Google Isn't Evil...just, ill-tempered

Updated version of an earlier piece:
The Google Democracy

By Kevin Bunkley

In an era of liberal government and blank-check spending, business is often the first casualty. Not so with the nation's most beloved internet company, Google. Since its IPO in 2004, Google has added an infinity of o's to its name. Critics often warn of some doomsday-like event in which Google unites with the federal government to penetrate every waking moment of our lives, and everything in them is sold to us by Google. I had my money on Microsoft becoming "Big Brother" first, but as Google grows, and grows...and grows, some would have you think this is bad for business and bad for our lives. In the age of globalization, a bigger Google can only further plug America, and the rest of the world, into each other.

Google's market value and subsequently, market share, is larger than Time Warner, Viacom, its subsidiary CBS, and The New York Times Company. They have every internet service imaginable, a cellular phone, and, in my estimation, the most important advertising operation in the world, AdWords. Competitors -- chiefly Microsoft and Yahoo -- warn of a monopoly business in violation of antitrust laws. Is that why the two companies just signed a ten-year deal to join their laggard search technologies to grab that market share back...after Yahoo's own project with Google was canned by the federal government?

The June issue of Wired magazine, had an article detailing Google's ascent to the powerhouse of online content and advertising and just how the company makes its money. In short, a complex mathematical formula causes a continuous cycling of the advertisements that are being clicked, and opens it up to bidding amongst the companies that want our dollars. Stimulating competition for ad prominence is an economy in itself, and it put a hole in the traditional model of going to an agency to buy ads in newspapers or online. Flattening the playing field has never been in the interest of too much power, but in the interest of advancing how commerce is conducted. The fact that an search engine start-up came up with this before Madison Avenue executives did is an indication that Google may have certain financial advantages in the modern economy.

These divisions have all the makings of a company that is beyond its reach. "Google's mission to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful,' so charmingly visionary in a startup, now sounds to some
people downright predatory in a company of nearly 12,000 employees," wrote Rob Hof in a 2007 Business Week piece. Corporate innovation is cyclical. IBM was at the front of the computer revolution, Microsoft at the integration age, and now Google is helming the internet phase. It's impossible to argue that a company that has made using the internet far more simpler than it was, has become too big and powerful. The only things that can limit Google are people who don't want to join the 21st Century.

Google's sole purpose is to provide information. It's easy to see why their projects to digitize entire University libraries, mainstream books, and other print media are contested as being too accessible at no cost (sometimes known as the "Wikipedia syndrome"), but look at who Google's toughest critics are: competitors and others who stand to gain nothing from the project. If Google were still a start-up search engine with a very small user base, would Microsoft and Yahoo throw a fit? Before allowing the Michigan Digitization Project, the University of Michigan filed suit on behalf of an author's guild since the company was seemingly in violation of intellectual property rights. Michigan is now the biggest advocate of digital book scanning, as economist and Michigan librarian Paul Courant led the charge to keep up with Cornell, Stanford and Columbia allowing access to their library collections. He wrote, simply, on his blog, "I believe Michigan and Google are changing the world."

Google only threatens the traditional information infrastructure that was devoid of balanced competition for almost ten years. Now, the rest are playing catch-up to Google's methods. The problem area is, that if Google has no competition at all, it would become too powerful with seemingly infinite ad revenue, and that creates a real vacuum. Google has expressed interest in cataloging everything in the world...but would we as a nation want their satellite data and information on our defense projects available to the tech-savvy web searcher? The existence of other companies keeps Google in check, not the self-restraint of its board. If Google were too powerful, Microsoft would be kaput.

The growth of the company has in a way led to a smarter internet, and collaboration that has produced amazing technological devices and services. Atlantic Monthly in July championed pharmacological research that suggests the ever-increasing amount of information on the web is making humans, as a species, smarter. In regular speak: without Google, our lives are a jumbled mess, and we're unable to maintain our fluid intelligence or think deeply. I would feel stupid and uninformed without Google Reader and Blogger software to occupy my internet-browsing time. And show me a University student anywhere in the country that wouldn't rejoice at being able to pull up a hard-to-find book for a term paper on their personal computer. Google's services are too numerous to effectively contain. Not when what is being dealt with is out there in cyberspace. Sharing news, video and documents is integrated into society, and can't be easily yanked out. Google yielded by allowing the Universities to maintain control of their collections, because of cries by academics over a single entity having too much power to control information.

Google may come uncomfortably close to high levels of government or an organization when it asks to be allowed in, as it did with China last year, or when it wants to abduct an entire archive of information as it did with the University of Michigan's Library. It may act as infallible and impervious to error or going too far (street-level satellite viewing), but Google is a tool of our globalized world. Google tells us what we are searching for, and how society is behaving. Their information helps us live.

There won't be another Google anytime soon, so the one we have has to be allowed to conduct its business how it sees fit, minding certain rules of course. Only when it swallows up Facebook and Twitter will there be true cause for alarm.