There are court threats and festering opposition to Google’s Book Search settlement. By the spring of 2009, the settlement was separating Google from members of “the tribe,” as Lawrence Lessig dubs them, who treat openness as a cause and crusade against those who advance their own narrow commercial interests and choke competition. The federal district court judge who must sign off on the agreement between Google and the publishers and the Authors Guild received amicus briefs from various groups asking him to address their antitrust and monopoly concerns. Under the terms of the settlement, Google was granted nearly exclusive rights to millions of “orphaned” books, or those books still under copyright but whose copyright holders are unknown. Because only Google would be granted the right to digitize these books and to sell them, the judge was petitioned to prevent a Google monopoly Librarians expressed concern that Google would monitor reading habits and compile data. Some literary agents protested, as did Charles Nessen and a group of Harvard lawyers, that Google did not have the right to abrogate an orphaned copyright. And with Google effectively locking up the right to digitize all the books ever published, including orphaned books, the claim was that competitors would be shut out. Safeguards were required, they asserted, to ensure that Google would not one day jack up the prices it charges universities and others. The federal judge gave opponents until October 2009 to register their complaints. Seeking to head off growing concerns among libraries, in May 2009 Google reached an agreement with the University of Michigan to grant libraries a say in pricing decisions and to settle disagreements by arbitration, a model it hoped to extend to other libraries. Ominously, the Justice Department also opened an antitrust inquiry. Many who petitioned the court or lobbied Justice acknowledged that Google’s effort to digitize books was salutary. Yet the din grew louder that Google was a mechanized steamroller.
And the U.S. government is not the only government Google must contend with. The European Union held up the DoubleClick merger, and may well object to Google’s worldwide book deal that was made with American companies and authors. China censored their search engine and, in early 2009, blocked YouTube for a time from appearing before the world’s largest Internet audience. As the Iranian government brutally suppressed street demonstrations in June 2009 not just with clubs but by jamming the Internet, the government of China had ordered PC makers to load filtering software on all machines sold after July 1. China claimed this would block pornography, but it would also grant the government a weapon to block political content it considered subversive. Not surprising, many governments are hostile to the idea of a free and open Web that Google advances, believing their national values-or the governing regime-are threatened. I soured on attending the World Economic Forum in Davos several years ago because I found too many panels there to be insufferably polite and boring-designed to bestow backslaps on corporate and government attendees. But what is mind stretching about Davos, and different from most conferences, is that attendees come from all over the world and bring with them different sets of values and assumptions about the meaning of words. I remember a panel in the late nineties moderated by Esther Dyson, an early champion of the Internet. She opened by extolling the democratic values-freedom, liberty, access to all information-advanced by the Web. The former foreign minister of Denmark chimed in with his agreement, emphasizing that the Web gave individuals more freedom. He and Dyson thought they were taking the unassailable moral high ground.
For the next several minutes, they sat slack-jawed as Singapore ’s ambassador to the United States challenged them. He said his government licensed Internet use with the idea that the Web must serve society, not the individual. “By licensing you are asking for responsible use,” he said. An Egyptian diplomat educated in America chimed his agreement. He favored regulating “human dignity” situations, such as expressions that might be construed as “racist.” He urged the adoption of international standards to prevent freedom of speech from being too free.
Astonished, Dyson and the former foreign minister challenged these ideas as threats to “liberal values.”
“I am not a liberal,” a member of the Iranian Parliament shot back, declaring that his government opposed the “pollution” of Western democratic values spread over the Web. “A nonliberal system does not equal intolerance,” he said, explaining that his country favored “community” over “individual” values.
This exchange was a reminder that “common values” are not always common, and that Google, whose mission is to share and make the world’s information accessible, will always have government bears to contend with.
THE THREATS FROM WITHIN GOOGLE are as significant as those from without. “What Google should fear most of all is hubris,” said Yossi Vardi, the Israeli entrepreneur who funds start-ups and is a friend of Page’s and Brin’s. “If you are successful and young and everything plays in your direction, you feel you can do anything.” When Marissa Mayer said that Googlers love to battle over ideas but “everyone” shares “a similar motivation to do good for the world,” or when chief cultural officer Stacy Savides Sullivan said, “What separates us is that our founders care about users, not making money,” they sincerely meant it. But history is littered with examples of people who believed too much in their own virtue and lost the humility that is a counterweight to hubris. Page and Brin, observed Stanford’s Terry Winograd, “are utopians,” believing deeply that “if people have better information they will live better lives… They are technological optimists in the sense of saying, ‘Let’s produce this technology and things will work out.’” They don’t always work out, and some of the clashes Google has had-with book publishers and the AP, or with ad agencies and governments-resulted from an inability to hear.
In the 1990s a coterie of math whizzes that included Nobel Prize winners Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes crafted formulas they were certain would allow Long-Term Capital Management to consistently out-perform the stock market; they failed spectacularly because their computer programs lacked common sense. This is the same mechanical thinking that often overlooks the needs of workers when designing assembly lines. In the same way, Google’s engineers can get too wedded to their algorithms. As Google search has become more dominant, a chorus of complaints from media companies that the PageRank algorithm penalizes them has grown louder. By giving so much weight to the number of links a page received rather than the quality of the information reported, members of Google’s Publisher’s Advisory Council, which includes ESPN, the Wall Street Journal, Hearst, and the New York Times, complained that their links often appeared on page three or lower in the search results. Nat Ives of Advertising Age reported that the Times senior vice president, Martin Nisenholtz, told of doing a search for Gaza after the Israeli army launched an invasion to stop rocket attacks around New Year’s 2009. “Google returned links,” Ives reported, “to outdated BBC stories, Wikipedia entries, and even an anti-Semitic YouTube video well before coverage by the Times, which had an experienced reporter covering the war from inside Gaza itself.” While it’s true that judging “quality” in news is subjective, it’s also true that Google’s proclaimed desire to offer the best information often conflicts with algorithms that reflexively push to the top of the search results those sites with the most links. If such complaints received wide currency, they would sabotage the trust essential to Google’s continued success.