London - 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the internet are outdated.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. “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.
- The Independent
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