(Yes, I have a thing for bumping old threads that are worth reviving.)
Two stories of a somewhat contradictory outlook about Google are on SlashDot.org this morning:
The bad --
Google's Sinister(?) Plans --
This week, Robert X. Cringely makes some interesting observations as to what Google's up to next. He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP / cable / telephone customers into it's open arms (often with the blessing of the ISP / cable / telephone company). The evidence: leasing massive amounts of network capacity, and huge data centers in rural areas (close to power-generation facilities). The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets; think mainstream BitTorrent, streaming moves from NetFlix, tv episodes from iTunes, video games on demand, etc, etc. Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?
And the good --
Microsoft, Google Agree to NGO Code of Conduct --
Technology companies have come under fire for providing equipment or software that permits governments to censor information or monitor the online or offline activities of their citizens. For example, last year, Google's approach to the China market was criticized over its creation of a censored, local version of its search engine. Microsoft, Google, and two other technology companies will develop a code of conduct with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights, they announced Friday. The two companies along with Yahoo, and Vodafone Group said the new guidelines are the result of talks with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
My personal opinion is that corporations are not supposed to have an explicitly altruistic social conscience, they're supposed to do what their shareholders want them to do - most likely to maximize profits. A corporation is an organizational directive, a force of nature, like fire or nuclear energy, useful but deadly if misused. And yet, most of the time that works out very well, "the consumer is always right"... until the government gets involved.
By becoming a part of the government apparatus, in part or in full, corporations can inherit its limitless power over their consumers and employees, and become intrusive and dictatorial over them. Without all-encompassing government, people's political energies would go into economic activism, a mechanism that is less corruptible and even more empowering to the poor, since the poor people's dollars can
collectively buy more products than they can political influence. A large all-encompassing government can safely expect all large for-profit companies to play ball when it asks them to, but it can't be everywhere at once, and it can't stop people from preferring transparent and decentralized solutions that localize the power.
Avoidance of Google's dominance may seem like irrational paranoia to the uninitiated, but the more you think about it, the more you realize how much information Google can collect on you over repeated use, and that in the information age this constitutes a tremendous power. In the wrong hands, this power can give the government a level of surveillance that Hitler and Stalin could only dream of! Needless to say, the people who've trusted Google with their e-mail are fooked, but you don't have to be logged in to their user management system to be recognized when you perform a search, and many non-Google sites report your usage to Google through their advertisements. You can be wary of cookies and use dynamic IP's, but the government is pushing for regulation of ISP's to track who held a given IP at a given time. You can use an anonymizer to hide your IP, but the information it collects on you, combined with some very fancy fuzzy logic algorithms, can narrow your identity down with amazing effectiveness. (See
this thread for info on an interesting lecture by a cyber-PI Steven Rambam, who semi-jokingly called Google the closest thing to
Skynet that exists today.)
Can consumer activism keep Google's market dominance in check? It's not as simple as switching to a different brand of papertowels, because Google after all is unique - it is faster and more effective than the other search engines, the leading of which are also billion-dollar corporations. When someone tells you to Google something and you use Lycos.com instead, your Top 10 sites can be quite different. When something is hosted on Google Video, the interest in decentralizing by mirroring it on other sites or using P2P technologies tends to be rather low.
There does, however, exist a freedom-loving minority of users, say 10%, who value being in control of their information technology, and they give the passive 90% a choice of possible escape pods if they'll even choose to use them. It is those people that are behind the decentralized Free / Open Source Software movement, and you will already find some of them nagging, "whenever someone links to content hosted by Google, they should make a decentralized BitTorrent link as well". (I volunteer to be the first nagger on this forum, at least if the content is important enough to decentralize.) Instead of Google Talk and Google Groups, they'll advise you to use IRC / Jabber and Usenet. Instead of Yahoo TV listings, they'll advise you to use an application that downloads complete public domain data in XML to your local computer and searches it from there. Browser settings /
plugin can automatically reject ads and other content (especially JavaScript) from an ever-growing immense list of hosts that report back to Google and other tracking databases.
How does this attitude apply to generic Web search? Obviously it is very difficult to offer decentralized community-hosted version of Google's billion-dollar server infrastructure that spiders, indexes, searches, and caches massive quantities of information at amazing speed... but you can take advantage of the principle of factor sparsity, aka the
80-20 rule, though in this case the curve is more steep. It's probably the case that 99% of the time people search Google with the desire to find 1% of the Web-sites, or even less if intermediate junction points are used. If that small fraction can be contained within a few dozen gigabytes, then it's possible to have a Web-based (or otherwise) search server that most people will be able to host on their computer / network. Content can include MediaWiki sites, the
Open Directory Project, a digest of
Archive.org, a specially designed keywords database, and some other peer-maintained data sources. Updates to this database could be distributed through P2P technology, which would be useful if your connectivity to the Internet is lost or some Internet fragmentation ever takes place. In other words, about 99% of the time, you will be able to find what you need without a search engine, and the remaining 1% can be outsourced to some kind of a crawler bot that would try to anonymously fetch your search results from another place.
Coming up with alternative technologies is the easy part, but changing human behavior to let go of old habits is pretty hard. I'll be the first to admit to being a total hypocrite, using Google's fast and powerful auto-correct features for things as mundane as confirming a word definition...