If I understand you correctly, the point you are making is the question of obligation. Is Google obliged to us? Well, no, private company, other search engines

If I understand you correctly, the point you are making is the question of obligation. Is Google obliged to us? Well, no, private company, other search engines available, etc. I contend, however, that being a publicly financed entity is not the only path by which a company can, or at any rate should, become obligated to a public. Funds are not the only resource that a public can provide. A public also provides trust, without which a private company wouldn't make money, because the public won't use your product. That trust in my view is public a resource. And acquiring it is important to Google's business, which is why Google wasn't skewing search results in 2000, which is why Facebook wasn't mucking around with the Timeline in 2009. They had the freedom to do it then. Why didn't they? Because the outcome for us, and hence for them, would have been different. We hadn't "invested" our trust in them back then. Now we have, and they can't just fuck around with it just because private company, other brands are available, etc. Google isn't built on their brilliance only, it's built on our usage of their brilliance, and they can't act like we aren't invested in it. We didn't put any of our money in it, but money is not the only thing that a public puts, or could put, in companies. Are we Google owners? No. But are we Google stake holders? Yes we are, hence our demand they don't skew results in favor of some thing or other. I didn't sign up for that, and if I hadn't signed up, Google wouldn't be, would it? Can we resolve this by education? No, because Rome wasn't built in a day. If the govt wanted to shut Google down, can you imagine people protesting? I can. Why, and they don't own Google? Because they're stake holders.