At present, Google is an astonishing $136 billion dollar company. I've been pondering whether or not to consider its empire built on fraud.

"Fraud" means to misrepresent the terms of a contract. If Joe sells Frank a car on the stated premise that "the car is running perfectly", while secretly knowing that its engine will explode right after Frank drives it off the lot, Joe has not technically lied-- the car was running perfectly at the moment in which Joe stated as such-- but any reasonable person would take "running perfectly" to mean that Joe was not aware of any fatal flaws in the car's condition.

When "GMail" was created in 2004 and was invitation-only, a friend sent me just such an invitation. The service was "free!" I did a little reading and quickly decided not to accept it. To this day, I am not among GMail's 1.4 billion users. Why?

Imagine that instead of a grocery store price tag for a loaf of bread having a dollar amount printed on it, it would say "your date of birth". In the cereal aisle, a box of "Frosted Flakes" would cost "your complete job history". A can of soup would be priced as "the names of all of your children, and their dates of birth." In the next aisle, a frozen pizza's tag would read "your shopping history, including that hemorrhoid cream you bought yesterday." A jelly donut? "Your home address." A package of bacon? "The routes you drive in your car." And so on.

Anecdotally, it doesn't seem that most people would be ok with those terms of exchange when stated up front. Now let's imagine that the grocery store has everything-- the loaf of bread, the "Frosted Flakes", the soup, the frozen pizza-- marked as "free!". But like Joe in the car example earlier, what the store isn't fully disclosing are the tracking microphones and cameras they are slipping onto everyone's clothes as they pass through the store's exit.

Countering the above discourse is the old adage "may the buyer beware". In the fine print of Joe's car sales contract, it does say "sold without warranty". When I received the 2004 GMail invitation, I was able to investigate and discern the company's business model-- so why couldn't other people?

But this is why there are arbitration institutions, private or otherwise: sometimes it's difficult to determine if murder was committed, or in what degree. It seems rational to entertain that perhaps Google built its empire based on the principle spirit of fraud. It would be interesting to see them put into a situation where their actions are put on the scale and weighed against the body of case law.