MEDIA MATTERS
The new evil empire?
SEVANTI NINAN
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On the Net, it seems to be Google everywhere. Should you be getting scared?
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Its critics read the Google CEO’s statement, “we want to know you better,” as an ominous one.
As Google keeps growing it merits inevitable comparisons with Microsoft. Its 10th birth anniversary this month invited a lot of hyperbole, along with the occasional suggestion that maybe the kooky, cool Internet start-up of yesteryear is now so far extended that it is on its way to becoming sinister. Can we escape Google or its cookies?
It has taken keyword search and augmented it with a mapping of the planet, gone from media navigation to media content, has blown copyright in publishing and television to bits, has created the ultimate alternate worldwide TV channel with its acquisition of YouTube, and now with its Net browser Chrome, it has entered Microsoft’s domain. It is not for nothing that Barack Obama and other primary hopefuls all came calling at the Googleplex to woo its denizens. Google has successfully sold the idea that it is where the future is at.
Diffused power
The funny thing is that Microsoft, which took longer to get to where Google is today in terms of earnings, attracted far more hostility, ending up with an antitrust suit. Before he reinvented himself as a philanthropist, Bill Gates was seen as a relentless, monopoly- building geek whose growing power had to be countered. In comparison the power and wealth that Google has acquired still seems diffused and less personalised, its founders not yet instantly recognisable in the way Gates had become. May be it’s just a matter of time before the opposition to Google builds up, Microsoft has been around now for 30-plus years, Google for 10. The latter’s economic supremacy is almost entirely in Net advertising and last week it seemed that future moves in that direction — such as a Google-Yahoo advertising partnership which has been mentioned — could attract an antitrust suit. The New York Times ran a story suggesting that the Justice Department was looking at the possibility.
If it is mind space dominance that has to be feared, Google is getting there. If its browser Chrome becomes the kind of success Gmail became, this is what will happen when you access the Internet. You will use a Google browser to take you to Google’s Search ( in nine Indian languages), , check out the day’s news at Google News, turn to its new web encyclopaedia Knol instead of Wikipedia, use Google Finance to check out market headlines, and Goggle Health to archive your medical records. Then you will turn to Orkut to catch up with friends and boost your profile. If you missed a stirring TV speech by a public figure, or an episode of a serial you like, you will look for it on YouTube. If you blog, you could be using Google’s Blogger. Not to mention checking your mail on Gmail. At the end of all this, the behemoth has a neat little profile on you, that it keeps augmenting.
To gauge if that can rebound, you need to be aware of two India-specific cases. One, still unresolved, in which Google’s India subsidiary has been sued by a Mumbai-based construction company for alleged defamatory posts by a blogger called Toxic Writer, using Google’s blogging service, Blogger. The Bombay High Court said the blog should be removed, and Google complied. Then it asked for the blogger’s identity, which it has not revealed as yet. But the point is, it could, because it has the information.
Privacy concerns
As it did last year, in another India-specific case concerning the use of Orkut, its social networking site. When a Google user posted a defamatory image of the Maratha hero Shivaji on Orkut, the Indian police asked Google for his IP address. Google gave it. Airtel then provided the physical address of a man which, they said, matched Google’s data. He was arrested and jailed, but turned out to be the wrong man.
Both of the above, Google could say, were cases not in their control. When they operate in India, the safe harbour provisions which make them immune in the United States to liability for user generated content, don’t apply. Indian law holds them liable.
For the future, its critics read the Google CEO’s statement, “we want to know you better,” as an ominous one. And because Net users resist dominance and personal data collection, someone has come up with Scroogle. It promises “no cookies, no search-term records, access log deleted within 48 hours.” It has a Scroogle scraper, which presumably scrapes off Google’s cookies. If you want to do a Google search, you are invited to do it through Scroogle.
While others have privacy concerns about the way it operates, Google wants to be seen as youthful, friendly and benign. Its well-publicised company motto is “Don’t be evil.” But it also wants to grow, and woo users by tracking their preferences. And their mail. If you think of it in those terms, it is unsettling to have related ad words pop up as you read your incoming mail on Gmail.
So the question for the next 10 years is, can a 800-pound gorilla which keeps growing, as David Smith of the Manchester Guardian described Google, remain trustworthy and likeable?
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