Kinda skipping over the part where they grabbed it at death's door, aren't you?
Suppose Google had done nothing. The alternative wouldn't have been a beautifully indexed, easily searchable completely up-to-date Deja News archive today. It would have been that archive rotting in a landfill or that equipment being wiped and reused.
Has Google's stewardship of the Deja News archive been disappointing at times? Of course. But the idea that Google has taken anything away from you or anyone else reflects an amazing sense of entitlement and an astonishing lack of perspective.
That's just making things up. Deja News could have ended up anywhere, including at the Internet Archive. The people running it sold it to Google in the belief it would be kept running. Had they not done it someone else would have.
The talk about entitlement completely misses that Google bought it only to prompty run it into the ground. If you do that in a market leading position to your competitors that's downright illegal in most jurisdictions.
That may not be applicable here, but you should be able to understand why this upset a lot of people.
> Deja News could have ended up anywhere, including at the Internet Archive.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The idea that a company that is falling apart and selling itself off in pieces was going to donate one of its last major assets to charity... I don't even know where to start.
That was the whole problem. Running the archive wasn't a business (at least deja.com never figured out how to make it one and eventually gave up trying), but the archive ended up in the hands of investors and/or creditors that didn't care about that. You may be partially right - if Google hadn't bought them someone else might have (maybe Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, or ...). I'm not sure about that (which is why the Google deal was good news at the time), but let's suppose you're right. All that would mean is that you would have ended up complaining about how some other buyer ran it into the ground. If you're going to make the case that Google got in the way of the Deja News archive's happy ending, you need a lot more than that.
Suppose Google had done nothing. The alternative wouldn't have been a beautifully indexed, easily searchable completely up-to-date Deja News archive today. It would have been that archive rotting in a landfill or that equipment being wiped and reused.
Has Google's stewardship of the Deja News archive been disappointing at times? Of course. But the idea that Google has taken anything away from you or anyone else reflects an amazing sense of entitlement and an astonishing lack of perspective.