To guard against such an eventuality, it is important that at least one robust market in the global information ecosystem be free of Google products, just as it's important for global agriculture to have GM-free zones. Genetically modified food, like Google Modified Information, let's call it "GMI", may be the wave of the future, but then again it may not.

Just as GM foodstuffs have, in a few short years, reached their way into nearly every nook and cranny of America's food chain, Google has insinuated itself into the information chain, public and private, in a way that uproots traditional norms of decency while making itself hard to deracinate, if not indispensable.

It's not the whiff of science behind GMO and GMI that is troubling, but the blind faith that its primary stakeholders can do no wrong. The deliberate gaming of genetic and informational ecosystems may be of some utility, but the jury is still out about systemic defects and the voracious elimination of alternatives.

Because it penetrates society quietly, insidiously and incrementally, you wake up one day, and all of a sudden the "buzz" is everywhere. Perhaps that helps explain the lengths the masters of these dubious new technologies go to convince the public that they are not just not evil, not just innocuous, but actually good for us.

But is it not better to let one hundred wild flowers blossom, than allow agribusiness to weed out competitors until there is only one kind of crop?

Google has produced some fascinating products that are borderline addictive, but increasingly, the firm is showing itself to have cult-like characteristics, from the fanatic fan-boys who defend it, right or wrong, in every forum, to the soft-spoken leaders whose slightest whisper can turn a hermetic world upside down.

Google itself is a highly secretive and curiously opaque organization, despite its almost willful come-what-may willingness to expose ordinary citizens to the public eye through aerial maps and street photos, indelible posts and silly videos, e-mail data-mining and oops, here and there some information spills.