Was super-excited for this one, then when the semester got heavy, couldn't make time to read more than the 1st chapter. Will bring w/ me to the beach this weekend.

The Googlization of Everything by Siva Vaidhyanathan looks at Google history and it's growing reach of services across the internet. The thesis is that Google is striving to control the world's access to the internet to harvest as much marketable data as possible.

Right off the bat, though, Vaidhyanathan approaches the different pieces of Google's services with a clear anti-Google agenda. With such negativity regardless of the evidence presented, it's hard to take any of his observations seriously.

The book first outlines the different services Google offers and how it uses the data it collects both through its robots and through user interaction. These observations, though, are done as an outsider — as a user of Google — without an effort to get Google to respond to perceived abuses. I suppose I am spoiled by the Google articles written by Barbara Quint.

The most interesting section is the examination of search usage by languages spoken. Google's saturation as a search index is highest in multi-lingual countries and amongst multi-language speakers. Google's flexibility of search in multiple and simultaneous languages makes it an invaluable tool.

The take away messages of The Googlization of Everything is that Google isn't as all present as the title implies. It does have its adopters — namely in multi-lingual countries like India, but it's not the world dominant behemoth you might think. ( )

Interesting, provocative, and often quite disturbing. The author does a particularly fine job diuscussing issues of copyright, intellectual property, and privacy clearly and concisely. ( )

Google dominates the World Wide Web, bringing order out of chaos through its comprehensive indexing system, its brilliant PageRank algorithms, and its vast trove of archived data.

Our faith in Google as a business fulfilling a bold and audacious mission—“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible”—is earned by its incomparable performance in the still untamed frontier that is the Internet. All too easily this translates into faith in Google as a benign force whose informal motto, “Don’t be evil,” seems to assure us that in fact it won’t be, can’t be evil.

But this presumed beneficence is not beyond question. Indeed, in view of the influence that Google exerts over our lives and our world, it must be questioned, and not with alarmist rhetoric but with a level, fact-based analysis. This is the thrust of Vaidhyanathan’s study of this corporate Titan and its place in a twenty-first-century experience of the information ecosystem.

Read the entire review in Peer to Peer, the magazine of the International Legal Technology Association. ( )

Google knows us better than we know ourselves. True story: my husband was answering a question from my son about the Large Hadron Collider (the source of the hottest temperatures we know of in the universe!) and started typing into Google search on his iPhone. By the time he finished “large,” the first suggestion—the first--was “large hadron collider,” a search term he could not recall using before. That’s freaky. And cool.

Vaidhyanathan argues that we’ve been distracted by the coolness and the freakiness from asking fundamental questions about Google’s proper role in organizing the world’s information. He argues that Google filled a vacuum created by public failure, a failure of government orchestrated by private interests in order to get the power to do what they wanted, often worse than government would have done. The political dynamic is: starve government and appoint incompetents (e.g., Hurricane Katrina), then use that to prove that government should be cut further. Meanwhile, people who are wealthy and informed enough to do so encouraged to choose “responsible” corporate providers like The Body Shop even though that doesn’t help all the animals/people caught up in producing the average unit of shampoo etc. Consumption, he argues, is not a substitute for citizenship, and by punting to private actors like Google we’re making a huge mistake of governance even if Google is (currently) well-intentioned. Eric Schmidt of Google thus preaches the same deregulatory bunk that got us the banking crisis.

We trust Google because it seems magic and we think we’re good searchers, even though we have no idea what the Google secret sauce is and most of us aren’t really good at distinguishing paid from organic results. Vaidhyanathan acknowledges that Google’s done a lot of good things, but there are also costs. Google’s withdrawal from China increased the scope of the Chinese government’s control over information (though he also argues that Google’s presence wouldn’t have been transformative either; prefiguring The Net Delusion, which I’m in the middle of now).

It’s a disturbing and often persuasive argument. Vaidhyanathan’s few unforced errors (for some reason, he thinks it’s not easy to exclude particular search engines from indexing your site and that you will have to make an up/down decision on them all together; it’s true that many people may not know about robot exclusion headers, but every explanation of them I’ve ever seen made it clear that you can exclude or allow particular bots at will), don’t go to the core of his argument. Unsurprisingly, I’m in greatest disagreement with him over Google Books: he says that offering the settlement makes Google’s fair use argument harder because Google conceded that it couldn’t do what it wanted without copyright owners’ permission, but this is really wrong, both in general and in specific. In general, we want to encourage settlement negotiations and therefore don’t treat them as admissions of wrongdoing, and in specific, the now-rejected settlement went much farther than Google’s initial scanning, as to which the fair use argument remains the same. He also says that the corpus hasn’t proven its value to research, which is (a) pretty early to be making that call, and (b) inconsistent with what I’ve read even with the early results. That said, he makes a good case that a government-scanned library could be more secure and open than Google Books proposed to be.

More generally, Vaidhyanathan is weirdly willing to accept the idea that companies have no responsibility to anyone but their shareholders—not their employees, their customers, or their society—and I think that’s a failure of imagination and history just as much as the assumption that government can’t do big things is. The idea that shareholder profits are all that matter is historically specific and economically catastrophic; “don’t be evil” could and should really mean something for corporations as well as for governments. ( )