Guardian on Google
posted by Frank Pasquale
There’s an interesting article in the Guardian on Google as “friendly giant or greedy Goliath.” I’ll give a law-related snippet, and one comment:
[T]he human rights watchdog Privacy International ranked the company bottom in a major survey of how securely the leading internet companies handle their users’ personal information. Liberty, the civil liberties organisation, and the National Consumer Council have also expressed concern.
[T]he European Parliament is already scrutinising Google, and some believe it is only a matter of time before Ofcom, the media regulator in Britain, is forced to intervene. Orlowski of The Register says: ‘It’s the big regulatory issue of the next 10 years: how politicians deal with Google. If the web is as important as the politicians say, it seems odd that one company sets the price and defines the terms of business.’
Others believe the free market will throw up alternatives, just as it did to the mighty Microsoft.
Ahh, that wonderful free market. Not that antitrust enforcement actions had anything to do with slowing down the MS juggernaut.
Vasanthan Dasan, one of the web’s pioneers and now an engineer at Sun Microsystems, perceives three threats to Google’s dominance. ‘First, social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are transforming information about you in a much more targeted and finely grained way; Google is behind on that. Second, mobile phones will become increasingly useful for information, and Google is behind on that too. Finally, there are quite a few companies working on personal genomics: knowing what your genes are so can you see your profile for genetic diseases and find customised medicine. Google will have a lot of challenges.’
As for the third point–it turns out that 23andme, a potentially huge player in personal genomics, has many ties to Google. I do get Dasan’s latter points–a social networking platform or cell phone may eventually become a better “database of intentions” than a search portal. But what about Google’s plans to get into the social networking space, via Open Social? Or the new Clearwire deal to give it a privileged place on cell phones? Mergers, joint ventures, and alliances could make the promise of competition here illusory. (And I’ve already given several reasons to doubt the effectiveness of competition in search aside from this.)
In any event, I have to give the piece credit for seeing this as an issue of media regulation, as this makes clear:
But what also seems certain is that, along with its sway over advertising, media and publishing, Google will seek to conquer domains that no one but Page and Brin have even dreamed of. In a world where television schedules are obsolete and content can be summoned on demand, for example, a search engine that can find the clip or programme you want will be more important than ever.
But that is only one part of the “elephant” that a presently blind legal system will have to deal with.
PS: Wildest commentary on it comes here, from Adam Curtis, director of some provocative films:
The millions of searches that engines like Google record and store reveal the shifting desires and fears of individuals. They’re leading to a new fragmented sensibility among millions of people in the way they see and experience the world. Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don’t want to know – that we are not individuals: ‘If you like this then you will like that…’. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite – that we are completely predictable. Out of that is going to come some very interesting political ideas of how to organise society and also new artistic ideas. The really interesting question is whether it is really a cult…
If you’ve see Wall-E, you can sort of get the picture.
August 21, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines
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