The Googlization of Everything

From Concurring Opinions:

Siva's New Blog/Book: The Googlization of Everything posted by Frank Pasquale

The Institute for the Future of the Book has been doing fascinating research on publishing the past few years. In a nice convergence of substance and style, they've offered a fellowship to Siva Vaidhyanathan, a thought leader on search engines who's presently composing a book on the company that's turning the content game upside down. Here's Siva's take on cyberculture in the 9th year PG (post-Google):

This blog . . . is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google's ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?

Many smart commentators at the TPRC conference last weekend observed that Google's extraordinary power derives from its status as the ultimate hub of interconnected knowledge and applications on the web. Websites "push back" against Google at their peril--anger it too much, and you may just get de-indexed or buried in the last pages of search results. And just as I've worried that the carriers could strangle Google, it's easy to imagine the tables turned: Google going proprietary and deciding not to allow its site to be carried on the carriers that fail to pay for it.

It's time for Google's critics to take advantage of the same "superhub" strategy by aggregating around some central site of inquiry and accountability. I don't know if Siva's site aims to become that, but he's certainly been prescient about the risks of unaccountable power in the search space. Here are some of his reflections on these matters:

Q: What do you see as the danger posed by Google?

A: The real question is not one of danger, but one of transparency. You can imagine some nightmare scenarios in which Google allows the government to have too much information about us and people are falsely profiled. Or you can imagine that Google starts censoring access to information. I don’t think either of those scenarios are either imminent or likely, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that as Google grows in importance in our lives, we should demand some accountability. And increasingly, competition is failing to generate that accountability. In other words, Google has managed to leverage its advantage in Web search to become a player, an instant factor, in so many different parts of our lives and so many parts of the economy. My argument is that it’s about time we began to question Google’s motives and tactics.

Google does us a tremendous amount of good work every day. We can’t imagine going a day without it. But what we don’t question is what the cost really is. What is Google getting from us? Well, Google is getting our attention and Google is getting a tremendous amount of money from its advertisers as we click through its ads. But we’re also letting Google profile us in ways that we don’t have any say over. We don’t have any sort of clue as to what Google thinks it knows about us. (emphasis added)

There's a lot more to be said about the power of platform owners. For example, we need to question the claim that sites are successful because of their great innovation; rather, their innovation may well be deemed to be great only because the site is successful. But I'll leave those issues for later on this week.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at October 1, 2007 06:10 PM