"Bottom line: I see no reason why I should be expected to trust these guys anymore." Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine
"Now, it turns out the people running the big search engines are liberally biased, too -- and they're CENSORING conservative search ad results!" William Greene, Rightmarch
Google is the first public trust of the information-producer age. As a repository for good information distribution, it is coming under political attack, and how it responds will largely determine whether it continues its meteoric rise as an economic powerhouse and whether we can build a new progressive America.
I've noticed something weird of late. When the right-wing base wants something, it doesn't happen unnless the insider media crowd also wants it to happen, and vice versa. This is why the war happened; it's both good TV, and good crusading. It's also why the gay marriage amendment did not happen but the culture wars continue. Tom Friedman is willing to tolerate creationism in Kansas, but not Manhattan.
But now the martini set and the creationist set are beginning to agree that Google's sure got a lot of power, and isn't it odd that this company is both unaccountable to the right and may soon have larger amount of ad revenue than all three networks in primetime? In other words, the incentives for the top-down media order to neuter Google have aligned with the incentive of the right wing to wreck yet another public trust.
Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com is a canary in the coal mine for the top-down media order. His site is largely dedicated to how big media can use citizen generated content to alter its business model, while at the same time preserving the social rituals of power that sustain a consumer society. Google is the first of a growing number of companies dedicated to the producer age. The centrality of conversation that Jarvis demands is the opposite of Google's culture of link generosity. The business model of Google is built on organizing information in an efficient and trusted manner where authority comes from weak social ties. The business model of Jarvis and the right-wing are built on self-proclaimed authority backed by political force.
Jarvis is not willing to allow Google to throw its products out there and see what works. "Is Google the trojan horse of the internet? Did it sneak in the gates over the night looking like a toy and turned out to be an army of conquest?"
Jeff goes on to accuse Google of everything from privacy violations to copyright theft:
It's one matter when the search engine caches a page you can't get anymore; that's a copyright violation but an all-in-all benign one in the sense that it's only giving you content you could not otherwise see (no different from, say, the web archive).
But it's quite another matter for Google to get in the way of serving current content. This means that the page is served from Google rather than from a publisher's server, which means that the publisher cannot count the traffic and serve targeted and dynamic advertising.
It also means that Google is copying content on its servers and serving it from there and thus is violating copyright.
And it means that Google is in a position to snoop on data on consumers' usage of sites that Google does not own: That is, Google will know what the consumers on my site are doing better than I will for these "accelerated" pages.
Google is forming a basic plank of a producer society, organizing a vibrant ecosystem of information. If Google News creates a trustrank and it sucks, then people won't read it. And even if people read it, it will not have influence unless the ideas that are written by people have currency in and of themselves. In other words, Jarvis is upset that Google is proposing another way to pipe information, one he does not and cannot control.
I've also seen a lot of bitching about the news sources going into Google News, that Arabic ones are included (white supremacist ones are also in there). I tend not to care about these; Google News does not confer credibility on any media outlet, only exposure. And in doing so, it flattens the playing field and requires media outlets to constantly recreate their own credibility, a sort of zero-sum budgeting for credibility.
The twin attacks Jarvis wields are the bogeymen of the internet: PRIVACY!!!! COPYRIGHT!!!! ACK ACK!!!!
These are both intended to scare consumers into the arms of big government. The reality is much more cool. Google is doing nothing with privacy or copyright that AOL couldn't do, and is far more careful about the dangers of the internet than any traditional institution. But it's in the realm of the political that Google will start getting blowback, because the long-standing grudge that the right has against 'the media' will come back to hit Google squarely in the nose.
Jarvis is an opinion-leader, and he's starting to want the type of society Google is enabling to get crushed. And he's not the only one; just go to a cocktail party for Vanity Fair. I wouldn't be surprised to see a magazine cover in a few years that says something like 'Google Is Big, Powerful, Profitable: How much do these guys know about you?' This will be accompanied with a religious broadside against what Google allows kids to learn about. 'Should you let your kids use Google? What you don't know may hurt them.'
The right strategy to take is to gather the new libertarian left, who are gathered in the Free Culture movement and the new leftie blogosphere, and bring them to Google's defense with a transparent conversation on the now-defunct Google blog. If the media is going to strike at Google's ability to innovate and create trusted sources of information, don't try to compromise. There is no compromise. If they force Google to nix a new product, they will only be emboldened. Because it's not that Google is infringing on their territory, it's that Google's very existence threatens their power base.
This is war, and like it or not, Google must take the side of science and reason. Or it will perish, and we will all be poorer.