CHAPTER SEVEN. The New Evil Empire?
(2004-2005)
In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, an incriminating letter disappears from the private residence of the French queen. The Parisian police prefect takes on the case, but even after an extensive search, he cannot find the letter. And though he manages to narrow the search to a chief suspect, a government minister, he lacks evidence to arrest him. The prefect decides to consult the noted amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. He explains that each night for three months, he has slipped into the minister’s home to assiduously search for the letter, removing cushions, the bottoms and tops of bedposts, the floorboards, the bindings of books-without success. The prefect is agitated; the suspect is a mere poet, he says, and he cannot believe such a “fool” could outwit him. Dupin, however, disagrees; he thinks the prefect and his detectives are the foolish ones, limited by their experiences, their routines, and “their own ideas of ingenuity.” They could not comprehend the acumen and cunning of a mind schooled not just as a poet but as a mathematician who follows his own “mathematical reasoning.”
Months go by, and the prefect returns, still unable to prove the minister’s guilt and ready to sign over the reward. Dupin, after persuading the prefect to sign a check, pulls the letter from his desk drawer. He explains that he cracked the case by climbing inside the supple mind of the suspect and imagining what he would do to conceal the letter. He imagined that the minister tricked the police by not attempting to conceal the letter. Rather, to avoid detection the letter was soiled, slightly torn, and crumpled in a card rack lying in plain sight in the middle of the minister’s room. Dupin found the letter where it had always been: under the nose of the prefect and his detectives.
Until 2004, most traditional media executives treated Google the way the prefect treated evidence: they failed to see the digital threat right under their noses. But soon after the IPO, their heightened awareness was captured in an eight-minute Flash-based movie that virally spread across the Internet. Called Epic 2014, it was a faux documentary by two young journalists, Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan. With a voice-of-God narrator, it recounted how year by year a new media giant, Googlezon (the merged Google and Amazon), acquires or murders media companies, including the New York Times Company. By 2014, this Orwellian colossus employs its algorithms and computers to snare advertising and customize packages of news for individuals, whose wants are revealed by the cookies Googlezon gathers to track the behavior of its users.
Not surprisingly, this depiction jarred Googlers. When Sheryl Sandberg joined the company in late 2001, she believed she had a public mission, a mission parallel to the one she felt as a ranking member of the Clinton administration. Yet to her shock, not long after the IPO, she first heard Google referred to as the “evil empire.” She was attending a Google conference-“I was standing there with our partners and they said, ‘How do we sustain ourselves against the power of-’ I thought they were going to say Microsoft. Instead they said, ‘Google.’”
The hostility, said Eric Schmidt, “did not begin until Google went public and people realized how much money we were making.” The reaction had more to do with fear than envy. It took Microsoft fifteen years to exceed one billion dollars in revenues; it took Google just six years. The evidence was now visible that Google was attracting more Internet advertising than anyone else, and these dollars were being siphoned from traditional media. This was perceived as a threat to most traditional media companies, and perhaps none more so than the advertising industry. Google was able to sell advertising with just a few search words, and without charging the same 2 to 5 percent fee extracted by the media buying agencies. The buy was better targeted. And for advertisers it was more efficient, for Google only charged the advertiser when the consumer actually clicked on an ad. “There’s that same ‘think big’ attitude about markets and opportunities,” Steven I. Lurie, a former Microsoft executive who had friends at Google, told the New York Times at the time of the IPO. “Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there’s that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and dominate.”
IT WAS IN THE CONTEXT of this growing backlash that the fight with book publishers, begun a few years earlier, started to come to a head. Like the Googlezon film, the uproar over digitizing books seemed to surprise Googlers. In their assessment, by scanning books and making them part of search, they were performing an ambitious and noble public service-they thought of the effort as their “moon shot”-and they assumed that they could do this without seeking permission of the copyright holders. Google knew that only about a third of the more than twenty million books ever published were no longer protected by copyright. But the mission was to scan all books. With books under copyright, Google said it would merely show “snippets,” which it claimed was permissible under the fair use clause of copyright law. Google did not precisely define the maximum number of words in a “snippet.” Nor does the law, but the rule of thumb is that fair use involves only enough text to briefly explain a book or briefly quote from an article or song.
Google believed it had provided protection to authors and publishers. In its contracts with libraries, Google said that if, within three years of the digital transfer of material, “Google decides not to use that content” (a particular book) because of a copyright dispute, the library would destroy the digital copy. They believed authors and publishers would see Google Books as a wonderful way to promote authors and their works, and to bring back books no longer in print. Google had earlier launched a Partners Program, signing up publishers who agreed to allow snippets to be shown for certain books, along with a link to an online bookseller. But publishers did not agree to allow all books to become part of search. The gulf between Google and the publishers and authors was vast. Google wanted to push the envelope of copyright, expanding the definition of fair use to allow more extensive quotations from books. It stressed the rights of search users, echoing the views of Web pioneers like Kevin Kelly, the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, who said that in return for government copyright protection, authors and publishers had a “copyduty” to “allow that work to be searched.” Google was offering to pay the cost of moving and scanning the books; what publisher-or library or university or author-could refuse that offer?
One clue of Google’s fundamental attitude toward books-and fundamental innocence of the publishing process-is a conversation I had with Brin while reporting this book. It was the second of our three interviews and upon entering the small conference room down the hall from the second floor glassed office he shares with Page, Brin playfully ribbed me for writing this book. “People don’t buy books,” he said. “You might as well put it online.” He meant: You might as well publish it for free.
“You might make more money if you put it online,” he said. “More people will read it and get excited about it.”
There’s little evidence that such a free book succeeds, I said. Stephen King tried it, and gave up the effort because he thought it was doomed.
“I guess that’s true,” he acknowledged a little sheepishly.
Following Google’s business model, would he expect authors to generate their income by selling advertising in their books? If there was no advance from a publisher, who would pay to cover the writer’s travel expenses? (I made thirteen week-long roundtrips to Google from New York, rented a car, stayed at hotels, and paid for dinner interviews most nights.) With no publisher, who would edit and then copyedit the book, and how would they get paid for their work? Who would pay lawyers to vet it? Who would hire people to market the book so that all those potential online readers could discover it? The usually voluble Brin grew quiet, ready to change the subject.