From the article: In September activists occupied the building it was to be located in for several hours.
That seems like the activists were preventing them
> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.
Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY
This poor-benighted-Google thing is gross. These companies are not on anyone's side.
No, that's most definitely not NIMBY. NIMBY means you support something when it's farther away but oppose it happening close to you. It stands for "not in my backyard", not "not in any backyard".
If I had to guess, a lot of those protestors probably don't care if Google ever opens an office anywhere--but, not being billion-dollar panopticons-as-a-service, they are constrained to act locally rather than globally.
Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's practically requred to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are practically required for modern daily life.
For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.
That's a great example, thanks for mentioning it. I'll probably use it from now on.