Poliblog Perspective

On a comment over at Ellee Seymour’s blog, Tim Almond asked me:

“Consider the how the Internet is distorted by Google dominance. That’s where it *could* end up.”

How do Google distort the internet?

A huge question. Here are a few points for starters:

Google has an 80% Market Share

Google has 80% of the UK search market. That cannot be healthy. The normal criteria that attracts regulatory interest is what … 40%?

Some graphs are here, with a further link to more information.

Potential for Destruction of Businesses

Google simply dropping websites from their index can destroy whole online businesses. To see an example of the potential impact and problems webmasters have to manage, see these threads:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum9/9593.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum9/9618.htm

(Warning a *lot* of posts).

Accretion of Knowledge - and Privacy concerns

Google is simply collecting so much knowledge about us all that it is worrying. A quote from the Economist:

The big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google’s business model (see article) assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company’s “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user’s searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user’s e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user’s medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).

More JP Morgan than Bill Gates

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.

Two Economist articles:

• Who’s afraid of Google? (Quote above came from here)
• Inside the Googleplex

Let me add one more extended quote from the second article:

IN AMERICA a phenomenon might claim to have entered mainstream culture only after it has been satirised on “The Simpsons”. Google has had that honour, and in a telling way. Marge Simpson types her name into Google’s search engine and is amazed to get 629,000 results. (“And all this time I thought ‘googling yourself’ meant the other thing.”) She then looks up her house on Google Maps, goes to “satellite view” and zooms in. To her horror, she sees Homer lying naked in a hammock outside. “Everyone can see you; get inside,” she yells out of the window, and the fumbling proceeds from there.

And that, in a nutshell, sums up Google today: it dominates the internet and guides people everywhere, such as Marge, to the information they want. But it also increasingly frightens some users by making them feel that their privacy has been intruded upon (though Marge, technically, could not have seen Homer in real time, since Google’s satellite pictures are not live). And it is making enemies in its own and adjacent industries. The grand moment of Marge googling herself, for example, was instantly available not only through Fox, the firm that created the animated television show, but also on YouTube, a video site owned by Google, after fans uploaded it in violation of copyright.

Google evokes ambivalent feelings. Some users now keep their photos, blogs, videos, calendars, e-mail, news feeds, maps, contacts, social networks, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and credit-card information—in short, much of their lives—on Google’s computers. And Google has plans to add medical records, location-aware services and much else. It may even buy radio spectrum in America so that it can offer all these services over wireless-internet connections.

Google could soon, if it wanted, compile dossiers on specific individuals. This presents “perhaps the most difficult privacy issues in all of human history,” says Edward Felten, a privacy expert at Princeton University. Speaking for many, John Battelle, the author of a book on Google and an early admirer, recently wrote on his blog that “I’ve found myself more and more wary” of Google “out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.”

A Worm’s Eye View

All this knowledge and power in the hands of a commercial business concerns me quite deeply. Here is a “worm’s eye view” quote from Opportunity Wales:

I run around a dozen Web sites which between them get through around 1 million pages (yup, that’s page not hits) per month. Looking at my Web analytics, I can see that on average 70% of traffic to my network of sites comes from various flavours of the Google search engine (mostly UK and USA). In comparison Yahoo provides around 8% of my traffic whilst Microsoft’s Live search engine produces a paltry 2%. The remainder (20%) comes from people who have bookmarked my sites or who are following links from other sites.

Now let’s rewind a moment and look at those numbers again. Google brings in 70% of my visitors. That’s absolutely staggering ! It is also very worrying because if one of my sites gets dropped from the Google index at any time visitor numbers are going to really suffer. And I have had sites dropped. As someone who does a lot of Search Engine Optimisation work, you really need to push the envelope sometimes in order to find out what works and what doesn’t. Inevitably, some Web sites (and their rankings) get harmed in the process.

So, yes, I’m concerned enough to avoid Google services where I can, and to want our regulatory authorities to keep an eye on the company.

Consider, for example, that they could turn off most of the top UK Political blogs with a few typings on a keyboard.

Wrapping Up

The company motto is “Don’t be Evil”.

That’s all well and good, and I’m not implying wrong motives, but I also believe that too much power power corrupts.

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