Google-Mart, this week’s post by Robert X. Cringely, scares the crap out of me. He has predicted a terrifying future for the internet, thanks to Google’s desire to dominate every corner of online communication. Regardless of your thoughts on the quality of their services, anyone who’s not into totalitarian ideologies must fear a world where the internet is run by an advertising company.
The usual, ‘Google are cool – don’t worry about it,’ take on their ambitions is no longer appropriate. Google are a public company, run by shareholders, driven by profit. There’s nothing they do which isn’t designed to make their owners richer, and no decision they’ll make where, if profit and the common good are on opposite sides of the fence, Google won’t take the money.
For adult content the implications of ‘Super Google’ are worrying. Google sometimes censor search results and, when they represent the internet to most users as completely as Windows represents computing, that they don’t have total control will be irrelevant. With the Internet in one company’s pocket, only one board has to be convinced to make unthinkable situations real.
When the net has been fenced in by Google-Mart and all the other stores have closed, if Roe vs. Wade is reversed by the new supreme court, and Googling family planning brings up pages explaining that information on abortion isn’t legally available, where will go? However unlikely it may be, it’s not impossible, and as Google becomes more pervasive, the pressure on them to reflect ‘consensus’ opinion will increase.
More philosophically, Google’s fondness for polluting every experience with advertising isn’t universally appropriate. With the average child now doing the vast majority of their schoolwork at a computer, do we think it’s okay that children’s learning experiences should be saturated with sales pitches? Is not being sold to a luxury we’ll have to learn to pay for? If ads in schoolbooks are wrong, why aren’t ads on learning tools?
Let’s hope a better search engine provides Google with real competition, before Google get so big they’re free to act without regard for anyone but their shareholders. Until the writers who best understand technology, start to point out that Google’s endless growth is incompatible with choice, freedom and debate online, 99% of Google writing will continue to be blind praise for Adsense, and geeky fandom. It’s time to look around and realign.
Google’s board of directors weren’t elected, Google’s board of directors aren’t accountable and Google’s board of directors shouldn’t be allowed to buy up an internet we’ve never agreed to sell them, simply because they can afford to. The Bush administration is not going to protect the free internet from big business and, when Congress finally works out that Google have bought the web, it’ll be too late (and pornographers will be the first to feel the pinch I assure you).
If you don’t think Google are as mercenary and craven as other corporations you’re forgetting that the preppy, Ivy leaguers high on stock we see on TV, are led by the same guys who brought us Sun, Novell and Excite. A soldier’s a soldier, however colorful their uniform. In a world where the internet is as important as air traffic, the companies who exploit it should be similarly monitored. Let the backlash start here.
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Sam, sam, sam…
Give me funding for one year, three to four people who could express the ideas I have into working code (I can too, but 8 hands plus 4 brains always beat one human being) and I say we can take down Google.
It’s quite simple really, it’s the same principle of the one called Chinese radio or something (I read about it in “Applied cryptography” I think), why can’t anyone go against Google? Three things : a) money b) hardware c) everyone says it can’t be done.
a) Money is not the issue
b) Hardware is not the issue
c) It can be done
Here’s how :
a) make it open source – make it accessible (think API) – get funding from those who don’t like Google (Microsoft, Yahoo, Altavista)
b) make it distributed (yes like in P2P – Think SETI@home meet Bittorrent meets Gnutella) [so the computer is the network - plus you'd get funding from Sun], make it real (Google is not a real search engine, it’s a hype engine : the more you get linked the more you pay them, the more you’re visible – plus nobody really goes beyond the first page and that’s beyond that the hype dies and that you get the real results), make it safe (think parental control plus personal DRM [so that everyone can be a paid author]), make it easy (as in Autonomy).
Power to the people.
c) what do you think?
By the way I have also several ideas to bring down the Music Business as we know it (think more money to the artists – did I say I did not like that we know have to pay for Music Videos? What’s next? Ads? Oh. The french government already has it : ever heard of “la Redevance Audiovisuelle”?)
That said, I hope nobody important in the Google/Music Majors side reads that post… I don’t want to die just yet.
Jamal, the black helicopter’s are circling now…
I know a few (really cool) people at Google. The interesting thing is that none of them seriously believe anyone could do a better job than they are. That’s dangerously complacent. They’ve gone from being a company run by a couple of students to a company that only hires from the Ivy league (because they clearly think having wealthy parents/good SAT’s is the best indicator of potential).
Google will be overtaken, not if but when. Remember when Yahoo! was the ‘great’ search engine? Google won’t go away but as it gets fatter it’ll face challenges it can’t predict.
I wish I could fund you for a year Jamal but I can tell you’re expensive. I have my own ‘Google killer’ idea which I predict could be launched in a couple of months with a handful of developers. If anyone’s interested in working for free for a while, let me know…
Nah… Thing is we should work together Sam.
I am always surprised when I see all the open source projects out there that do exactly the same thing but won’t work together, it’s a waste of resources if you ask me.
They don’t get it, most of the time they have different interfaces but the same ideas powering the back end.
Which is part of my idea really : leave the processing to the network, then publish the specs of the gathering server farms (you know like Microsoft does : “the next Windows will need those features, build your PC accordingly) and let them (Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun, HP, IBM, Dell, Apple, Oracle, MySQL, etc…) provide it for free (you know all these record breaking transaction per second we always hear about? Well that would but them to some use plus it would foster datacenter building competition of some kind or supercomputer if they want to be a knot in the sieve network).
Then anybody (be it Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Autonomy or SugarBank?), could use webservices to connect to the master feed and then publish his/her own search engine tailored to what he/she wants (a bit like”rollyo”:http://rollyo.com) and use algorithms to add/hide, his/her own content and his/her own interface to it.
And there you have it : a search engine that does not belong to anyone and that belongs to everyone at the same time, that anyone can contribute to and that big companies will want to finance because basically it’s good publicity.
I would really want to be that expensive Sam but right now I am an unemployed alien (either way I won’t stay one of those for very long [meaning I'll either find a job or be asked to leave] since France does not like none of them, it’s even worse if you are both) in France – meaning I can’t work for free but I cannot ask too much either, lol! Swell…
Anyway, as a finishing touch, you don’t need money or ask people to work for free :
“In truth it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there for ever provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look.
This is known as finance”
-Terry Pratchett
Plus don’t forget that : http://9rules.com/whitespace/ideas_are_cheap_execution_is_expensive.php
Jamal,
I have ideas on a different, equally radical, line but – unlike yours – it’s got inbuilt marketing. I.e. People will want it to succeed because the results will be an order of magnitude better than Googles. Plus, unlike Google I have a killer twist (it makes the Sixth Sense seem predictable). The formula for this brilliance is shorter than the word ‘formula’ too. It might happen…
Don’t get deported and thanks for the link.
Just stumbled on this article. Seems to be a pretty complete rundown of the Google empire present and future.
http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/google.html
Thanks Ellie. I think they all fear Google because Google’s yet to fail. They will – because an 100% record is impossible to maintain forever. I have to believe that the web becoming Googlemart will appeal as much as the web being AOL (and remember when that was the ‘future’ 6-7 years ago). No one seriously believes they can beat Google yet. Hopefully that’ll change.