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Global Edition | Today Is Friday, March 12, 2010 |
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Global Edition | Today Is Friday, March 12, 2010 |
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| Downdraft! | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | The Google Conumdrum: Reality Check | |
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How Well Does Google Serve The World?
From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible. While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value.
World’s Largest Publisher
Google Inc., by virtue of its service model, business acumen, financial muscle and technical superiority has enjoyed worldwide success. It is the largest collector and indexer of information in history — and that makes Google the world’s largest publisher. Should you wonder how Google might be a publisher it’s because publishers are the gatekeepers to all that we read, hear and watch.
Unlike any publisher in history, Google is in a class by itself. For Internet access and information, it has become the gatekeeper to what’s known and what isn’t. Today, in nearly every nation, Google has made itself the world’s information gatekeeper in the sense that it is Google who chooses which ideas succeed and which are relegated to obscurity.
Google’s intentions to fairly, responsibly and wisely manage its gatekeeper function are well known. But commercial reality has forced Google to do things its founders never intended. In China Google manages its gatekeeping functions contrary to its published policy advocating full, complete and unbiased results, by intentionally limiting what is reported to its users. Google has responsibly stated its reasons for doing so. It also asserts that users are notified when and how much content has been expurgated.
In exchange for commercial access, Google’s policy is to censor information, omit listings, or ignore sites or information based on what best suits its own self interest or advantage. There is no appeal open to those damaged by Google’s censorship or delisting decisions.
The success of Internet services, publishers and even social networking operations rests upon their visibility on Google and other search engine companies. So does the expression of ideas not widely known, unpopular, or contra to the interests of the powerful. Being the world’s major gatekeeper carries immense economic opportunity as well as immense responsibilities.
Google presents itself as a responsible, competent and fair arbiter of resources relating to user inquiry. When Google chooses to censor information, for whatever the reason, it makes of itself Freedom’s choke point.
What Google is doing is lawful, but wrong, for once censorship gets a foothold it can never be put back into the bottle.
Credible reports put Google’s U.S. market share at about 72%. In France it is said to be 81%. In China, where Google is limited in terms of availability and where it filters content to conform with local law, Google’s market share is said to be closer to 27%.
It’s unlikely Google founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin foresaw the full implications of their revolutionary search engine technology. While still students at Stanford, only a few miles up the road from Google’s Mountain View headquarters, Brin and Page established an Internet directory service based on serving the user, not the publisher ( the Yahoo model before Google ).
The idea was obvious, but also radical, in the sense that it redefined the structure, organization and usability of online resources. No one, least of all Brin or Page, might have foreseen the the long-term implications arising from their lets index everything exploration model. Their aspiration to know and report on everything ever published on the Internet has been extraordinarily successful. As as result, Page and Brin have enjoyed fame and made immensely wealthy.
Google is so dominant that it has become the effective choke point ( gatekeeper ) for effectively all Internet information and access. Among the implications arising from Google’s immense success have been demands by certain agencies, governments, dictators and others to exercise its gatekeeper capabilities to control ( censor ) information deemed sensitive, unnecessary, or otherwise unwanted.
Never in the history of the world has one single organization or entity possessed the power to control, distort, or redirect what’s known to almost every living person on Earth.
Until Google.
Google is not doing anything illegal. What’s makes their censorship potentially so damaging arises from Google having no effective counterbalance. By having legitimately become the choke point in Internet information access, Google is unaccountable to anyone beyond its own restraint — and that has already failed.
News and information have been censored for as long as there has been publishing. Newspapers used to be the most pernicious censors by way of covering issues favored by owners and publishers more favorably than those with which they disagreed. Randolph Hearst, and his newspaper empire, were only the best known of this nation’s policy newspapers. Today the cable news channels are all policy driven, not just Fox News Channel. So are the network news operations — although they’re far more careful about what they report than either their broadcast competitors or newspapers.
While not all newspapers conformed their coverage, writing style and story framing to meet publisher policies, most have done so. Today, not even the New York Times is entirely free of policy directed coverage — a fact Fox News rarely misses. The problem isn’t whether one or another news source produces policy-driven content because competition offered competing philosophies and political inclinations. Some opposing policy publishers still exist including The Washington Post’s liberal views of events and the more conservative views favored by the Washington Times. Where there is little or no competing viewpoint, as is the case with Google today, the public’s freedom to know ends at the choke point.
That Google’s censorship may not affect you today is irrelevant, for Google has knowingly and intentionally chosen to use its immense choke point power to filter out what’s unwanted ( by others ). Doing so is antithetical to any responsible media organization.
More On Google
WikiPedia On Google Censorship
Google’s early success forever ended Yahoo’s misdirected gatekeeper era. While it appears to have been fairly easy for founders Page and Brin to see flaws in Yahoo’s gatekeeper practices, now that it has substantial dominance in the field, Google has chosen not only to adopt Yahoo’s flawed ethics, but to extend them.
Not even playing catch-up to Google has restored Yahoo to its former dominance. And few expect Microsoft’s reinvented MSN presence ( bing ), to seriously threaten Google’s dominance. The reason is breadth and commitment, for Google has used its search engine roots to expand its reach by both acquisition and evolution. Given its global scope, innovative style and technically superior indexing and retrieval systems, plus immense vertical and horizontal integration, Google, Inc. has made of itself the world’s final arbiter of what’s known and what’s not.
Today, Google has more control over the flow of information than any other organization in history. In comparison to today’s massive big-media conglomerates, Google is not only larger than all of them combined, it largely controls the methods, mechanisms and means of their survival. The worlds great newspapers, from The Times of London, to the Washington Post are betting heavily that their future is not in print, but on the Internet. Broadcasters, from France Télévisions to NBC-Universal are investing heavily in online presence and content. Every network, every movie maker, publisher and musician is increasingly dependent on its Internet presence. None are beyond Google’s ability to choke or relegate to the media scarp heap should doing so be in Google’s interest.
French Television
It remains too early in the game to know what success, if any, Google’s competitors will have in keeping, or increasing their market share at Google expense. But whether you like the other search engines or not, their success is of considerable importance to everyone on Earth. Not because Google’s competitors are deserving, but because Google’s immense size, global reach and willingness to censor content is an immense future risk to freedom of information and national security.
Newsroom Magazine, and a small number of other online publications, have been extraordinarily successful in recent years, not by immense investment in printing plant or by acquiring television stations, but because Google made us important and extended our reach worldwide. While Yahoo, MSN, ASK and all the other search engines now track Newsroom around the clock, and rank our content among the most important, it was Google that made this publication a worldwide success.
We publically thank Google for helping to make Newsroom Magazine what it is today. But, after watching how Google deals with repressive regimes, by overtly and knowingly censoring or concealing content where and when it best suits Google’s needs, we recognize we could disappear from Google at any moment. We have absolutely no reason to expect Google to drop us, but we fully understand that’s their decision, not ours.
In plain language, Google sold out to power. For those who think it impertinent for any publisher to call out far larger and more powerful organization for their failures and shortcomings, be reminded that doing so is our charter.
We chose to comment on our own dependence upon Google only as an illustration, for the issue has nothing to do with a single publication, but a great deal to do with responsible publishing. Yahoo lost its dominance in the search engine business due to its pre-disposition to gatekeeping. For those who don’t already know, in the early days of the Internet, publishers had to apply to Yahoo for consideration. After assessing the value of information publishers offered, Yahoo decided who would be indexed and who would not.
We cite Google’s content censorship policy only because of their dominance in search services, integration and global reach. The point isn’t that Google is bad while others are good, for that is clearly not the case. Published reports cite similar censorship of content by Yahoo, MSN-Bing and others.
Google does not see its actions as unreasonable, or threatening. They do see their business as complex and their dealings with foreign governments ( and other entities ) as necessary accommodations required by local custom or law. We found a recent online interview ( print and audio ) that speaks directly to Google’s concerns and position posted on the O’Reilley Radar, a publication of O’Reilley Media, a major publisher of computer and technology books. We recommend listening to this interview on the O’Reilley Radar site.
Transcript Excerpt
Source: O’Reilley Radar
Published: June 16, 2009
Interviewer: James Turner
Interviewee: Marissa Mayer, Senior VP. Google, Inc.
Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google’s Marissa Mayer
by James Turner
James Turner: All right. One final controversial issue before we move on to happier things. Just last week, the news broke that Microsoft Bing was censoring out anything with the word sex from their Indian users. We’ve also heard of similar censorship of information going into China. It could be argued that a Google search is, in some sense, a snapshot of reality as seen on the web. Can you present different versions of reality to different people while remaining true to Google’s motto not to be evil?
Marissa Mayer: Well, we have a very firm view on wanting to keep as much information in our search results as possible. So where we have to remove results, we note on the bottom of the page that we’ve removed results. And we only remove results in the event that there’s a particular page that has been deemed illegal due to its content in a particular area. So like if you were to say child pornography or various hate content. But even in those cases, when we remove something, we note on the bottom that it’s been removed and put in a link in with the complaint. And there’s also instances where in order to provide a good user experience, we really feel that we need to do this. So, for example, China’s a very interesting case where the websites that would be removed from the result page aren’t accessible from inside of China anyway. So if we put them on the results page, users can’t click through and read them anyway. And so we do note when they’ve been removed so people can see that. We ultimately think we’re really hoping to achieve the best possible user experience because it’s not a great user experience to get ten results, none of which you can actually click on. And if you do click on any of them, it shuts down your internet connection.
So we think it’s not a great outcome. And we also felt that it was more important to engage with China and get the benefit of Google to Chinese users, especially given the choice of our policies that are in China, we think is a better user experience in terms of search.
What If Google Were Asked To Filter What You Could Read, Hear or See?
Melissa Mayer’s comments are consistent with what Google has said publically before, that Google only censors content when forced to do so by other parties. We find that position untenable for any public Internet indexing and listing service, Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK — any of them and all of them.
There is a great deal of unsavory, dangerous and inflammatory material available online. Child pornography, extremist pronouncements, bomb making guides, character assassination and calls for revolution are all part of the real world.
But the question isn’t what we find offensive, or wish others not to know. It’s who shall decide what it is that’s unsavory, dangerous or inflammatory. Making that decision is not the responsibility of any for-profit organization whose own best interests are diametrically opposed to public convenience and necessity, human rights, freedom of expression and legitimate protest.
What we know today is that Google, and it’s competitors have knowingly and intentionally chosen to censor what others do not want us to know.
Giving any single organization or field of publishing the power to censor information for which there is no other source is dictatorship by other means.
