Patrice Riemens on Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:51:34 -0400 (EDT) |
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<nettime> Ippolita Collective: The Dark Side of Google (Chapter 1, Second Part) |
Dear Nettimers again, And a few more additions... So the "Light and Shadows" are out again, and it's definitely "The Dark Side..." . Damn commercial publishing houses! F. also didn't inform Ippolita very much about the French translation, which they received only once it was completed. As you may have noticed, there are a few problems with it, and they promise to grow worse when I'll check it out with the Italian original (not doing that presently, to get some speed, so feel free to point to abominable divergences! ;-) Btw, I am not best pleased to be called 'someone' ... by anyone. And finaly, credit to whom credit is due: I wouldn't have heard of the Ippolita Collective hadn't I been attended to them by Geert Lovink. Cheers, patrizio and Diiiinooos! -------------------------------- NB this book and translation are published under Creative Commons license 2.0 (Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike). Commercial distribution requires the authorisation of the copyright holders Ippolita Collective and Feltrinelli Editore, Milano (.it) Ippolita Collective The Dark Side of Google (continued) Chapter 1. The History of Search (Engines) (continued from part one) Style, Form, and Services Overflow ... For Google begin 2000 meant most of its competitors had gone South, and the times were ripe for a new round of innovations, starting with proposing users a bevy of new services [*N20] Every new service constitute a piece of a complex, constantly re(di)fined mosaic, branching out to each and every domain of IT. At the time of writing [end 2006/ begin 2007 -TR], Google offered 17 different types of searches in data-banks of images, blogs, notes, books, maps, videos, financial services, etc. But it can also search and retrieve documents into a user's own computer. And there are many more services, present and to come. Two are specifically geared to application development and new projects under elaboration in Google's labs. There also 6 communication enabling services: Google Mail, VoIP telephony, instant messaging, discussion groups ('Google-groups'), picture-sharing, and translation services. Three services are for mobile devices (GSMs, PDAs, etc.). And finally, there is another service about software suggested by Google. And the number of services keeps adding up... Even the most dull-witted user can easily grasp the reach and power of these instruments. By now, it is possible to key in a postal address or a phone number, and Google will instantly disclose all you need to know in order to contact a person or localise an object. One can also save one's search preferences, making the repeated use of the search engine a breathtakingly smooth experience. A typing error in the search query is promptly corrected by a highly advanced spell-checker, which is also able to 'learn' incrementally along the search process. In 2001 Google launched "Google Images", a dedicated search engine which in just a few weeks became the most sought after resource for do-it-yourself graphic production and has become one of the Web's biggest image banks. At the same time, Google also bought up Deja.com, and hence the Usenet archives, which constitute, with over 650 million posts on various newsgroups, a kind of "historic memory" of the Internet in its pre-World Wide Web days, when such discussion groups were the life-blood of the Net. By April 2001, Usenet got re-christened "Google-groups" with a new, pleasant interface making it easy to follow the more elaborate, edgy discussion threads. >From 2001 onwards new services followed each other in quick succession, or were upgraded without any apparent economic purpose or immediate financial return, as if Brin and page were thrilled to show that a sheer inexhaustible data retention center could also bring about next to any technological feat one could dream about. The most illustrious instance of this is probably "Google Map" [Google Earth?] a behemoth repository mapping the Earth {in detail}, with some maps of the Moon, Mars {and the Oceanic depths -TR} thrown in for good measure. Google Earth is a freely downloadable software suite enabling you to visualise by way of satellite images parts, or details, or at least a photographic rendering of any surface of the Globe. And the "Google Directory" is home to the contents of Dmoz.com. a collective of human agents organised within a collaborative and decentralised system of 'open publishing', that has been present on the Google home page for ages, but now sports an increasingly sophisticated graphic design. "Google News" saw the light in 2005, making Google's humongous data-bases available to journalistic work. GMail started the same year, offering each user 1 gigabyte of personal storage. Beta-launched on invitation-only basis, it immediately created a network of personal linkages completely internal to Planet Google. Privacy nay-sayers were promptly silenced with the somewhat cranky argument that GMail was "an outstanding product", that "its advantages far out-weight the doubts it may raise", and that "it's bound to get ever better with time". Any user of GMail is however liable to be controlled by Google in its use of the service, since the enormous storage space made available is likely to incite her to leave all her mail messages on its servers. And since usage of the service was spreading by way on invites already registered users could freely extent in her circle, Google obtained crucial information on individual networks of friends and acquaintances. With other words, the archetype of an intrusive feature geared towards 'data-mining'. And then came the "Google Scholar" project, a universities-oriented search engine still in 'beta-testing' mode [2006], which enables to retrieve academic literature, but also articles submitted to reviews, working papers, M.A. and PhD theses, university publications, reprints, table of contents, bibliographies, reports, and reviews published across all sectors of scientific/ academic research. And then we have Google Library, whose ambition is to make available on line *all* books in digital format, by going into agreements with libraries and even interested publishers world-wide, and scan publications into e-books. Only the Google data center could make into reality the dream of a global digital library, accessible from Google pages. But this dream is meeting fierce opposition from the side of a large part of US publishers who are members of the AAP (American Association of Publishers). They fear a meltdown of their profits. In 2005 AAP demanded the digitization of those works still under copyright to be frozen for six month, pending further, and comprehensive, explanation from Google's on its 'Library' project. Yet, despite appearances, and copyright owners opposition, this initiative of Google does not have the free circulation of knowledge as its aim. It is more about a shift in the monopoly to information, which in this scheme would be transferred from a handful of publishers to the one and only Google. Like in all dreams, there is a flaw: a solitary, private entity, named Google, is going to decide what constitutes the stock of collective information, by making the same available through proprietary formats. The Open Content Alliance was started in direct reaction to this project, and it is supported by the Internet Archive, a non-profit, and by Yahoo! Its objective is to make as much material as possible totally accessible, through open formats. Parallel to its opening new services, Google showed a remarkable ability to milk the relational economy to the max, made possible by a keen utilisation of the commercial data it indexes. AdSense, launched in 2004, offers site owners the possibility to host certain commercial links on their site, as suggested by Google on basis of the site's subject and particular keywords. Revenues accruing from such links are shared between Google and the owners of the participating sites. The innovation there lies in monetizing the trust the site's users network put in it. Google is then no longer on the Google site only, but everywhere where the Google 'window' is welcomed, and that unobtrusive little space promises to be always full of accurate and interesting data, such as befits Google, even if these data bits are now commercial suggestions. AdSense is thus factually the materialisation of a "Google network", a specific network meant to cross-link users data with their interrelationships for the benefit of advertisers. According to Google, AdSense is the network of "sites and products partnering with Google to put targeted AdWords advertisements on a site or a product[*N21]." Obviously the AdSense system is also part and parcel of the "Google Network". And obviously, once you have put such a network in place, revenue must be extracted. We are still in 2005, and Google now experiments with a 'rerun' of the CPM model on the AdSense platform, following a 'site-by-site targeting' model. Advertising will now again 'pay for eyeballs', but this time not according to number of clicks on their banners but as a package deal sold through an auction process. Advertisers are able to choose in detail the profile of their prospective viewers: language, geographical area, {issues of interest}, etc. But moreover, such views will only happen within the 'Google network'. This appeals mostly to those who want to sell a brand rather than a product, i.e. those vendors favouring indirect marketing strategies. Here, 'brand awareness' is the name of the game, rather than selling specific products to key-word selected potential buyers such as is the case with the CPC advertising model. This {virtuous, or hellish,} circle linking up the value management of its own immaterial products with the organisation of the labour force, and the framework of project development, is perfectly attuned to the modular building blocks system upon which the entrepreneurial philosophy of the firm Google is based. An endless growth is the precondition for the system not to flounder. The number of users searching with Google and hence trust their data unto it must increase ceaselessly in order for the advertisers peddling their wares in the "Google network" to keep growing alongside. There must be a continuous launch of new services, of new machines to keep track of it all, of new employees to maintain, improve, and invent them, of new users to make use of them, and of new advertisers to extract a profit from, {and, and, and ...] Every new 'piece'of the system is being introduced as a new module, in an endless cycle: ever growing stockpiles of data, brains, users, and of their respective data, increasing quality of the handling of these data, in the dealing with employees, in the interaction with users and the management of their data archived in Google's data centers. And this always under the imperative of speed and further development. Brin and Page don't hide where their ambitions lie. "Why would we let our employees start their own firms only to buy them up later on when we can pay them to stay with us, and do what they would have done in any case?" The "Googleplex" [*N22], Google's operational Head Quarters in Mountain View, California, is a kind of university campus where people are pampered all the time. Employees are even given one day off a week to work on their own projects, which are then shown to the "Google Duos", who offer both money and the support of the firm to the most promising talents, as reward for their efforts. Google, the Good Giant, goes IPO ... "Don't be evil" or you can do anything you want provided you're not naughty: thus is the motto of Google's "capitalism with a human face"[*N23]. But already, quite a number of cracks are showing up in this 'being Good' PR image: lawsuits galore, suggestions of fraud, sites being blacked-out, etc.[*N24] ... In 2002 Google had 1000 employees on its payroll and owned in excess of 10.000 computers [servers?]. Its service indexed over 4 billion documents and its net profits (somewhat reluctantly disclosed) amounted to close to US$ 185 million. Given such a size, investors were starting to demand more transparency, more control, and a more credible business profile. It's allright to have two brilliant - if eccentric - engineers at the helm, but please hire also a general manager with a proven development track record! After a few less than felicitous get togethers and some intemperate public statements, the role of CEO of Google Inc. finally devolved to Eric Schmidt (who was already a top dog at Sun Microsytems and then Novell). The two young prodigies keep taking pot shot decisions but this strategic managerial move soon proved to be a sound economic choice. Schmidt's arrival actually coincided with the first semester that the firm was in the black, demonstrating herewith that it has succeeded in making its products billable. Page and Brin had postponed as long as they could the moment their company needed to go public, as they feared they would be forced to go on record regarding their business perspectives and profit expectations and that this would make their life less fun. It would also have made Google a much more open book, and presented its competitors on the market with sticks to beat it with. But after the introduction of AdSense in 2004, and despite Page's pronouncements to the effect that "Google is not your run of the mill company, and has no intention to become one", the colossus became to all intent and purposes precisely that: an all-American publicly traded company. Just before the IPO, Yahoo! and other competitors lodged scores of complaints against Google, claiming copyrights and patents infringements with the aim to ruin the firm's reputation even before it has sold its first share. Wall Street was then on the verge of lowering the initial floor price for the bid in view of the encountered difficulties, but Brin and Page managed to bury the biggest lawsuit, the one with Yahoo! by paying Filo and Yang a compensation in Google shares and settling the different regarding patents. Upon which the duo, against the Stock exchange's best advice, proceeded with the IPO, in the midst of August, and with a US$ 20 reduction of the share price. Yet within a day of trading, Google shares lifted from their US$ 85 launch price to US$ 100, leveraging a cool US$ 1,5 billion of paper profit in the process. One year later Google shares were quoted at US$ 400, or a 300% increase in value. Google Inc. appeared to be surfing the wave in a marvellous world where nobody is bad, everybody wins, and evil simply does not occur. Granted, with such figures even a small downturn in share prices means millions of Dollars going up in smoke, as happened in March 2006 when Google lost seven percentage points. Google is now a giant amongst the giants on the world's stock markets, and if it ever sneezes, many risk catching a cold with it. Google Inc. or the Monopoly on Search In October 2004, Brin and Page were flying their company jet when they learned that AOL (America On Line, the biggest US Internet access provider) had just closed a deal with Yahoo! to incorporate its search engine into their service. The youthful entrepreneurs immediately ordered a change of course, flew to London, and managed to prevail on AOL to shred the contract they just had signed and opt for a sweetheart deal Google, to the tune of a cool 50 million US$. It's not exactly what you would call the gentle and open approach you would expect from the "good giant", but hey, business is business, even for the two nice guys research scientists from Mountain View! In the meanwhile, Google's profits have grown by a multiplier of 4000 in the course of a mere 5 years, making it the closest direct competitor to Microsoft and Yahoo!, and this not only in terms of stock market capitalisation, but foremost in terms of popularity and hence of cultural domination of the consumer's mind. Millions of users are now using Google as their starting page when they go on the web. And they trust the results they get through the tools developed in Mountain View. Today Google's name is uttered in the same breath as the Web or even the Internet. The Californian search engine scores best when it comes to milk the relational network of its users and extract every cent possible out of millions small advertisers, so much so that for 2005, available data suggest an income in the range of 6 Billion Dollars on advertising products (whereas estimates for Yahoo!'s similar activities amount to US$ 4,6 bn). The first swamp Google got bogged in had to do with complaints that its searches were conflicting with the (US) legislation on trademarks. Symptomatic were the cases of Geico and American Blind & Wallpaper Factory [& More ?] vs Google[*N25]. In both cases the complainants alleged that Google's AdWords service was illegally selling trademarked name-words. The tricky question was whether complainants could prevent Google from making appear their competitor's links when users would query on terms like 'geico', 'american blind', or 'american wallpaper'. Would a court follow that argument, then Google's and its partners' would face a severe drop in their revenues, since any owner of a trademark could deny its use by AdWords, and sue Google if it ever did. In France, {luxury goods firm} Louis Vuiton went to court on this and won. Google's answer is that if any tort occurs, it is the responsibility of announcers themselves and not of Google, since its role is merely that of a neutral carrier, and that besides, "attempts to limit the sale of trademarked terms amount to a denial of the freedom of expression". Sounds like making good sense - for Google at least. [? intp. by TR] however, Mountain View's giant itself falls foul on the freedom of expression issue it argued against complaining firms, where it breaches the trust many users have given it in a matter that constitutes one of the most important sources of revenues. Google has always shielded behind the argument that the actualisation process of of its search algorithms and the objectivity of the workings of its machine were proof that query returns were beyond any kind of manipulation. But then, just before the American Blind case went to court, it had decided to withdraw a number of AdWords that had been purchased by Oceana, an activist group [*N26]. Oceana's 'mistake' had been to publish an environmentally motivated critique of the operations of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, itself a major Google investor. This could be retrieved when searching for the {'AdWorded'} terms 'cruise vacation' or 'cruise ship', keywords users would normally use to look for information about cruise holidays or associated activities. Google's official statement was that being a neutral medium, it could not condone any propaganda campaign deemed to be detrimental to the good name of other enterprises. Obviously, in such cases, freedom of expression is no longer a paramount concern. To make things even weirder, on the very day the San Jose District Court was in session on the American Blind case, Google's search results in that very district were mysteriously at variance with results obtained in any other part of the world! For the first attested time, Google was caught manipulating search results with an other aim than to return "the best possible answer to a query". The fact that the court ruled in favor of Google in the Geico case (which was analogous to the American Blind one) does little to detract from this unsavoury episode. The most embarrassing and best known case till now pertains to Google entrance into the Chinese market. In order to penetrate this fast-growing [potentially immense} market, google for the first time, publicly abode by a demand for censorship, making sites deemed illegal by Beijing authorities inaccessible to searches from out the Chinese territory. A Harvard study in 2002 had already shown that Google was blacking out 113 sites in its French and German language versions (Google.DE and Google.FR). Google confirmed the facts, but argued that these pages had only be withdrawn on request of local government agencies and police authorities, and only after a careful analysis of their contents. Many sites were racism-oriented, others were informed by religious fanaticism. Someone then raked up a controversy, stating that Google's much vaunted transparency was crumbling and that users should be made aware of the existence of a 'hidden censorship'. Others countered that Google was not to blame, but rather the law system in particular jurisdictions where you could get sued merely for the providing a link {to an incriminated site} on your page. In such cases, it is natural that Google chooses to avoid legal consequences by withdrawing links after assessing the risks on individual basis. It should noted, while we are at it, that the issue of the 'right to link' is going to be a major bone of contention within the issue of digital liberties at large: who decides what is legitimate censorship? An umpteenth 'Authority'? Or an international body? Or will it be 'might is right'? In a market economy, that amounts to the right of the party that pays the most, or carries most weight. Or will local, usually religious, fundamentalists have the last word, who black-mail with reprisals every time a 'subversive' site runs foul of their particular world-view? This problem is as far-reaching as the issue of freedom of expression itself, and obviously cannot be resolved in a court room. Emotions ran high in the Chinese case, because the censorship bid came from a government. Yet Brin and Page were too focused on the potential of a market representing a quarter of the world population to backtrack, despite this massive scale-up of the issue at stake. For Google, the world will fast become a gigantic index in which a perfect correlation will obtain between digital resources and ambient reality. Each and every index will become computable by an algorithm and presented as a search result in the most convenient manner. And Google will be in pole position to be the instrument that shall maintain that index. But, quite aside from the obvious observation that digital and real worlds do not necessarily coincide, even they are very much intertwined, and that not even from a technical point of view. The perfect algorithm simply does not exist. It is simply not possible to retrieve *all* informations that exits on-line. Also, nothing that is in the technological domain can be considered really neutral, especially not if it pertains to real-world data of on line individuals. Stemming from the partnership that are likely to be entered upon, and of the technological convergence coming every day nearer, a new direction appears to emerge, and Goog;e's 'vision' is forcing it upon us as the one and only access point, and management and mediation of digital data. Google's dystopia as Big Brother wannabee becomes more precise, and is bot dangerous and fascinating, as every historic power struggle: the Web is the new stage for a fierce competition to establish the new standard of communication. A standard that, paradoxically, is "personalised", with offers and services that are geared towards the users' individual needs and tastes. for a few years now, the keyword has been "mass personalisation". An oxymoron for sure, but one that comes loaded with the importance of the game, and which represents a paradigm shift, away from mass production consumerism towards a personalised one, sold to us as "freedom of choice". As for us, beyond rhetorical platitudes, we could find a response to this by simply making different choices: the question is not whether or not to use Google and its services, but to choose other ways to put {our personal} information on the Internet, and to learn how to link them up in a new fashion, making for more innovative and interesting trajectories for each one of us [*N28]. Since a number of years, Google has been learning to its own costs (and those of its users, of course) that innocence does not really belong to this world, and even less to the world of business, that total goodness amounts to stupidity in general, and more particularly so for a firm whose main goal is to make a profit, and that finally, neutrality is a very uphill road when war is raging between {competing} search engines. And at this juncture it may be recalled that those nations that are traditionally neutral, like Switzerland, are also traditionally militarised to the core. And so we can see which kind of 'good' weapons Google has been using to achieve the status of a world class phenomenon. [END of Chapter 1] -------------------------- Translated by Patrice Riemens This translation project is supported and facilitated by: The Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore (http://cis-india.org) The Tactical Technology Collective, Bangalore Office (http://www.tacticaltech.org) Visthar, Dodda Gubbi post, Kothanyur-Bangalore (http://www.visthar.org) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org