This is the freedom that conservatives and libertarians mean. If you are in powerful position, you are indeed royally free. If you are in weak position, this is your problem.

Factual freedom is a venture of more opportunities for yourself and everyone. Say, you don't want to be very much dependent of illness, nature disasters, or other stucks of luck. These risks can be diminished across a society by means universal health care, education, etc.  Social agreements can make life more free in a sence that people may feel more secure, or have more diverse options to pursue their goals.

The problem witht he nominal freedom is the caveat "within boundaries fo law and established moral code". Why there are those boundaries? Why are there restrictions on the "freedoms" to taking things that you can easily physically reach (but they belong to others), or eliminate hurdles (by just murdering someone on your way)? Is not because societies without these boundaries do not have a logical chance to succeed? But "established boundaries" do evolve with time. For example, slavery was compatible with nominal freedom at one time. Who knows, soon enough we might need to update moral imperatives to respect not only citizen property and rights, but also natural needs of the Nature in order just to survive on this planet. The freedom to abuse your power has to be restricted in principle - we already have proper restrictions on physical power, but a successful civilisation may need to restrict economic and consumative powers as well.

On the other hand, the progressive "factual" freedom has still to win more appeal. It has to show that social contracts do make everyone more happy. Social contracts do cost more (freedom is not free, yeah!), or they force you to refrain from an immediate benefit. The problem is to show that everyone can win much more compared with tax contributions or missed immediate convenience. Social contract do work. For example, traffic rules do restrict your freedom to drive wherever or however you may wish - bu without traffic rules the would not be any traffic to satisfy our massive trasportation needs!

Damn, now you created aching homesickness in me! The picture you picked shows the Weinachtsmarkt (Christmas market) at the Römer, the central place of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Long years ago, I have been there on countless weekends.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}