It was refreshing to read William J. Lockhart’s article, >“The Ministry of Magic Tricks” (April 22) . Can industrial profits compensate for severe environmental degradation? Industrialisation may spell a better life for people in the long run, but at what cost to the environment? Can it reverse habitat loss, population resettlement, air and water pollution? Climate change on account of global warming and ozone layer depletion are well known. Development needs to be sustainable and which accords importance to the environment. Ankit Galgat,
Panipat, Haryana
Google under the lens
Google (Editorial, April 22), over the past two decades, has become so much of a household name that O.U.P. has added ‘Google’ as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary . The numbers showing Google’s dominant share of the worldwide Internet search engine market can make competitor products such as Bing or Yahoo! Search sink into oblivion. Monopoly is, in many cases, the result of the natural success of a business and should not always be treated as a transgression. Google, in all fairness, should be allowed to earn revenue from its advertising campaign programme, ‘Adwords’, by displaying paid ads on its web pages. But the predominant display of search results from its own partners at the top of the search results page is opaque/unknown to the user, and is therefore unjust. Such misuse of its monopoly as a search engine juggernaut should be checked. At a time when net-neutrality is the talk of the town, Google should play by the rules.
Sujith George,
Thiruvananthapuram
