Larry Page's yacht, Senses, now docked in St. Maarten. (marinetraffic.com)

Google co-founder Larry Page’s recent purchase of an 187-foot, $45 million yacht is a classic case of “conspicuous consumption.” The term, coined by  economist Thorstein Veblen, refers to  “the waste of money and/or resources by people to display a higher status than others.”

As an investment the purchase of the yacht, dubbed “Senses,” makes little sense, as one commenter to Business Insider notes. The purchase is an intentional waste of money designed to prove something we already knew: that Page has the capacity to waste more money than most of us will have.

Why would Page, obviously a smart fellow, feel to need to send such a message? Veblen, an iconoclastic academic economist who couldn’t get tenure due to his provocative “theory of the leisure class” (and his equally provocative penchant for seducing the wives of colleagues) argued that this impulse toward extravagance is rooted in the division of labor generated by the rise of barbarism. Per Wikipedia:

Once conquerors took control, they relegated the more menial and labor-intensive jobs to the subjugated people, while retaining the more warlike and violent work for themselves. It did not matter that these “menial” jobs did more to support society (in Veblen’s view) than the “higher” ones. Even within tribes that were initially free of conquerors or violence, Veblen argued that certain individuals, upon watching this labor division take place in other groups, began to emulate the behavior in higher-status groups.

Veblen would say that that the 21st century Internet genius is emulating a pre-historic caveman.

We’ll just say that the boat is docked in St. Maarten awaiting further use/waste.

The company is eating its proverbial tail by hawking key words that deliver more spam, not useful results,  says Infectious Greed’s Paul Kedrosky.

I avoid searching for things that are likely to score high in Google keyword searches. Appliances are an example, but there are many more, most of which I use mechanisms other than broad search. Second, it has made me more willing to pay for things. In this case I ended up paying for a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers — the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high.

Broadstuff identifies the core of the problem for Google’s corporate culture. The company, he says,

is trying to navigate a line between income (systemically the more spam there is, the more Ad money it makes) and usefulness (how much spam can you run before the user walks away) and has veered too far to the spamside.

Dash says the company has to recognize the problem.

What is worth noting now is that, half a decade after so many people began unquestioningly modifying their sites to serve Google’s needs better, there may start to be enough critical mass for the pendulum to swing back to earlier days, when Google modified its workings to suit the web’s existing behaviors.

U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman spoke with a trusted tech source last January who told him the Beijing government is in “technologically-aggressive state of mind” in its dealings with Google and other Western Internet companies. He said

growing Chinese  pride, economic clout and influence, and the “weakened” position of the U.S. and its allies after the global economic downturn, are emboldening the Chinese to take ever more aggressive positions in advancing its innovative industries at the expense of foreign ones.

This state-to-corporation harassment is not going to stop.

The Wikileaks documents released in the past few days revive that question, first posed  in 2006 when the search engine entered China, by revealing  the hardball tactics that Beijing’s communists use to bring Mountain View’s capitalists to heel. One Google executive, worn down by three years of Chinese harrassment, told a U.S. diplomat that the company might consider leaving China, a comment quoted in this July 2009 cable. With company co-founder Sergey Brin already going public with his qualms, Google’s Chinese future seems in doubt.

The cables reveal how Beijing relentlessly pressurizes Google to achieve its economic and political goals.

–Use of the media: When the Chinese government charged that Google was failing to filter pornographic Web sites from its search results, there were at least 57 negative articles in the Chinese media  before Google had a chance to respond. These stories have damaged Google’s brand in the Chinese market.

–Manipulation of the private sector: When Google refused to remove a link to Google.com, its uncensored search engine, from its Google.cn site, which is censored, the government told three leading Chinese telecommunications firm to void existing contracts  and cease negotiations with Google, dealing a blow to the company’s mobile device estrategy.  Google’s share of traffic in China has suffered.

–Selective hacking. During the Chinese Communist Party’s annual meeting in 2007, Chinese hackers diverted searches from Yahoo and Google to Baidu, the Chinese search engine. For example, search for “Dali Lama” was sent to Baidu which reported it could find “no  information on your request.”

The cables showed that Google preferred to enlist U.S. government support rather than complain publicly about such incidents. With the diplomatic channel showing little success, senior Google executives, including Brin, have  to decide if they can live with these realities.

There is zero possibility that the Chines government will change its behavior.  Google controversially acceded to the  government’s demand that it censor its China-based search engine. In response to the latest Chinese demands, Google dropped the Google.com link but installed a link to another uncensored site, Google.hk, which as you can see, could not be more prominent on Google.cn.

But in larger perspective, Google’s cat-and-mouse moves amount to a strategy of appeasement which, however sincere, has not impressed or deterred China. The Times reported yesterday that senior Chinese officials, initially worried that the Internet could undermine their grip on power, have concluded that “the Web is fundamentally controllable.”

So the ultimate question raised by the Wikileaks cables is: Will Google participate in (or acquiesce to) Beijing’s campaign control the Web in the world’s largest country?

Would that be good for Google’s bottom line ? Probably.

Would it be good for Google’s brand and self-respect. Probably not.

Apparently a neighbor of Google’s office in the German city took advantage of the company’s willingness to blur the images of people who want privacy.

Google viewing service, rolled out in 20 German cities this week, has drawn more than 244,00 blur requests and considerable opposition, according to Spiegel Online. Fifty percent of Germans polled say they oppose Street View.

Germans are sensitive about privacy, perhaps because of the unhappy national experience with messianic techno-chauvinism. The Googlers live in the muliti-national technocracy which often regards such feelings as irrational or out-of-date.

But such sensitivities are real, and if the Googlers are smart (not a given), they will pay attention.