The Googlization of Everything

The Many Voices of Google

The story of Google in China may not be a simple one of censorship and the struggle for liberations. After all, China is hardly the only example of a state effectively censoring Internet traffic and thwarting political dissent. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon wrote during the June 2009 crackdown on Google and other Internet services in China, "The Internet censorship club is expanding and now includes a growing number of democracies. Legislators are under growing pressure from family groups to 'do something' in the face of all the threats sloshing around the Internet, and the risk of overstepping is high." Germany was considering a national censorship system, through which Internet service providers would be required to block a secret list of sites. Australia and the United Kingdom have for a number of years maintained a similar national censorship list. While none of these states censor as pervasively, disruptively, or effectively as China does, it's clear that China has strong partners in efforts to restrict the use of the Internet for both pornography and politics. In each of these countries, Google follows orders from the state carefully and thus actively (albeit tangentially and grudgingly) participates in the censorship of the Internet. Even in the United States, digital copyright laws have forced Google to aid the Church of Scientology in its efforts to squelch Web critics. In addition, the United States has for a decade been requiring libraries and schools to install Web filter software similar to the "Green Dam" mandate in China for the same overt reason: to restrict access to sites suspected of supplying pornography. However, as with Green Dam, such software also restricts material of political significance. Measuring by scale or effect, it's improper to compare the Chinese efforts to restrict the flow of information with that of the United States and other democracies. But it's a mistake to single out China as the only significant place where Web censorship is a matter of policy.

The struggle to speak freely on the global network of networks does illustrate the daunting challenges of forging a "global civil society," or a media environment in which citizens around the world may organize, communicate, and participate openly and equally by discovering and using reliable knowledge.

As communicative and transportation technologies have connected people in more efficient ways over the past three decades, we have seen the rise in importance of organizations and social networks that work outside of state control to do work across borders. A list of paradigmatic "civil society" organizations would include Amnesty International, OxFam, Falun Gong, the Catholic Church, the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, and the International Red Cross. "Civil Society" is a messy construct. Political theorist John Keane defines global civil society as "a vast, interconnected and multi-layered non-governmental space that comprises many hundreds of thousands of self-directing institutions and ways of life that generate global effects." Certainly, global civil society exists. Elements of it are divergently global, civil, and societal. And most of these institutions predate the Web. An ideal global civil society, which is different from the actual civil society we have now, would foster a cosmopolitan sense of identity and a commitment to the common good of the whole planet. So the question at hand is how Google helps maintain and extend the workings of global civil society.

Molding a Public Sphere out of the Internet

Forging a "global public sphere" is a much more daunting challenge that an already existing global civil society. We have never really had one. But we might want to create one. Much of what we treasure about living in relatively liberal societies - broad freedoms of consciousness, belief, and associations - could only be guaranteed globally if we could generate a way that all the world's people could use their voice and influence the qualities of their lives.

According to German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, early examples of "public spheres" emerged in Europe soon after the rise of nation-states and a commercial middle class in the 18th century. A "public sphere," according to Habermas, is "a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body." The tragedy of the public sphere, Habermas argues, is that its core institutions such as newspapers and later broadcasting became so rampantly commercialized in the 19th and 20th centuries that it failed to support the goals of keeping a republic informed and engaged. When it comes to the Web and the influence of Google on the Web, we can see a laboratory experiment in which Habermas' story unfolded in very short time.

The global network of networks that former U.S. President George W. Bush calls "the Internets" represents the first major communicative revolution since the publication in 1962 of Habermas' influential historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas described a moment in the social and political history of Europe in which a rising bourgeoisies was able to gather in salons and cafes to discuss matters of public concern. The public sphere represented a set of sites and conventions in the 18th century in which (almost exclusively male) members of the bourgeoisies could forge a third space to mediate between domestic concerns and matters of state. It was a social phenomenon assisted by a communicative development: the spread of literacy and the rise of cheap printing in Europe.

Habermas asserts that such a space had not existed in Europe in a strong form before the 18th century and that by the end of the 19th century it quickly underwent some profound changes. The democratic revolutions in the United States and France, parliamentary reform efforts in England, and the unsteady lurches toward republics in Germany and other parts of Europe eventually codified many of the democratic aspirations of the public sphere: openness, inclusiveness, and fairness. And by the dawn of the 20th century, the corporatization of communicative functions across nation states had drained the bourgeois public sphere of its deliberative potential and much of its purpose.

Habermas left those of us who worry about the health of democratic practice with a nostalgic model of rational discourse with liberatory potential. It's been a powerful and useful model. Since 1962 in Europe and 1989 in the United States (the date of publication for the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) Habermasian standards have influenced media reform efforts and - to a much lesser extent - media policy. Long exhausted by trying to rebuild the Hellenic Agora, we set about trying to build a better coffee house.

It's not surprise, then, that as soon as the Internet entered public consciousness in the 1990s cultural and communication theorists started asking whether the Internet would enable the generation of a "global public sphere." Influenced perhaps too much from Marshall McLuhan's model of a "global village," scholars, journalists, and activists drove Habermasian terms into mainstream discussions of Internet policy and its political potential.

Alas, the Public Sphere is not the best model to idealize when we think globally and dream democratically. Habermas' Public Sphere is as temporally and geographically specific as Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities," and similarly has been inflated to cover disparate experiences that don't precisely map to the specific historical experience the original work covers. In Habermas' story of the emergence and deflation of the public sphere, both nationalism (with the rise of the nation-state) and capitalism play a major role. Concern for the fate of the nation or local affairs drove people to assemble and deliberate. A global public sphere, however, is necessarily cosmopolitan in temperament. Therefore, members of a global public sphere must culturally cohere in some way. Either they must share a language or they must share a value system and a common notion of truth and validity. We are far from having such a system and it's not clear that it's in everyone's interest to generate one.

To consider the prospects for a cosmopolitan "global civil society" or its cousin, a "global public sphere" and the role Google might play in it, we should consider the role of powerful and flexible communicative technologies in places as dynamic and diverse as China, Russia, and India. It also allows us to assess how much Google has merged with the Internet in general.

Does Google Unite or Divide?

Despite its global and universalizing ambitions and cosmopolitan outlook, Google's search functions are not effectively connecting and unifying a diverse world of Web users. Instead it is customizing its services and search results so carefully that it reinforces the patchwork of knowledge that has marked global consciousness for centuries. Over time, as users in a diverse array of countries train Google's algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localized results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or "relevant" corresponding to each query. Already, a search done using the Indian version of Google, Google.in, while seated at a computer in Charlottesville, Virginia generates a different set of search results than the same search run in New Delhi, India. Google knows the general location of the searcher, so the results are structured to reflect the habits expressed by others in that place. As Google continues to strive toward localizing, personalizing, and particularizing its services and results, it fractures a sense of common knowledge or common importance. Google might be "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible," but it is not making universal knowledge universally accessible. Everything might be available to everyone at some time (although we are far from that status and Google is not necessarily contributing to that mission equally across the world), but essential information could be highly ranked on Google searches in Sidney and buried on the ninth page of results in San Paulo. There might even be significant differences in results (and thus effective access to knowledge) between Kiev and St. Petersburg, or Tel Aviv and Hebron.

The Languages of Google

One exceptional aspect of Google's role in a global context is the automatic translation tool, which enables people to read very rough translations of documents written in other languages. My recent attempt to read the Italian-language book, Luci e Ombre di Google: Futuro e Passato dell'Industria dei Metadati, composed by an Italian collective, was frustrated by the poor quality of Google's translation. But as Google folds more multilingual content into its servers, its translation skills can only improve. As a result, Google has different effects and influence in different parts of the world. So while Google hopes to be universal and universalizing, it actually fractures and severs. The most likely result of the current trends in Web search and Web use would be at least two Webs with very little interaction: one expressed in the Latin alphabet (with English dominating that realm) and another in simple Mandarin (but with as global a reach as the Chinese Diaspora itself). The utility and universality of English on the Web in general has been, according to some scholars, reinforcing its position as the dominant language of commerce in the world. Two factors have complicated this simple story of English linguistic imperialism: The rise of Mandarin as the fastest-growing language area of the Web and the ability of Google to customize, search, and translate elements of the Web into dozens of languages. So the story of the next 10 years of the Web might just be a movement toward at least two dominant languages, but perhaps no domination at all.

Google matters most in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In each of these nation states Google controls more than 95 percent of the Web search market. Closely behind these leaders are Venezuela, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Columbia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and the United Kingdom, all of which give Google between 90 and 95 percent of their Web search traffic, according to various search industry reports in 2009.

While examining these countries where Google leads the pack, it's hard to distill commonalities. Most of them use the Latin alphabet. Latvia and Lithuania are Baltic languages, which use a script heavily marked with diacritics and thus differ significantly from the Latin letters of Western Europe. Google does not handle diacritics (or Russian or Hebrew, for that matter) well, so it's surprising some new local search engine has not challenged Google in the Baltics.

Still, it's clear that countries that use various Asian syllabic scripts find locally developed search engines better suited for their needs. Google is far behind the local competition in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Russia. Each of these nation-states grants Google less than 40 percent of the search market. And each of these countries has major languages that use scripts very different from Latin.

Linguistic diversity does not explain everything. As of 2009 most of the major Web search services worked better in English and the languages of Western Europe than they did in other languages. In addition, regardless of the local language of the search engine, the legacy strength of English-language Web sites (that they have been up longer and thus enjoy more incoming links) biases most search engines in favor of English sites. Web search and portal companies certainly understand this. So it's clear that linguistic diversification is central to the success of any Web company.

There are also important differences among the non-Latin countries as well. Google actually does worse in Taiwan, with 18 percent, than in mainland China, with just 21 percent of the market. So technologies of censorship might not be the most important factor to searchers. In South Korea, which now has a rich commitment to democracy but strict guidelines about obscenity, Google has only 3 percent of the search market. Naver, the search leader in South Korea, exploits local knowledge generated by generous Web users to tailor search results - sort of a blend of Wikipedia and Google. And the fact that too few Web users use Korean text means that Google's computers have not been able to master the data in Korea the way it has in other parts of the world. Naver got in early to this market in which more than 70 percent of Koreans use high-speed Internet services regularly. So Google has had nothing but trouble and frustration in South Korea. The Korean government has been pressuring Google to adopt a system by which users must identify themselves truthfully when posting videos or comments on YouTube. Google has been limiting access to some services for South Korean users rather than abandon the potential for user anonymity.

Google has offered its service in Arabic since 2005, but I have not been able to find any information on its market shares in Arab countries. Google does have offices in Amman, Jordan and Cairo, Egypt. It even offers Gmail to users in Egypt, despite the fact that the Egyptian government is just as aggressive in tracking down, jailing, and torturing political dissidents and critics as China is. Google has not been as public and forthcoming about its concerns for the fate of its users in Egypt as it has in China. And no one in the U.S. Congress or major human rights groups seems to have raised the issue of Google's policies in other oppressive regimes with the vigor of the China question.

As Russia has lurched from fragile democracy to nationalist, authoritarian, one-party rule under the direction of Vladimir Putin, Google has found itself able to operate freely within the country. While Putin's regime has stifled (to put it mildly) journalism deemed critical of the government, it has kept the Web relatively open. We often assume that greater Internet use and freedom corresponds with greater political liberty. But in Russia over the past 10 years we have seen a steady rise of Internet use and freedom accompanied by a harsh crackdown on dissent. It's as if the Russian regime understands that the Web is for shopping and whatever political organization might occur over it is a mere nuisance.

Despite structural openness of the Russian Internet, Google has not been able to establish a significant or influential share of the search market in the birthplace of co-founder Sergey Brin. Yandex, a Russian company with close connections to the state, had 44 percent of the search market in 2008. Google only had 34 percent of the market. At the time, only about 25 percent of Russians were regular users of the Internet. So the potential for growth and change in that market was significant. Yandex and Rambler, the second-most-popular Russian search engine, have the advantage of being programmed natively in Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet. Yandex specializes in offering Cyrillic-text sites in other languages that Russian users might want to read such as those from Ukraine and Belorussia. Russian grammar is complex and very different than most European languages. Because search techniques now demand complex linguistic analysis, Google's lead in these areas of research among Western European languages gives it no aid in the Russian market. The growth Google has experienced since its debut in Russia in 2006 can be attributed to its influential ancillary services such as YouTube and Google Maps. Still, Yandex controls many of the WiFi access locations and a popular photo sharing site. And in Russian markets, political connections and the support of the state can matter just as much or more than the quality of the service. Because of this complex ecosystem, it's hard to imagine Google prevailing or even growing significantly if Russia becomes even more nationalistic than it already has. If, on the other hand, Russian society and government opens up and liberalizes, one could imagine Google playing and important role in that process. Once again, the conditions on the ground would lead the change in the media environment, rather than the other way.

Perhaps Google does better in countries with internal linguistic diversity. The United States is largely monolingual (for now, although Spanish should soon gain status as America's second official language), yet it gives Google about 72 percent of its Web search business -- although this number has been climbing steadily since 2005. Google does slightly better in bilingual Canada, with 78 percent of the market. India, the most poly-lingual of major economic powers, is a much better market for Google, with more than 81 percent of the search market.

Many of the searches in India are done in English, which is the standard language of commerce across the country of more than a billion people - more than 17 percent of the world's population. Unlike in Korea, where mastery of one script and one language has been the key to success for Naver.com, India offers Google an ideal environment to demonstrate its flexibility, adaptability, and computational power. Google has invested much in automatic translation within and among Indian languages. So it stands alone as an effective agent to serve the 21 major languages spoken and written in India. As of mid-2009, however, Google only offers its service in nine major Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujurati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Although India is a major high-technology incubator, it has yet to gestate an effective local search engine that does anything more than mimic Google's look and feel.

Local Culture and the resistance to Cosmopolitanism

The Internet has great potential to unite the world. But it has done so unevenly at best over the past 20 years. Rather than acting as a membrane that connects everyone with everyone and everyone with every piece of knowledge equally, the Internet allows for punctuated connections. It succeeds best at uniting Diasporic communities, forging political alliances within borders (when the state allows such a thing) and across borders (whether or not states allow it). Google's role in these phenomena has been anything but simple. In its search functions, Google has amplified the "tribalization" of the Web, letting Dutch football fans and people of Maori descent find each other and reinforce their collective judgments. One aspect of global civil society, what we might call the "Local Culture Movement," has benefited greatly from this enhancement. And it demonstrates how global civil society and the potential global public sphere conflict rather than cohere.

The Local Culture Movement has no use for the global public sphere. In fact, the global public sphere is a problem for it. This movement represents the interests of long-unrecognized culture groups, many of which have struggled to assert and maintain identities under intense pressure from illiberal, authoritarian, or totalitarian nation-states intent on eliding difference for the sake of a forged and coerced postcolonial nationalism. Under these conditions, many of these culture groups were not able to transmit local traditions openly or teach languages to their young members. Since liberalization and globalization replaced fervent postcolonial nationalism in many places (and just as often in already liberal states such as Australia and Canada), these culture groups face a new threat: the corporate exploitation of their signs, stories, and cultural practices. For them, a public sphere is merely an opportunity for others to cheapen their experiences, traditions, and beliefs by rapid repetition and distribution in new and often insulting contexts.

The Local Culture Movement opposes "the torrent" of proprietary media images and texts that pour out of multinational corporations via closed networks of satellite, cable, broadcast, and retail outlets. Therefore, both movements could find common cause. One significant limitation to the prospects of a Free Culture-Local Culture alliance is the tone-deafness of much of the U.S.-based rhetoric that serves as the foundation of the Free Culture Movement. Habermas and John Stuart Mill do not always translate well.

Yet the tension between the very Habermasian Web movements and the more communitarian Local Culture Movement reveals more than a rhetorical fault. It exposes the frustrations and limitations of efforts to generate a global public sphere that can wrestle with any issue of global importance: cultural, trade, health, or environmental questions. First, it's not always clear what the global public sphere is between. The local (or national) public sphere in Habermas' model mediates between the private and the state. There is rarely a clear state-like supranational body that has effective sovereignty over any particular global issue. Sometimes it might seem to be the World Trade Organization, but that might just be a mask for the interests of a particular nation state. Other times it might seem to be UNESCO or the World Intellectual Property Organization. But again, such organizations might just be acting as an instrument of policy execution at the behest of a nation state that demands the illusion of multilateral cover for its will. Second, public spheres imply (perhaps require) real spaces for deliberation and debate.

The very marginality of the Local Culture Movement - its reason for being - renders it peripheral to global discussions of cultural policy. Only when represented by a friendly and supportive nation state (again, Canada or Australia) do Local Culture Movement members find their claims considered by policy-making officials. But this is state-driven action. It's not publicly spherical.

While traditional public sphere theory offers little to the Local Culture Movement, civil society more broadly conceived does. This is especially useful because so much Internet-mediated global political action is markedly uncivil. The project should be to encourage civility among all parties without hitching civility to the noxious ideology of "civilizing the uncivilized" parts of the world. More often than not, American and European actors need to be encouraged to behave civilly, whether they are corporations, states, or black bloc anarchists disrupting a meeting of the G-8. On the margins, "Hactivism" and cyber-vandalism have grown into important tools for the disaffected, including members of the Local Culture Movement. The Internet does not in itself provide the social space or norms Habermas describes and prescribes for a healthy public sphere. It is not designed to be a force for the civility. Paradoxically, the Internet does a better job of stimulating (or simulating) rational spaces and norms in illiberal contexts, such as when employed by democratic dissident movements.

To understand why uncivil behavior remains important in global politics, we must consider the peculiar role of culture in the postmodern global market economy. Culture is contentious. On its face, this is a rather mundane claim. But it is historically important. Seyla Benhabib argues that "culture" has traditionally been considered central to the maintenance of world-views of dominant political structures, not a distinct field or locus of symbolic generation and differentiation. The distinction of "culture" as a value saved from the regimentation and reification of science, politics, economics, or militarism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, the result of a process that Max Weber called "Wertausdifferenzierung," or "value differentiation." Weber claimed that culture under the modern state and capitalist economy tends to foster oppositional poses as much as legitimizing ones. Under the political canopy of the 20th century industrial and welfare state, cultural politics was merely an adjunct to questions of resource distribution. Calling for resource distribution in a neoliberal context seems futile and is dismissed as counterproductive. In recent years, Benhabib explains, cultural groups have been employing political strategies in an effort to assert recognition rather than redistribution (although there can be redistributive consequences of cultural recognition). In a desperate, divided, Darwinian world economy, cultural recognition can seem as important as life itself. Cultural humiliation can be considered cause for mass slaughter. Attempts at forging a global public sphere discount the importance of cultural recognition in favor of procedural equality - no that there is anything wrong with that. But those who fail to consider the visceral power of specific cultural claims are destined to exclude and alienate much of the postcolonial world.

With its powerful trends toward localization in search results and thus the customization of knowledge, Google's search functions actually reinforce the interests of the Local Culture Movement.

However, several major aspects of Google's business has influenced the expansion of global civil society and offered a glimpse of what a global public sphere might look like: the YouTube video service, Blogger, and Google News. These are some of the main characters in the Googlization of communication.

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Rebecca MacKinnon, "The Green Dam Phenomenon: Governments everywhere are treading on Web freedoms," The Wall Street Jounal Asia, June 18, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124525992051023961.html.
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A broader sense of civil society would include for-profit firms such as Sony Universal, ExxonMobil, or Google itself. We could even construct a list of global "uncivil" society actors that would include Al Queda, organized crime syndicates, and human traffickers. Keane includes commercial actors as elements of global civil society, but I think including them dilutes the analysis of non-commercial actors who forge remarkable connections without compensation. Each set of actors should be considered distinctly first so that we can then examine the effects of one on the other. See John Keane, Global civil society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism : ethics in a world of strangers, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006). Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism (Cambridge ;;New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Martha Nussbaum, The clash within : democracy, religious violence, and India's future (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, The clash within : democracy, religious violence, and India's future (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
Jürgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article," in Media and cultural studies : keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Durham and Douglas Kellner, 2nd ed. (Malden Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 102-107.
Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). I use the word "revolution" cautiously. It is far too early in the 20-year history of the Internet to assess its effects in a balanced and sober manner. Hype and fear still dominate the discussions of the effects of the Internet on culture, societies, politics, and economics. In addition, the Internet hype may have distracted scholars from another revolution. I believe that the proliferation of the magnetic cassette tape and player in the 1970s has had a more profound effect on daily life in all corners of the Earth than the Internet has so far. See Peter Lamarche Manuel, Cassette Culture : Popular Music and Technology in North India, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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Marshall McLuhan, The global village : transformations in world life and media in the 21st century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Some media theorists like Mark Poster and Jodi Dean are critical of efforts to associate a print-centered nostalgic phenomenon with the cacophony of cultural and political activities in global cyberspace. Others, like Yochai Benkler and Howard Rheingold, see the practice of "peer production" and the emergence of impressive and efficient organizational practices as a sign that Habermas' dream could come true in the form of digital signals and democratic culture. Mark Poster, "The Net as a Public Sphere?," Wired, November 1995. Also see Yochai Benkler, "Freedom of the Commons: A Political Economy of Information," (New York: 2005). Also see Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community : Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rev. , 1st MIT Press ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Also see Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs : The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002). Also see Craig J. Calhoun, Information Technology and the International Public Sphere [Google cache Web page of unavailable PDF] (Social Science Research Council, 2002 [cited March 27 2005]); available from http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:RGjUwuMc8BwJ:www.ssrc.org/programs/calhoun/publications/infotechandpublicsphere.pdf+global+public+sphere&hl;=en&client;=safari%20target=nw. Also see Jodi Dean, "Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture," Public Culture 13, no. 2 (2001). Also see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, ed. Manuel Castells, 2nd ed., Information Age ; V. 1 (Oxford ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Law professor Michael Froomkin has argued that the place on the Internet that best exemplifies the Habermasian spirit is in the open generation of the protocols themselves. See A. Michael Froomkin, "Habermas@Discourse. Net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace," Harvard Law Review 116, no. 3 (January 2003): 749-873, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342583.
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Wingyan Chung, "Web searching in a multilingual world," Commun. ACM 51, no. 5 (2008): 32-40, http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1342335&type;=html&coll;=GUIDE&dl;=GUIDE&CFID;=36468138&CFTOKEN;=80579826. Fotis Lazarinis et al., "Current research issues and trends in non-English Web searching," Information Retrieval 12, no. 3, 2009: 230-250
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"Google's Market Share in Your Country," Google Operating System: Unofficial News and Tips about Google, https://quick-proxy.appspot.com/googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/googles-market-share-in-your-country.html.
Ojas Sharma, "Where is India's Google?," SiliconIndia, May 22, 2009, http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Where_is_Indias_Google-nid-56999.html.
Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties : Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), Rosemary J. and Andrew Herman Coombe, "Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World Wide Web," Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004), Robyn Kamira, "Indigenous Peoples: Inclusion in the World Summit for the Information Society," (Geneva: World Summit on the Information Summit, 2002), Ian McDonald, "Unesco-Wipo World Forum on the Protection of Folklore: Some Reflections and Reactions," (Redfern: Australian Copyright Council, 1997).
Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Local Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
McDonald, "Unesco-Wipo World Forum on the Protection of Folklore: Some Reflections and Reactions."
Coombe, "Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World Wide Web."
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library : How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004). Also see Shanthi and Taylor C. Boas Kalathil, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Regimes (Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003).
Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).
Seyla Benhabib, "The Liberal Imagination and the Four Dogmas of Multiculturalism," The Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (1999). 401.
Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc. : Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001).