174 Comments
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River Rouen's avatar

I’d like to stick up for Google. I think it was very brave of them to ditch their motto of ‘Don’t be evil’

Problem is they only ditched the ‘Don’t’

Now it’s just “Be Evil”

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John Harvey's avatar

You funny!

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Kate Stanton's avatar

Imagine believing that the "experts" behind SEO on Google or "research" on Wikipedia know it all. More the reason to read the greats, sit with their wisdom, then apply action in meaningful ways to each unique lifepath. No one else can tell us how to live our life. We must STFU from the distractions long enough to figure it out.

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Charles W. Kingsfield III's avatar

I recall reading that in 96 (that was the ipo year, right?) and recall thinking that any firm so arrogant to instruct the world what it should not be, was definitely that thing. Consider the utterly evil eric schmitt. Google’s end can’t come soon enough and forgive me for hoping there’s jail involved.

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Yuri Bezmenov's avatar

Google is one of many East India Companies. They don't own many physical assets, but they seek to control our minds. The World Economic Forum is hosting many Fortune 500 leaders this week to advance globalism and mercantilism, while pretending that they are "the resistance". https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/fortune-500-demoralized-dozen-wef-wehrmacht

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Kaleberg's avatar

Google does own physical assets.. Google owns server farms all over the place along with the cable to interconnect them. If Google were barred from writing or running another line of their own code, they'd still have something comparable to Amazon's AWS or Microsoft's Azure. This is a lot like the East India Company owning ships and port facilities.

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Kate Stanton's avatar

With the finest maple Louisville slugger, I'm gonna Astral Project my way into those server farms until my bat is in splinters. Cue the Office Space gangsta rap...

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Charles W. Kingsfield III's avatar

Lmk when you’re headed over that way, we can bring beers and axe handles.

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Kate Stanton's avatar

I'm a boring teetotaler, but I'll bring the spray paint in multiple colors for us to draw bullseyes :) Let's axe some fun!!

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Mishtu's avatar

not sure what you just said — but it was funny

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Charles W. Kingsfield III's avatar

Ms Stanton wished for the best of all things.

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Diogo Dores's avatar

Next time you use the word “woke” in a post just call it what it is, instead of what the fascist what you to think it is. It’s empathy, that’s all it is, empathy.

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Luke's avatar

“Empathy” for one group at the expense of the another, for reasons related to the immutable characteristics of one’s birth

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Diogo Dores's avatar

At the expense of who? Non of the major problems people have nowadays are related or were created from having more empathy and trying to push for minorities to have a better chance. Absolutely zero.

Houses aren’t expensive because of minorities, people not having enough money to start a family is not because of minorities, groceries being expensive is not because of minorities, people caring less about education is not because of minorities and the list goes on…

The problem points to a very obvious point you people simply don’t want to deal with it and prefer to point to somewhere else, most of the problems men face nowadays would be solved if we address inequality and stop letting rich companies and millionaires do w/e they please.

The villainizing of intelligence and empathy in online communities, particularly in MenVerse communities really needs to stop. These whole shit of “making it on your own with your own business” and blablabla is turning young men into dumb fucks who think school doesn’t matter and then can’t stop crying that women seem to suddenly have a lot higher education levels because “DEI”.

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Charles W. Kingsfield III's avatar

Quick, name the first virtual company!

You’re right: Enron, or that’s what poor Jeff Skilling said. I once saw him more than a little buzzed on the streets of manhattan. that was after he resigned as ceo but before the bankruptcy. There was a point everyone in Houston wanted to work at enron.

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Julio Jacobsen's avatar

Techno-feusalism as yanis would put it.

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Mishtu's avatar

They do own a fair amount of physical assets.

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Chris Coffman's avatar

Outstanding article! Equating Google with the British East India company is a conceptual coup.

America itself was also founded on the rejection of the East India Company and its ruthless domination. Not just the Boston Tea Party. In that sense, the East India Company / Google model of mercantilist exploitation is anti-American in the most profound way possible.

If you haven't read it, Conor Cruise O'Brien's brilliant book about Edmund Burke shows how the American colonies were the anti-model for British Imperial India, which was dominated and exploited by the East India Company.

Edmund Burke is the key figure because he was both an advocate for the American colonies at the Court of George III, and the prosecutor in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, the corrupt overseer of India. Burke was passionately pro-American and anti-East India Company and its heartless exploitation.

O'Brien's book describes how the pivot of history turned in favour of the American Revolutionary War and its fight for the "unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" and against the ruthless exploitation of India (and China) by the East India Company who enslaved, exploited and forced opium on their "users".

Your connection between Google and the East India Company is brilliant. May the new Trump Administration eviscerate the anti-American, in the deepest sense, digital exploiter Google.

Here's a link O'Brien's great book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226616517

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Sandeep Mehta's avatar

William Dalrymple, preeminent historian and expert on British colonialism, had equated the East India company to today's monopolistic tech platforms a while back. Ted elaborated on that model.

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Callimachus's avatar

Dalrymple and co-host Anita Anand have a truly wonderful podcast called simply "Empire." Here's the address: https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/

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Michael Kupperburg's avatar

Burke as well as supporting the American Revolution, was also adamantly against the French Revolution, for what it would lead to. He called it the man on horseback, we call it a dictator.

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John Harvey's avatar

Everyone loves to win at Monopoly. Even the Communists.

Let's not overcomplicate this.

Sadly, the "sharing" impulse does not always rule. Look around you, such as at the USA, to randomly name a country. Did anything of import just happen here?

"It's mine, all mine!"

Go away, Jacob Marley! I'm enjoying myself.

(Me: thanks for the book link.)

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Chuck Koton's avatar

youre insane if you think tcrumpASS and his cronies/puppet masters will do anything pro-American ideals...And I think it's pretty phu-knee that in 2025 u think the US project ever truly meant to incarnate its supposed ideals...Like the propertied class that led the Revolution, the USA always just wanted to be Top Dog...the Revolution was driven by pure self interest, not any ideals of______(fill in the blank)!

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ron's avatar

Hmmmm..You seem to think the only authentic society is one that acts against its own (self) interests. Why do you think that societies are morally unfit if they don't act to serve your apparently narrow interests?

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Lulu Manus's avatar

Replace one overseer with a worse overseer. How is that beneficial?

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Michael Kupperburg's avatar

If the recourse is no overseer, it may be a good start, even if it leads to a bad end.

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ron's avatar

Sorry. I am not interested in something that would likely end badly for me even it it entertains you to see it happen.

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Michael Kupperburg's avatar

Anarchy, no overseer, is a deadly dangerous state of affairs. The overseer can be also equally dangerous, but that need not be the case. My optimism assumes it will be better than none.

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Carsten Rasch's avatar

anarchy is only dangerous to the State, certainly not the state of affairs.

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Michael Kupperburg's avatar

Anarchy is dangerous to the people. It would bring us back to Rome, where there was no police force, as the Romans could not imagine who could be trusted to oversee them. People thus had either private protection or none. Are you sure you want to live with that state of affairs?

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Mark Watkins's avatar

Very interesting, and appropriate, analogy.

You mentioned not being sure what the tipping point would be. It seems to be happening already. The tipping point seems to be "AI".

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."

It's unclear whether/why new solutions will be better in regards centralized power - in fact they may be worse. In any case, we will not be going back to some decentralized information access paradigm...That horse has left the barn...

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COMRADITY's avatar

Since they lost two anti-trust cases in a row, they seem to be getting even creepier, if that’s possible. For example, search results are limited and I cant send an email to a gmail account any longer.

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Mishtu's avatar

AI has been around a very long time both proprietary and open source. LLM’s, the current poster child have been around for a long time. What happened is in early 2023, just as we were coming out of Covid as a world , ChatGPT came out; was very impressive; pushed heavily by OpenAI’s key investor Microsoft; and created a wave of FOMO in info tech. However these models took huge resources to train and for them to make inferences. This created a lock-in with the companies that had the size and scale to train the models and offer access to them. Though much of the underlying technology is based on Open Source — the models are effectively proprietary and we subscribe to them and are charged token by token. I believe that lock in contributed to the “tipping point”

https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/05/06/ai-accelerates-cloud-revenues-as-well-as-cloud-investments/amp/

Was AI’s entrance into hype cycle coinciding with the world moving beyond COVID and 24/7 virtual, each of us no longer locked in our homes and online way too much a coincidence or marketting genius? I don’t know.

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Candace Lynn Talmadge's avatar

Outstanding history lesson, Ted! Bravo! I went to high school in England, and it's funny how the history teacher never mentioned the true role the East India Company played. Yes, fear and force work well in the short term. In the end, people rise up and take back their spiritual rights of freedom and free expression.

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Chuck Koton's avatar

doubt anyone reading this essay will still be alive when when "people rise up and take back..."

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Treekllr's avatar

Not with that attitude

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ron's avatar
Jan 22Edited

it's already happening. You can see it all over the world. You may not recognize it because what the people seem to want is not what you expect.

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Tobi's avatar

Google was the coolest company out there the first decade. Now the public is already highly skeptic . It is not as bad as with Facebook but it will get there.

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W. Michael Johnson's avatar

Another useful and well-written post. One quibble: That motto on the East India Company's coat of arms (at least the one we see here) has nothing to do with God. It says, "Under the Auspices of the King and Senate of England." Leaving aside the point that England has never had a Senate (I assume they're talking about the House of Lords), it's still odd. Their charter came from Elizabeth, who was a Regina, not a Regis, and with the almost immediate ascension to the throne of James I, if it were still under royal auspices--even nominally--it wouldn't have remained just the Angliae. Because of the Scotiae. Just noodling.

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ron's avatar

I wondered about that. I was thinking my Latin is getting really, really bad.

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Ruv Draba's avatar

Ted, I have lately been enjoying your articles, but think that this one is argumentum ad ignorantiam. By that I mean your central thesis reads as:

I, Ted, don't really understand what the Google business model is, how its business model might develop or what it's likely to do in ten years time to remain profitable, but here's the East India Company, which I have studied, and I can find parallels because it was also a big trader, a force for globalisation and near-ubiquitous. Furthermore, I'm alarmed at Google's potential to damage liberal government and rules-based trade, and the East India Company did that too, so the analogy may have resonance with my readers.

I agree that the East India Company is indeed worth studying in the history of commerce, and I think that you did that part well. I also understand the emotional resonance.

But so far as the critical thought in your thesis goes: so what? What's one specific, significant, time-bounded, falsifiable prediction offered from this analogy, and how would you know if it was wrong?

And isn't it also true that *every* global trading organisation can find parallels with the East India Company at times? Is every corporate *but* Alphabet indifferent to price control, barriers to entry, influence on trade policy and the attractions of evading rules-based operation? Have you followed the decades-long money-laundering scandals of Deutsche Bank, for example?

There's a real conversation to be had here about how Big Data might develop in coming decades, especially in the role of AI and what you've called 'connectivity' but which I think is really about the monopolisation of data-sets about human behaviour.

It's a worthwhile conversation, it must include Alphabet, and your instincts are right to want to have it. I just don't think that arm-waving analogies are helpful in advancing it.

Honesty requires self-honesty, Ted. We have to admit what we don't know. More research is required, else the rush to convenient analogy can make us ask the wrong questions and ignore key evidence.

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Adhithya K R's avatar

Good callout. I found the article fascinating, but I did wonder whether the analogy wasn't a bit too convenient. I would have liked Ted to spend some more time steelmanning his argument with the AT&T Bell story and other alternative business models as examples. If the Google/East-India-Company model of capturing "links and trade routes" is so successful and outlasts benevolent middlemen, is there any incentive for companies to do business in that way? More importantly, if anyone's doing business in that way, can they outcompete the incumbent model?

I'd have liked some more thought on what sort of alternative model can work, and what a political/economical system that enables this new model would look like.

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David Wittt's avatar

The Opium Wars were fought because the Chinese dared to exercise their sovereignty and destroy the East India Company's opium stockpiles. Of course, the East India Company was just trying to 'maximize shareholder return' by 'providing goods that people want.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

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Chuck Koton's avatar

so today, people are hooked on Instagram & Tik Tok!!!

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Jane Baker's avatar

The Chinese rightly resented being told they should be opium drug addicts and not be paid actual money.

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Richard's avatar

Google is so yesterday. They will lose all search business soon. They’re are the new Yahoo! (haha!).

I only use Grok. Many people use Perplexity or ChatGPT.

Ted, try Grok.

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Chad's avatar

No. Everybody already has at least one gmail account. Which means everybody will soon be interacting with Gemini.

People have to sign up for Perplexity and ChatGPT.

They are already signed up for Gmail and if they own any Android device--phone, TV, SmartHome, Car, they will be interacting eventually with Gemini without having to take the additional step of signing up to some other platform.

People underestimate Google's first mover advantage. It may not look like it from the outside, but Grok, Perplexity, and ChatGPT are playing catch up.

They'll either be bought by Google eventually, or they will eventually become Yahoo.

It's not like LLMs are difficult to personalize.

The average person can run their own LLM on their home PC right now.

https://www.kdnuggets.com/5-ways-to-use-llms-on-your-laptop

The magic is in the data. How will those companies be able to compete with all the information Google already knows about you and everyone else?

Google serves something like 5 billion daily users.

Perplexity has about 2.3 million users.

One of the ways in fact, that people sign up for services like Grok, Perplexity, or ChatGPT is with their Google accounts.

The soil never argues with the roots.

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Jane Baker's avatar

I have an android phone and sometimes it pops up a text saying "try Gemini" but I never do,so it's an AI thing then. Speaking as a frog,this water is getting hot

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ron's avatar

I use gemini all the time. I just don't have time to wade through all the clickbait responses to conventional searches.

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Richard's avatar

Perplexity is only two years and five months old! And growing very quickly. Just because Google may stay successful with email, cloud, sheets, android, and docs - does not guarantee it will win in search.

Indeed, Google reminds me a lot of Internet Explorer, and Microsoft office. Who still has a Hotmail email address! Things will continue to evolve in the players will change.

The core underneath the soil is evolving!

Cheers!

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ron's avatar

<<<<<Who still has a Hotmail email address!<<<<< Not me. Luckily google iterations work on my p.c. Did someone say ...Microsoft?

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Screen & Spleen's avatar

I do. Works as well as gmail.

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Chad's avatar

That's an interesting company to choose to make your point.

Microsoft's market cap is top 2 or 3 in the US right now.

People are allowed to hold whatever beliefs make them comfortable.

Everybody can google or "perplexity" the figures if they want to.

The market cap of Google and Microsoft is in the trillions.

Perplexity is in the billions.

The heads of Google and Microsoft and Apple made sure to visibly position themselves on the dais at the highest levels of our government a few days ago.

Maybe the Perplexity guys were there. Nobody I know said anything about them.

While people are Googling (or Perplexing. Let's see how long before that becomes a verb ) whatever you're calling it...

While they are Googling that they can also Google "interesting analogy for the difference between billion and trillion".

Between 2010 and 2016 all the people paid to have opinions wrote think pieces about Walmart's demise. I remember lots of loaded dinosaur metaphors. People said Walmart was going extinct when Amazon came along.

Market cap for Walmart is $700 billion or something like that?

Tenth largest company in the US by market cap? In 2025?

The core can evolve all it wants. Nothing grows on the core.

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Alter Kacker's avatar

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.

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John Harvey's avatar

"or they will eventually become Yahoo."

Ooo, that's cruel!

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ron's avatar

Right I'll get out my android phone and try it right away.

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Kaptin Barrett's avatar

Another great post and brilliant analogy, although "no bouncer would ever assume that controlling the door allows you to bully the bar owner." shows you missed clubbing in 90s Britain ;)

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Dheep''s avatar

You said it. I've (a nobody) have said it for a Long time. What you predict WILL come to pass ,because just as in days gone by ,the Greed and Insatiable Lust for More never dies ... Its NEVER enough.

Its going to take a Long LONG time before humans evolve beyond this sickness - if they survive that long that is

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Jeff Cvitkovic's avatar

From first hand experience, I can say that if you're a small, growing YouTube channel you absolutely have to pay to be seen by "promoting" your videos. If you don't promote it will get like 19 views, if you do promote thousands and thousands. The catch of course is that then you don't get "credit" for those views or subscribers in the quest for monetization. It's the biggest scam out there. 99% of the people who post videos to YT don't make a dime, and Google keeps all the money from ads on these videos. It's a viscous rabbit hole that feeds on the ambition and dreams of creators thinking the "creator economy" could earn them financial freedom but it's a sneaky mirage.

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Peter Saracino's avatar

AT&T had a code of ethics? Is that why it was broken up — albeit temporarily — in 1982 as the result of an anti-trust lawsuit?

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Outdoor.Erin's avatar

Anti-trust is absolutely part of the resistance. It’s moving, albeit slowly.

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Anonymous Dude's avatar

Was going to come in to say that. Yeah, they developed a code of ethics after having the antitrust department after them.

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Biso Yellow's avatar

"Google is shameless. If you pay them money, people can find your business. If you stop paying them money, you disappear from view" - Ain't that the truth.

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YM's avatar

Great article! Google started as a search engine and has now essentially made all search engines useless.

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8d Press Publishing's avatar

Except for Duck Duck Go which I use all.the time and love. Don't tell me, it's now owned by Google 😂😂

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Callimachus's avatar

Regarding the motto on the coat of arms, I'm not sure where you got the translation from but AUSPICIO REGIS ET SENATUS ANGLIAE has nothing to do with the translation you give, “God is our leader. When God leads, nothing can harm.” The Latin actually means, "By auspices of the king and the English senate [presumably meaning Parliament]."

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Ted Gioia's avatar

The company had two mottos."Deus Indicat. Deo Ducente Nil Nocet" and "Auspicio Regis et Senatus Angliae." I've now clarified this in the text.

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River Rouen's avatar

Figured there must have been another motto... Thank you for clarifying, Ted.

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David Wittt's avatar

Must have been an AI translation lol!

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River Rouen's avatar

I came to say this as well….is there another motto separate from the coat of arms?

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