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Novel way of examining Google?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 09:54:26 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Thomas Lord <lord () emf net> Date: September 3, 2006 7:55:53 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Novel way of examining Google? For IP? -t ======= People interested in the ethics of Google might find it useful to review some source materials: Google's statement of corporate philosophy: http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html An article published in 2003 in Wired, "Google vs. Evil", by Josh McHugh. It contains a review of some controversial issues and some interesting comments (and "no comment"s) from Google: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html It's a tricky business to arm-chair a company like Google. In spite of that, I'd like to offer what I think is a fairly novel take on why Google is in an ethically tough spot and how I think they (and we) should respond. Consider Google's mission statement: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And later we'll relate that to their motto: Don't be evil. Three concepts are central to Google's mission: 1. "the world's information" 2. "accessible" 3. "useful" While in a vague sense these terms suggest an appeal to universal values, in fact, they lack universal meaning and are inherently value-neutral. "The world's information" does not literally mean all information that is, in principle, available. Nor does it literally mean all information to which access is granted by, for example, a "robots.txt" file. Google must, necessarily, make choices of inclusion and exclusion. Google must, necessarily, choose strategies of discovery (e.g., web crawling) and acquisition (e.g., search logging, gmail, book scanning). These choices reflect Google's narrowly defined internal values (Sergey's opinion, ultimately, they say) mediated through external factors such as regional jurisprudence (e.g., a lawsuit by Scientologists that results in excluding certain web pages). The delineation of "the world's information" by Google therefore forms a privatized, anti-democractic, hegemonic project -- it simply cannot express universal values. "Accessible" means "accessible via a specific kind of index." What a user discovers through Google, and what materials he or she accesses, are shaped by that indexing. Thus, for example, a Google policy of punishing the clients of a search rank optimizing service makes a decision for users of what is, in fact, accessible and what is not. Are these choices, imposed by Google, consonant with the values of users? There is no a priori reason to expect them to be and, once again, Google is found to be engaged in a privatized, anti-democratic, hegemonic project. "Useful" forces us to ask "useful for what?" What is important? What is our metric of utility? Google's position in a popularity ranking of competing search engines gives, at best, a relative impression of utility. It does not begin to speak to how that utility compares to the utility achievable in general. And if we hypothesize that Google's project favors some uses overothers then its hegemonic nature becomes clear once more: Google has no constraints that lead it to make the world's
information "useful" in any general sense -- rather, Google's economic role will be to shape user ambitions by arbitrarily emphasizing some uses over others. And so we see such things as search rank optimization services and a culture of elite political bloggers who place a high social premium on gratuitous cross-linking. And we see "attract good AdSense ads" as a new business model for content providers. "Utility," here, is curiously emphatic about uses which reinforce Google's business model. Some readers will find that the preceding simply states the obvious: that Google's stated mission is at best value-neutral and, at worst, carries considerable moral risk. Should we then take comfort in Google's motto: "don't be evil"? Could it not be, for example, that in a market-driven meritocracy, Google will emerge as the "benevolent dictator" of search? It is one thing to observe that Google's project is to promote a privatized, anti-democratic hegemony but another thing entirely to leap to the conclusion that that is a *bad* thing. If Sergey and Google generally define their hegemony well, won't we all benefit? To get to those questions I think it helps if we look beyond the general principles of mission statements and mottoes and turn to consideration of Google's past, present, and future technological and business degrees of freedom. That is to say that if we *are* going examine the morality of Google, surely we must do so by examining Google's actual choices of consequence. I am not referring, primarily, to famous choices that are reviewed when considering Google. For example, I am not immediately concerned with whether they have struck the right balance with the government of China or which records they should or should not hand over to governments in various circumstances. It seems to me that those famous questions are mostly of the "which is the lesser of two evils" variety: morality fails, mostly, except in that it guides us to rely on popular ethical heuristics to make those decisions (yes to regional sovereignty, yes to judicial warrants, no to warrantless law enforcement fishing expeditions, etc.). Rather, we should ask how Google places itself in a position where such questions seem, with increasingly regularity, to arise and become important. What more basic choices to they make that create those dilemmas and what alternatives are there to those more basic choices? I locate Google's relentless drive to place itself in moral dilemmas for which there is no good answer in Google's impulses to monopolize certain things which are better off not being monopolized: it's "raw data" and it's platform for implementing indexing and search algorithms. One cornerstone of Google is its facilities for collecting information: from web crawling, to hosting email boxes, to caching, to scanning books. At the most basic level, Google must organize this information so as to keep track of the most rudimentary privacy concerns (my email is different from your home page) and legal concerns (that scanned book is different from my email). Internally, they must make this information accessible in the most primitive but important ways: spreading it out over storage clusters and ensuring it can be MapReduced and indexed on large compute clusters. That cornerstone is Google's raw data and platform for examining it. Their first business model choice -- their first moral choice -- is whether to hoard that raw data and platform or, instead, to open it up. Google's choice is to hoard it -- they decided to make money by retaining the exclusive rights to build applications on that platform. They decided to make money by retaining the exclusive rights to decide what is and is not included in the raw data. The raw data and platform which is the foundation of Google have,or at least it is very well arguable that they have, universal, objective
value. But once Google decides to hoard these resources and make itself the arbiter of what services are built upon them -- then Google's project becomes inherently hegemonic. With that hoarding decision, Google makes itself the decider of values. Far from a "don't be evil" company they become a "because we say so" or "because we can" company. In an alternate universe, Google would not be a search company, or an ad company, though it might have subsidiaries or close parnters in either business. Rather, Google would be in a business at the conjunction of commodity computing, service hosting, the sale of raw data, the lease of data collection facilities, and the making of a market for search results produced by competitive sources. The massive accumulation of "the world's data" is inevitable and this alternative Google would begin to democratize the decisions of inclusion and exclusion that define what "the world's data" consists of. It might be sensible for this alternative Google to form public interest non-profits to work out the most basic meta-data to manage privacy, copyright, etc. This alternative Google would make the question of "accessibility" an object of competition and open innovation. Google would provide a (not even the) platform on which different approaches might be explored by competing sources. This alternative Google would liberalize the process by which "utility" might be discovered and designed. If Google will not form itself into this alternative, perhaps it is something the rest of us ought to do for ourselves. -t Two postscripts: 1) Google APIs represent a baby step in the direction I advocate. The real test asks whether Google will put the development of such APIs above its current proprietary advantages -- will they sacrifice a near monopoly on search, ads, etc. to emphasize opening their platform as the right model? 2) In a longer essay, in addition to considering Google's attempts to hoard raw data and platform, I would want to examine Google's attempts to hoard talent and the resulting, unseemly, recruiting practices of billboards, contests, challenge problems, and the Google Summer of Code. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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