Google's world wide web
wars
The giant of search
engines has seen off its commercial rivals. Now it's locked in a series of
increasingly fierce fights with assorted national governments.
By Peter Popham SATURDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 2012
We use its technology
dozens of times a day with scarcely a thought. But what is Google? Is it just a
search engine? Is it a publisher, or merely a platform, an intermediary? A
content kleptomaniac and parasite – in Rupert Murdoch's famous characterisation
– or simply a stunning, hydra-headed incarnation of the zeitgeist? Google is a
stunningly resourceful and ingenious servant – but is it on the way to becoming
our master?
It was 14 years ago this
month that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company, and they show no
signs of slowing down. At the headquarters in Mountain View, California this
week, State Governor Jerry Brown signed a law allowing the company's driverless
cars on to California's roads, following Nevada and Florida. "Today we're
looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality," Mr Brown gushed.
"This is the place where new ideas, risk and imagination come together to
really build the future."
But this was also the
month that saw the first US Ambassador killed in living memory, as a direct
result of the furious reaction to the crude video The Innocence of Muslims, a
trailer for which was posted on YouTube, which is wholly owned by Google.
Efforts by Islamic groups around the world to force the company to take the
video down saw the head of Google's Brazilian operations, Fabio Jose Siva
Coelho, arrested this week after the company lost a final appeal. He was
released soon afterwards but must appear in court again.
Brazil has been a
particularly turbulent market for Google, with more demands for content to be
removed from the website than in any other country. This week Jose Guilherme
Zagalio, the head of a commission set up by the Brazilian Bar Association to
investigate information technology, said: "Our laws trying to govern the internet
are outdated. It's not clear who is responsible for content, and that creates
uncertainty."
But this is an issue that
resonates around the globe. In Jerusalem, offended Muslims tried without
success to persuade an Israeli court to grant a temporary injunction against
Google, blocking the same video. "Freedom of expression is not freedom
without limits," one of the plaintiffs, M K Taleb a-Sanaa, told media
after the hearing. "People were actively hurt by this. It can't be that
because [the courts] are not Muslim [they] won't worry about the feelings of
Muslims." Inside court, Mr Sanaa compared the Innocence of Muslims trailer
to a hypothetical film making light of the Holocaust. He argued that the
Israeli courts would waste no time forcing Google to remove material deemed
offensive to Jews.
Google's lawyer dodged
that awkward line of attack. The point, according to Hagit Blaiberg, was that
Google was not a publisher of offensive videos or anything else: it was merely
an engine which could be used to search for anything. Google content was not
out there in the public domain like an advertisement on a billboard. "It's
a choice, they have to go to it," she said.
Google later commented
that the plaintiffs were pursuing the wrong party: they should be suing the
people who made the movie, because even if Google took the film down, people
would be able to watch it on other sites, thereby arbitrarily punishing Google
for the success of its search engine.
The argument will rumble
on, but Google's claim to be just another search engine is starting to seem
increasingly unconvincing. Fourteen years after its winningly spare and
restrained home page entered our lives, its dominance of search is close to
total. That's why Google was the target of the case launched in Berlin
yesterday by the former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley, claiming the search engine
is breaking German privacy laws by providing links to websites with videos of
him at a sado-masochistic sex party.
Google's freedom of
expression defence plays well in the US, where it chimes with the First
Amendment. But such battles are less easily won elsewhere, and there are also
copyright claims and anti-trust cases to worry about, in the EU and the US. So
the company has recently been working overtime to build strong teams of
lawyers, academics and professional lobbyists to fight its corner.
In Google's new office in
Berlin's famous Unter den Linden, brightly coloured robots cluster in
plexiglass cases, young, casual employees whizz on scooters down corridors decorated
with cityscape murals, and the conference rooms are named after hip Berlin
clubs. But behind the easygoing scenes, a deadly serious campaign to nail
German opinion at the highest level is under way.
With the European
Commission mulling a new data privacy regulation that would establish a
"right to be forgotten" online, and the German Cabinet approving a
rule giving publishers the right to charge search engines when they list
articles together with a short text, Google risks seeing the ground it has so
smartly appropriated bit by bit clawed back.
Rupert Murdoch (who
recently admitted defeat on the question of allowing Google access to articles
from The Times and The Sunday Times) has described the company as a
"content kleptomaniac". If he is right, its impunity may not last
much longer. But Google is not giving in without a fight.
Der Spiegel revealed some
of the company's plans this week. Annette Kroeber-Riehl, the leader of seven
lobbyists in the new office, says the company aims to be "transparent and
open". But the magazine claims to have detected opacity and manipulation
in the way Google is trying to make friends and influence people.
In autumn 2010, a
Google-funded think-tank called Collaboratory invited 41 experts to discuss the
crucial issue of copyright. But according to one of the invited experts, Stefan
Herwig, who runs a music label, the "guidelines" in the final
document that came out of the meeting did not represent the expert discussions
but were drawn up separately by a team of nine. "We were merely window
dressing," he commented.
Crucially, the guidelines
described search engines like Google as "intermediaries" – a term
that had not come up in their discussions. The interests of these
"intermediaries", the guidelines said, should be "considered
equally" with those of creators and users, because they "promote or
enable the availability of creative property through secondary offerings."
Five of the experts objected to the use of "intermediaries", and
expressed surprise that it was in the document. "To some extent,"
said Herwig, "Google produced the desired results itself."
The man who assembled the
guidelines' drafting group, Till Kreutzer, is himself closely connected with
Google, having created the Initiative Against Ancillary Copyright, which Google
co-founded.
Other examples of the
company's efforts to influence public debate include the Humboldt Institute for
Internet and Society, founded last year, to which Google contributed €4.5m
(£2.9m). "What does it mean when a company that has an excessively large
amount of influence on everyday activities on the internet is also involved in
shaping the public discourse?" Der Spiegel asks. "And what happens
when a company which has a quasi-monopoly as a search engine also threatens to
gain a quasi-monopoly when it comes to explaining the internet?"
For 14 years, Google has been
deft at dodging the sort of image issues which have clung to Microsoft and
other tech giants. It "has been able to make itself look like the good
guy" writes US tech writer Don Reisinger. But for how much longer?
Google provides us with a
wonderfully clear window on the world – but at the same time goes to
considerable lengths to control the way it is seen from the outside. As the
legal challenges mount up, it is building itself a powerful, largely invisible
fortress.
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