Now, don't get me wrong, I love Google, I love their corporate motto: "Don't be evil." They represent what seems like a great story about a couple of kids that made good, taking on the might of Yahoo and the behemoth: Microsoft itself.
What could be more honey and little cotton socks than that?
I guess, firstly, it is not really the true story.
Now, I do not want to cast aspersions or imply nefarious intent to those at Time Warner who own 1 billion dollars worth of Google stock. It was no doubt a good investment for AOL and after all the Googlyboys did not make them buy in. There is, however, a public feeling that Google was developed outside the system and is therefore not part of the “them” that people sometimes worry about. Admittedly my polling for this feeling was hardly scientific or as expansive as the never biased zogby, but amongst even the technical cognoscenti that I know, it is widely thought that Google was designed almost garage like, akin to the early development of Apple: a true success story against all odds.
But does it fit the facts?
Does that fit with Andy Bechtolsheim, a founder of Sun MicroSystems, investing USD 100,000 [i] in 1998 for 1 percent of Google? Or, what about Mark Andreassen, father of Netscape and Sillicon Valley, being an early investor?
Or take Yahoo, a primary competitor albeit with a different business model, who invested USD 10 million in 1999 so that even if they lose, they win. If we take into consideration that the Googlyboys own 50% of the company, there were millions of dollars of early investment money. I mean, this would have been one hell of a garage.
I am not saying that any of this is wrong. Let’s face it, when you are up and coming, passionate about wanting to succeed, help is help and you take investment from almost anywhere you can get it. We would of course hope that aesthetics alone would at least provide some pause when taking handouts from organized crime or Enron.
So what am I saying?
Well, first, it is almost impossible to become successful and avoid being part of “them”, the man, the system.
and
Myths, even when you do not spread them yourself, are a form of deceit – a tiny lie perhaps but all part of the slippery path.
Now, it might be more charitable to rephrase the question to: Is Google in danger of becoming the new Microsoft?
The thing I hope Mr. Brin and Mr. Page understand is that the more influence and control their company has, the more constraints they will need to impose on themselves to avoid being "evil". It is a bit like the spiderman ethos of “with great power comes great responsibility" in that the more power you have, the easier it is to do harm. Here's an example:
You are in a bar, you go up to a girl who is on her own and ask her out on a date. Nothing wrong with that. A bit forward perhaps, but essentially all harmless.
What if you are her supervisor at work?
What if you are her boss and have the power to fire her?
What if the girl is deep in debt from having to pay her mother's life saving medical treatment and desperately needs to keep her job to maintain that treatment?
How great must the differential in position be before such a harmless question becomes riddled with potential threat and harm?
In this particular case, maybe the girl would have redress through the courts - unlikely that it would save her mother though - but there are plenty of cases in our complex and interlinked world where no such redress is possible.
This could well be a factor in why God is not found picking up stray women/men in bars.
Maybe much of this comes across as wooly thinking, specious or facile but much is at stake here because the way we search is the way we think. I am sort of taking as a given here that everyone is pretty much aware that the Orwellian potential of Google is colossal. Searching demonstrates how we approach an issue and says a lot about us. And the problem with gathering such information is that it can be used to wildly mischaracterize and misrepresent us. It allows correlation to be increasingly used as proof and by cherry picking what people are looking at, they can, with relative ease, be turned into demons or saints.
It’s a bit like the problem with identity cards in UK. Most people already know that we are all on multiple databases. The issue is less to do with people being able to find information about us but what they might do with that data – it is not a matter of if someone will abuse it but rather when. After all, history basically guarantees that this will happen.
And what happens when you factor in commercial needs to fend off other big players versus being “evil”? (e.g. the decision on China)
Where does this all lead us?
You may want to brace yourself for this!
Google is headed to become the arbiter of truth.
Maybe you don’t believe this. Well, it is possible that truth will be slightly more consensus driven with a number of primary resources (including wikipedia perhaps) but essentially Google will control what options appear in answer to any question: Who invented this or who wrote that?
Seriously, they have the ability to do this. It may seem far fetched but the platform that Google is building is of the mindset that bigger is better. This is why it was relatively easy for them to role out Gmail with its continually increasing gigabytes of storage. They have basically built a humongous, mostly single purpose (search), computer running a cluster based OS that gets bigger, faster and more intense every day. Using this platform, Google are able to turn their attention to any application related to information sharing and attain almost immediate domination.
Now bear with me a sec, while I know it is hard to work out exactly what the Googlyboys overall gameplan is, we can make some assumptions. They will, for example, continue to expand their information resources and grow their platform, increasing advertising revenue by branching out into other mediums, etc. So, here is a fictionalized scenario:
- Say Google becomes a prime resource for generally available information, accessible via the web/mobiles & pdas/tv and eventually directly from a person’s neural array!
- Google becomes increasingly customizable for end users so that they end up with their own Google that fits their life needs. Personalized intelligent agents will be developed to expand the types of queries we can ask and the quality of information returned. They will be like an online buddy, always there when we need them – our Big Buddy.
- Google will launch the GoogleTrust initiative that will encourage people to store all their information in their personal Google. Young people become inculcated to use Google at an early age for homework, diaries (blogs), ideas, work etc.
- Future Google generations who are not so concerned with the “Do no evil” idea will have access to masses of information about everyone. Blackmail, dictatorship, evil things ensue.
We do not even need to wait upon the malfeasance of future generations as current governments, in their terrorist-hunt mindset, are as likely to get their corrupting hands on all that info and again “evil” comes knocking.
I know, I know, it’s the stuff of conspiracy theory, paranoia to the extreme. But remember, control the information and you control the world, and, of late, it seems that the conspiracy “nuts”, I use the term affectionately, have been hitting the nail on the head: Iraq and WMDs anyone?
Now take a look at the mediascape today, already American media is controlled by a few very rich, very powerful interests who use that resource to control the news. Do we really want to head down a path, albeit innocently with some well meaning people, that hands so much information to what will eventually be, that self same few?
I don’t have a definitive answer to this or in fact any of the questions posed here. It seems reasonable to point out, however, that monopoly, they might not want to consider themselves such with only a 52 percent[ii] market share, needs to operate by different rules.
For what its worth, here are some thoughts that Google should look at:
- Information is a world resource that should not be restrained in the hands of a few. Restricting it leads inexorably to “evil”. To counter this evil, maybe Google should consider constraints on their behaviour and let us know what they are so we can help keep them on track - a Google Constitution perhaps?
- Google needs to consider who should watch the watchmen. It needs to move some elements of itself into a global trust, a steering committee whose only remit is to have access to the way in which Google’s information is used and to publicize the same. Google needs to police itself in a way that it can not de-police itself.
- Google needs to separate from its brand those areas that are not a clear part of its model. They need to avoid using the Google brand as a sledgehammer, a market frightener. It may seem counter-intuitive to deny your business a possible revenue stream but when you achieve a critical mass in one area, it is something you need to do to be a decent netcorporation. We already talk about being a good netizen and using netiquette, we surely need a guideline for the way corporations use the internet – Google can light the way.
- Google need to remove some of their own hype. This is particularly tricky but when a company is valued far in excess of any income it can produce, the investments themselves are no longer part of real world achievements, they are essentially investor games – a particularly nasty blood sport that basically causes money to move, osmosis like, from the poorest to the richest. The company’s value must be linked, if only in the most tenuous terms, to its income and profit. In this way Google, a very digital company, stays in the real world and thus connected to real people.
These thoughts could be expanded but I guess they boil down to the idea that power corrupts through a series of degrees, many infinitesimal steps that require counters (checks and balances) to be held in place in order to restrain the corruption. There is no funny end to this story, much as I’d like there to be one because I like the idea of Google and I believe that most of the engineers and developers working there tend towards the libertarian, anti-establishment types that want to do good in the world. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be anti-establishment when you own the place.
[i] http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
[ii] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_29/b3943050_mz011.htm
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