Maureen Dowd goes to Google

The CEO doesn’t look like the ‘Dick Cheney World Domination sort’

Maureen Dowd, distinguished by an often acerbic tone, today visits Google, a company currently engaged in a “battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.” The AP is threatening legal action against Google, which uses headlines and newspapers stories without permission or sharing a “fair” portion of revenue. But inside the Mountain View, California complex, the New York Times columnist finds an idiot’s paradise, stuffed, as it is, with volleyball courts, ejector seats, wheat-grass shots, framed stuffed-animals, sugar cereal, Haribo Gummi Bear dispensers and heated toilet seats. And, she finds, “the C.E.O. of Google doesn’t look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.”

New York Times