Googlephobia

“Google Bigotry,” Corporate-Bashing & Human Envy

by on September 6, 2009 · 10 comments

Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about “Google Bigotry,” or his belief that “media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy.”  Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies:

newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses. ..  It’s not just that they dislike the competition – and they do, for it is a new experience for too many of them. If they were smart, they’d use Google to get more audience and make more money but they don’t know how to (or rather, they’d prefer not to change). No, the problem is that Google represents change and a new world they’ve refused to understand.

Well, yes and no.  I don’t believe that every story penned about Google by a mainstream media reporter is rooted in envy, and certainly not the one that Jarvis alludes to as prompting him to pen this piece.  Jarvis apparently received an inquiry from a French journalist at Le Monde asking for comment about “an article about Google facing a rising tide of discontent concerning privacy and monopoly.”  That doesn’t necessarily sound like an unreasonable journalistic inquiry to me. So, I’m not sure it’s fair to accuse every journalist who calls with a hard-nosed question about privacy and antitrust as being guilty of “Google bigotry.”

That being said, some journalists are likely feeling a bit miffed about Google’s recent success, thinking it comes at their expense, and, therefore, their envy might be prompting some of them to pen attack stories on the company.  I think Jarvis in on stronger ground, however, in asserting that most privacy and antitrust complaints about Google are unfounded, and also based on envy. Indeed, Berin Szoka and I have have been cataloging the complaints that we believe are driven by an irrational form of corporate envy we call “Googlephobia.”  And in prior years we saw a similar form of Microsoft-bashing at work that we still have with us today. That’s why I think Jarvis is on to something when he notes that Google-bashing represents a broader sociological phenomenon: Continue reading →

SHARE: 10 comments

Antitrust Law Can’t Keep Up with High-Tech

by on July 29, 2009 · 25 comments

A key point that Berin and I try to get across in our Forbes editorial today about the Yahoo!-Microsoft deal is that the high-tech marketplace evolves too rapidly for creaky Analog Era antitrust laws to keep up. We wanted to say more on that point in our piece, but we had a tight deadline (and a strict word limit!)  Well, turns out that we really don’t need to do so now because Farhad Manjoo of Slate has done a better job than we ever could have making that point in this essay today entitled, “The Case Against the Case Against Google“:

But if the government was right on the facts [in the Microsoft case], it was wrong on the big picture. The theory behind the prosecution was that Microsoft’s mobster tactics would raise the price of software and slow down innovation. But that didn’t happen. In 2002, Microsoft settled the antitrust case with the Bush administration; it faced no substantial penalties for its years of bad behavior. At that point, it still looked unbeatable—it had the same OS monopoly, office-software monopoly, and Web-browser monopoly. And you know what happened? It got beat anyway. Many of Microsoft’s assets turned out not to matter, because upstarts like Google and old foes like Apple found ways to innovate around them.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 25 comments

Our Forbes.com Op-Ed on Yahoo!-Microsoft Search Partnership

by on July 29, 2009 · 17 comments

We’ve just published an op-ed over at Forbes.com about today’s big Yahoo!-Microsoft deal.
________________

Searching For Success: Web 1.0 Titans Struggle to Reinvent Themselves
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer

Yahoo! and Microsoft on Wednesday announced a partnership in which Microsoft’s Bing search engine technology will power search for both companies, but Yahoo! will manage advertising sales and content creation.

This should be cause for celebration as a good thing for consumers. By providing a strong competitor with a combined 28% market share, the deal should also be a source of relief at Google, which has come under increasing attack for its supposed market dominance. But if recent concerns about online search, advertising, competition and privacy are any guide, many will fail to appreciate why the deal is pro-consumer, or what it says about the rapid evolution of the Internet.

It’s easy to forget that just a decade ago most of us still hadn’t done our first Google search, Microsoft was still focused on the desktop and Yahoo! was still serving up the online equivalent of the Yellow Pages. AltaVista, AOL, CompuServe and Geocities still ruled the roost.

Today, as we enjoy the fruits of a true cyber-renaissance, cyberspace circa 1999 increasingly looks like the Digital Dark Ages: The old online walled gardens have crumbled, desktop applications have migrated to the cloud and search has redefined our experience of the Web.

Oh, and did we mention just about all of it is “free“? Sounds like exactly the sort of vigorous innovation, expanding consumer choice, falling prices and cut-throat competition that policymakers should want, right?

Alas, regulators seem stuck in the past. European officials in particular seem hell-bent on continuing the antitrust crusade of the ’90s against Microsoft, myopically focused on fading paradigms (desktop operating systems and Web browsers). But instead of narrowly defining high-tech markets based on yesterday’s technologies or market structures, policymakers should embrace the one constant of the Internet economy: dynamic, disruptive and irrepressible change.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 17 comments

Wired on Google’s Coming Antitrust Nightmare

by on July 21, 2009 · 21 comments

Great piece in Wired by Fred Vogelstein asking “Why Is Obama’s Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?” It paints a pretty good picture of the coming antitrust ordeal that Google is likely to be subjected to by the Obama Administration. And, as usual, I couldn’t agree more with the skepticism that Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University Law School articulates when he notes: “The problem for antitrust in high tech is that the environment changes so rapidly. Someone who looks strong today won’t necessarily be strong tomorrow.”  More importantly, as Vogelstein’s article notes, we’ve been down this path before with less than stellar results when you look at the IBM investigation in the 70s and the Microsoft case from the 90s (a fiasco that is still going on today):

After the government initiated its case against IBM, the company spent two decades scrupulously avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. By the time the suit was dropped in the early 1980s, company lawyers were weighing in on practically every meeting and scrutinizing every innovation, guarding against anything that could be seen as anticompetitive behavior. A decade later, innovation at Big Blue had all but ceased, and it had no choice but to shrink its mainframe business. (It has since reinvented itself as a services company.)

Microsoft took the opposite approach. Gates and company were defiant, to the point of stonewalling regulators and refusing to take the charges seriously. “Once we accept even self-imposed regulation, the culture of the company will change in bad ways,” one former Microsoft executive told Wired at the time. “It would crush our competitive spirit.” Gates put it even more directly: “The minute we start worrying too much about antitrust, we become IBM.” Microsoft’s hostility to the very idea of regulation resulted in several avoidable missteps—including remarkably antagonistic deposition testimony from Gates—that ultimately helped the DOJ rally support for its ongoing antitrust suit against the company. Although Microsoft ultimately settled, the public beating appears to have taken a toll on the company, which has been unable to maintain its reputation for innovation and industry leadership.

Read the whole article for all the gory details.  This is going to be the biggest antitrust case of all-time once it is finally launched and I feel confident predicting that it will make many lawyers and consultants very, very rich while doing absolutely nothing to help consumer welfare.  But perhaps those DOJ lawyers can at least get Google to lower the prices for all those services they offer. Oh, wait, they’re all free.  But don’t worry, I’m sure Beltway bureaucrats will do a great job of running something as complex as search algorithms and online advertising markets.  Right.

SHARE: 21 comments

Not Just Another Linux Distro

by on July 9, 2009 · 4 comments

Yesterday this list of 11 undocumented features of Google Chrome OS was posted on Woot!. It’s too funny not to share:

  1. Your family photos are accompanied by text ads for skin care and diet plans.
  2. Removes all Falun Gong references from your files.
  3. Every month, the hard drive is automatically defragged and investigated for anti-trust violations.
  4. Invests in, develops, acquires, and abandons your best ideas.
  5. Integrated tax preparation software includes “I’m Feeling Lucky” deductible button.
  6. Changes your icons daily, forcing you to look up which obscure scientific figure is having a birthday.
  7. Spends 20% of its time not doing what you tell it to do.
  8. Prevents all evil activity unless it is deemed to be for the good of the shareholders.
  9. Masseuse comes by every Monday afternoon.
  10. Constant crashes won’t bother anybody as long as it’s labeled “Beta”.
  11. “Beta” status won’t expire until 2038.

But seriously, we love Google (so please don’t lower our PageRank for my having posted that).

SHARE: 4 comments

First Amendment Protection of Search Algorithms as Editorial Discretion

by on June 4, 2009 · 34 comments

Cory Doctorow has called for a Wikipedia-style effort to build an open source, non-profit search engine. From his column in The Guardian:

What’s more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots at the major TV networks. Good search engine placement is make-or-break advertising. It’s ideological mindshare. It’s relevance…

It’s a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It’s too much power for a handful of companies to wield.

The question of what we can and can’t see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There’s no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.

Put that way, it’s obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public.

He goes on to claim that “Google’s algorithms are editorial decisions.”   For Doctorow, this is an outrage: “so much editorial power is better vested in big, transparent, public entities than a few giant private concerns.”

I wish Doctorow well in his effort to crowdsource a Google-killer, but I’m more than a little skeptical that anyone would actually want to use his search engine of The People.  My guess is that, like most things produced in the name of “The People” (Soviet toilet paper comes to mind), it will probably won’t be much fun to use, and will likely chafe noticeably. (For the record, I love and regularly use Wikipedia; I just don’t think that model is unlikely to produce a particularly useful search engine.  As Doctorow himself has noted of Google, “they make incredibly awesome search tools.”)

But I’m glad to see that Doctorow has conceded an important point of constitutional law: The First Amendment protects the editorial discretion of search engines, like all private companies, to decide what to content to communicate.  For a newspaper, that means deciding which articles or editorials to run.  For a library or bookstore, it means which books to carry.  For search engines, it means how to write their search algorithims. Continue reading →

SHARE: 34 comments

The Pepsi Challenge 2.0, Reputational Incentives & Genericide as a Check on Google’s Brand Power

by on April 8, 2009 · 12 comments

It seems Microsoft is facing much the same problem Pepsi faced in the 70s, when it created the Pepsi challenge (a blind taste test between Coke and Pepsi):

A stark sign of the challenge Yusuf Mehdi faces as a point man for Microsoft in the company’s battle with Google comes from the company’s own research into the habits of consumers online.

During regular “blind taste tests,” in which Microsoft asks randomly-selected consumers to score the quality of results from various Internet search engines, the quality of Microsoft’s search results have so improved that people can’t tell the difference between Microsoft and Google search results, says Mr. Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group. But when Microsoft slaps the Google brand name on the results from Microsoft’s own search engine during another portion of its tests, users invariably score them highest.

“Just by putting the name up, people think it’s more relevant,” he says.

… Microsoft still faces the problem of the strong association in consumers’ minds between Google and Internet search. In theory, it’s far easier for a consumer to switch Internet search engines than it is for them to switch other forms of software. But Mr. Mehdi–a veteran of the Web browser wars of the late 90s in which Microsoft managed to overtake the pioneer in the category, Netscape Communications–says in reality it’s very hard to convince consumers to change their search behavior.

So, Microsoft faces an uphill battle.  Happily for the Internet marketplace, it seems they’re embracing the challenge cheerily by attempting to kill two birds with one stone:  launching an innovative new semantic search engine capable of answering users’ questions more directly while also creating a fresh new brand for what Microsoft acknowledges is a “confusing jumble of brand names for its search efforts.”  I, for one am looking forward to Microsoft’s forthcoming search engine, dubbed “Kumo.”

But I think there’s a bigger lesson here:  Google’s most valuable asset is its brand. Continue reading →

SHARE: 12 comments

New Heights in Googlephobia: “A Delinquent, Sociopathic Parasite”?

by on April 5, 2009 · 15 comments

Leave it to the English—famous for their superior fluency in the language that bears their name—to reach unparalleled heights of hysteria in the war of words being waged against Google. The Guardian’s Henry Porter claims that “Google is just an amoral menace: The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything.”

Porter declares that Google is the world’s “most prominent WWM,” his acronym for the “worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.”

Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn.

Let’s review Google’s 2008 Annual Report. Of Google’s 2008 Revenue ($21.78 billion), two-thirds ($14.41 billion) came from advertising on Google sites and just under one-third ($6.71 billion) came from advertising on Google Content Network (GCN) web sites (made up of publishers that sell their ad space to advertisers through Google AdSense). On this revenue, Google made a net profit of $4.2 billion after taxes. To put these numbers in context, Microsoft (Google’s closest peer) earned three times ($60.42 billion) Google’s revenue and produced 4.21 times ($17.68 billion) Google’s profit. Google’s revenue was just 0.1528% of 2008 U.S. GDP and its net income, 0.0294%.

So what does Google actually create with all that revenue? The answer is free content and services.

First, Google cross-subsidizes dozens of its own free services—starting with its search engine but also including email, a free browser, YouTube, a word processing suite, IM, maps, news, and much more.

Second, as the world’s leading ad network, Google supports a significant percentage of the free content and services offered by others. In 2008, Google paid out $5.28 billion (24.22% of revenue) to GCN publishers—significantly more than the $4.2 billion Google earned in net income (19.3% of revenue). Continue reading →

SHARE: 15 comments

Should the FTC shut down Gmail and Google Docs because of an already-fixed bug?

by on March 18, 2009 · 15 comments

Earlier this month, Google made news when it announced that its cloud computing productivity suite Google Docs had suffered a technical glitch that temporarily compromised a subset of users’ shared documents. After becoming aware of this glitch, Google notified its users via email and posted an entry to the Official Google Docs Blog that offered a more detailed explanation of what happened.

It turns out that a bug in Google’s permissions code was causing certain documents that had been shared by their author with other users but subsequently unshared to remain visible to those users. By the time Google notified its users, the bug had already been resolved, and Google estimates that only around 0.05% of all documents were vulnerable due to the glitch. As to how many documents were actually viewed by unauthorized parties, it’s unclear at this point.

All in all, the Google Docs glitch, while troubling, seems relatively minor as far as bugs go. Nevertheless, the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Mark Rotenberg jumped on the chance to attack Google, as he often does when Google makes news for anything privacy-related. Yesterday, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that called on the FTC to investigate Google’s privacy safeguards, order Google to shut down all cloud computing services—including Gmail, which has 26 million users—pending a thorough privacy evaluation, and force Google to pay $5 million to a fund that would be setup for “privacy research.”

Watchdog activist groups like EPIC can play a useful role in the public discourse on privacy, helping to publicize unsavory behavior by companies and educating consumers about keeping data secure. Unfortunately, however, these groups’ admirable focus on protecting privacy sometimes edges on the myopic, causing them to overreact to data breaches and sometimes even call for regulatory interventions that are decidedly anti-consumer. EPIC’s latest complaint about Google is a classic example of this.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 15 comments

Googlephobia: Part 6 – The Left Begins to Turn on Google

by on November 29, 2008 · 36 comments

Over the past year or so, many market-oriented critics of Google, like Scott Cleland and Richard Bennett, have criticized the company for aligning itself with Left-leaning causes and intellectuals. Lately, however, what I find interesting is how many leading leftist intellectuals and organizations have begun turning on the company and becoming far more critical of the America’s greatest capitalist success story of the past decade. The reason this concerns me is that I see a unholy Right-Left alliance slowly forming that could lead to more calls for regulation not just of Google, but the entire search marketplace.  In other words,  “Googlephobia” could bubble over into something truly ugly.

Consider the comments of Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig in Jeff Rosen’s huge New York Times Magazine article this weekend, “Google’s Gatekeepers.” Along with Yochai Benkler, Lessig and Wu form the Holy Trinity of the Digital Left; they set the intellectual agenda for the Left on information technology policy issues. Rosen quotes both Wu and Lessig in his piece going negative on Google. Wu tells Rosen that “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.” Moreover:

Continue reading →

SHARE: 36 comments

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →