The real question is whether conditions like mine would scuttle the project. And I don’t think they are that burdensome.

Perhaps not as an end-result, but your means of getting there — through current copyright challenges to doing the project at all — is playing with fire.

[A]ny one of these people is still pretty reliant on Google to route it customers

Maybe, maybe not. Dopplr mostly isn’t, Abebooks mostly isn’t, Altlaw mostly isn’t. The principal Google searches they care about are navigational queries on their own names.

Do you really think someone else is poised to make a “Schumpeterian breakthrough” on general-purpose search?

Yes. The key will be to redefine the problem; my best guess is that whatever comes next will be significantly user-generated.

Some responses:

1. You say: “[T]here are more pressing present dangers from other powerful entities. That’s the case with neutrality (the incumbent broadband ISPs) and it’s the case with book scanning (the publishers).”

Agreed. Google book search without the conditions I’ve advanced above would be better than a Google book search contingent on a million licensing deals.

The real question is whether conditions like mine would scuttle the project. And I don’t think they are that burdensome. They can also be pared down; for example, there is a much greater societal need to have scholarship indices being free and open access than, say, indices of Danielle Steele books.

2. You say “smaller pieces of the search market are still cheap to play in.” I agree, but I think a) any one of those people is still pretty reliant on Google to route it customers and b) Google does not need to monopolize that space to still be a dominant force that deserves scrutiny.

Do you really think someone else is poised to make a “Schumpeterian breakthrough” on general-purpose search?

3. The falling costs of scanning are a good argument for multiple scanning enterprises. And yes, the risk of one inaccurate or incomplete scan should be factored in against the risk of harming a book via multiple scans. But I still think that this project is such a small part of the overall Google business plan that even if the conditions I’ve proposed were applied, they would not significantly deter the project.

Nobody is saying “Google can’t advertise on the index”–that’s their core business plan. I’m just saying, don’t try to make money off tiered access–just as Google says to the carriers when it lobbies for net neutrality.

Duplication of scanning efforts is not a problem. If we spend 10x as much as we should making 5 scanned copies of everything, so what? It’s still money well spent, and good search engines will still iron out any inconsistencies. And overspending on the digitization project is a far far easier way to prevent a tiered access future than trying to scan once and set exactly the right conditions on it. We should all be pushing as hard as we can for scanning and searching to be an unambiguous fair use, so that lots of institutions get into the scan+search business. (Keep in mind, too, that the costs of scanning are continually falling, whereas the stock of things that need to be scanned is not growing at anywhere near the same rate.)

In general, you’re too eager to see search markets as natural monopolies. They aren’t. Universal search does have high costs and thus high barriers to entry, but smaller pieces of the search market are still cheap to play in. Especially given mobility of users, Google’s dominance today isn’t a function of unique market factors forcing concentration; it’s a result of a Schumpeterian breakthrough in search technology that Google spearheaded and is still milking. Another paradigm shift in how things are done could dethrone it in the space of a few years — and it’s quite possible that that shift could be to something not under the control of any one company.

There are serious issues that large search engines present. We should face and address those issues. But for a lot of the deeper problems you worry about in search, there are more pressing present dangers from other powerful entities. That’s the case with neutrality (the incumbent broadband ISPs) and it’s the case wit book scanning (the publishers).