As we near the end of our week's discussion, Siva approriately directs our attention to the conjunction of Google and the incoming Obama administration. I'd like to offer a few comments on one of the issues Siva raises, the appropriateness of the federal government anointing YouTube as the home of videos of government hearings.
Today over at the Mothership (that's the TPM Front Page) we see one of the "wire" stories that the General Services Administration is negotiating with YouTube (a Google service) to post federal hearings, etc.
Given the uncomfortably close relationship between Google execs and Obama, should we be worried about this? I think so. YouTube is already the default video platform on the Web. But it does not have to be. And there is no clear reason for the government to solidify YouTube's market dominance. In fact, there is no reason why the GSO could not mandate that all federal agencies post their videos in open forms -- accessible, repostable, and mashable -- on their own sites.
Then We the People could repost them on YouTube with commentary and maybe some cartoon graphics mixed in. Better yet, because .gov can't deal with the bandwidth demands of too many folks pulling down popular videos, the federal government should post open format video as bittorrent files.
Getting beyond anti-trust and competition law questions, and beyond good and evil, I wonder how Google's rise as a platform through which millions experience the Internet every day means that for much of the world (North America and Western Europe, mostly), Google and the Internet are merging. In other words, what happens when we can't or won't experience the Internet without using Google as a filter, enabler, editor, and source of software (can you tell I have been immersing myself in Nick's work of late?).
In fact, Nick's article in the Atlantic from the summer, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" made me consider this question. The article actually made the case that fundamental features of Web culture are affecting our cognitive habits. It did not directly address the behavior of Google per se. So is Google a proxy for the Internet?
Siva asks: "Why and how did Google increase its share of the search market 7 percent in less than two years? For the past five years or so it seems that MSN, Google, and Yahoo all provide similar search quality and many of the same ancillary services. Why would a person in 2009 stop using Yahoo and start using Google?"
A few speculations:
1. Don't assume that the continuing growth in market share is just, or even mainly, from people switching from other engines to Google's. Use of the Internet (and of search) continues to expand. If a very large percentage of new users choose to use Google, as is likely given that the company is now synonymous with search, then Google's share would keep increasing even if no existing users switched.
If, as James credibly suggests, Google will likely soon have the power to crush used book stores and exact extortionate prices from libraries who become dependent upon ongoing access to Google's e-book collection, we may ask, Is the company likely to press its advantage to the utmost, here and elsewhere? Or will it hold itself back, adhering to Don't Be Evil?
The story of how "Don't Be Evil" ended up on Google's official list of "10 Things We Know" is told in Planet Google---it began as a guerrilla action on the part of engineers who were concerned about the influx of MBAs into the company. Once it became a publicly visible part of the company culture, it became a permanent fixture that will be hard to remove, should the company's executive leadership ever wish to do so----unless, that is, they want to announce, "Hi, don't mind us---we're just taking care of some preliminary business before we go on to do evil!"
As long as we have these sharp observers of Google in a conversation, please allow me to ask some provocative questions in hope that y'all will enlighten me.
Why is Google so dominant in search? Why and how did Google increase its share of the search market 7 percent in less than two years? For the past five years or so it seems that MSN, Google, and Yahoo all provide similar search quality and many of the same ancillary services. Why would a person in 2009 stop using Yahoo and start using Google? Is it a network effect? Is it cultural power (there is no verb "to Yahoo")? Is it the corona of goodness that emanates from the company? Or is there a clear qualitative difference that I have never seen demonstrated and thus do not believe?
Randall started answering these questions in a previous post, as he did in his book. Hal Varian asserts that Google is winning because it is demonstrably better. Is there evidence of this claim?
"E.T. is the model for American culture circa 1980," writes David Thomson in his new book Have You Seen ...? "In trying to give identity and a look to his magical creature, sometimes known as Puck, Steven Spielberg followed an old Disney concept: that people love the look of a baby, the wide brow, the clear, pure eye. So he pasted together a baby's face with a photo of Carl Sandburg's eyes, and the mixture of baby and sage was exquisite."
And so, too, was born Google, the alien baby-sage dropped onto Earth with a 300-year plan to help the human race fulfill its destiny or transcend itself or make way for a superior intelligence or something or other.
Randall asks about antitrust issues, and both he and David think there aren’t many, at least in Google’s core search business. I tend to agree, for reasons they’ve laid out. Compared with the lock-in of using Windows and the network effects of a common set of operating system interfaces, web search is a wide open world. Anyone who comes along and offers better search is in a position to grab the lion’s share of the market, the way that Google itself grabbed it in the beginning of the decade. (For the record, I don’t think Microsoft’s deals with Dell and Verizon Wireless are a sign that Microsoft is competing effectively in its search offerings; they’re a sign that Microsoft has enormous piles of money to throw away on bad business decisions.)
The DoJ scrutiny of the Google-Yahoo deal was similarly off-base. The usual antitrust fear is that sellers will collude and raise prices. But the instant a web search company stops providing free search, it’s dead. Faced with this fact of the search marketplace, opponents of the deal argued that the companies would raise their prices to advertisers. That would be plausible, except that Google’s ad-pricing algorithm is based on an auction to potential advertisers; their competition with each other sets the price. And, of course, from an advertiser’s perspective, search ads are just one piece of the online advertising market; if the prices for search ads go up, advertisers will just find another way to annoy web users. There is at least one place where Google needs a good, careful antitrust review, though: Google Book Search
Randall Stross's question about whether the Justice Department needs to probe Google for possible antirust violations is provocative. But the last thing we need in the US now is more government intervention in the economy. It would further destroy growth and jobs. After all, the federal government is pouring tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into Citicorp, AIG and the automobile companies, virtually nationalizing industries in distress, and has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, making Uncle Sam the de facto mortgage lender. At this fragile moment, do we really want to decimate Google, a growing, innovative business that has created more than 15,000 jobs and is thriving debt-free?
But Randall's question cannot be ignored, especially not inside the Googleplex. For Google's biggest risk may well be political. Google dropped its proposed partnership with Yahoo last year only because the company was warned that it was hours away from facing Justice Department antitrust action. Google wisely walked away.
Nicholas Carr sees growing similarities between Google and Microsoft, and at first glance, it does seem plausible to describe both companies as wielding control of the "economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day." But the more one looks at the nature of their power, the less similar they seem. I'm going to make the argument that Google's customers have played a far more direct role in Google's success than Microsoft's, and that greatly complicates a discussion of possible ways to loosen Google's control of the "chokepoint."
Microsoft's domination of personal computer software has always revolved around distribution deals with intermediaries, hardware vendors---and that continues to this day (how else to explain unwanted Vista's quite respectable sales?). It was those relationships with vendors, built from its operating system business, that permitted Microsoft to get easy distribution for its Office package, and which was priced well below the competition. It also was able to use its intimate knowledge---and, upon occasion, undocumented API calls---to make its applications work with Windows in ways the competition could not.
James Grimmelman compares Google to Sauron. I'm flabbergasted. I had always thought that Google was the Ringbearer and that Mordor was where Gates and Ballmer hung out.
Was I misinformed? Or am I just confused? If it's the latter, I have a decent excuse. After all, even though Google and Microsoft have very different public personae, it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart as businesses. Both built their empires through the same strategy: gaining control of the economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day.
It’s telling that Randall started off the discussion by talking about the lag time between turning his finalized manuscript in to the publisher and seeing it in print. It’s a common problem in writing about computer technology; everything you want to say might go stale before you get the words out. It’s not a coincidence that Planet Google quotes so heavily from blogs, the new first responders of technology journalism. Nor is it a coincidence that the first three good books on Google — Planet Google, David’s The Google Story, and John Battelle’s The Search — were all written by journalists and are structured as thoughtful accumulations of individual pieces of reportage. Individual plot strands — like the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal Randall fretted about — may go out of date, but others remain relevant and interesting.
What I was most struck by in Planet Google was the strong sense of contingency. It’s easy to attribute to Google a single, overarching master plan. (The company’s own messianic sense of mission certainly doesn’t help matters, either.) Each new product seems like another brick in a carefully planned wall, and leads to fairly predictable debates over the good and the evil that walls can be used for. But Planet Google is a good reminder of how remarkably aimless Google can be.
Letting go of a book manuscript is hard. It's especially hard when the book's principal subject is a company whose every twitch is widely regarded as newsworthy and it feels as if at any moment a news story will break that will render entire chunks of the book instantly obsolete. For Planet Google, I held on just as long as possible, far beyond what was reasonable to ask of my publisher. In June, when the last window for very, very, very final editing would close, I was still futzing over such things as whether Google would purchase Digg or Microsoft would revive negotiations with Yahoo.
Boy, that was pretty pointless. Today, we stare across a bleak economic landscape, with a global economy that has seized up, scary unemployment numbers, worries that a severe recession could become still worse, and our attention fixed hopefully on Inauguration Day. Back in September, after my fingers had been pried off of the manuscript, the landscape changed. In the week separating Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and Planet Google's arrival at bookstores, no Google story broke and nothing about Google's narrative had changed in any obvious way. But the context had...
Randall Stross is with us for this week's TPMCafe Book Club, where we'll be discussing his latest book Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know. The book takes us inside perhaps the most innovative, successful, and controversial company of the 'Internet Age'. Where is Google leading us, how much do they know about us and how much do we really have a say in the matter?
Randall also writes the Digital Domain column for The New York Times and is a professor of business at San Jose State University.
He'll be joined by a panel of specialists and critics who've all weighed on the dynamic role Google plays in the world of information technology. Nicholas Carr is the author of a recent Atlantic cover article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and the bestselling book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World From Edison to Google (out in paperback this coming week). James Grimmelmann is an associate professor at New York Law School and a former resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, specializing in copyright, intellectual property, and internet law. Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, currently working on a book about Google, and maintaining the web site www.googlizationofeverything.com. David Vise won a Pulitzer Prize as a business reporter for the Washington Post, and is the author of The Google Story: Inside The Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time.
Join us.
The Coffee House
TPMCafe's regulars
House Brew
From Your Cafe Editor
Special Guests
Big names and big brains
Special Features
Pressing topics and trends
Table for One
An expert's week-long talk.
All Reader Posts
TPM readers discuss.
Editor-in-Chief
Josh Marshall
