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Vivaldi founder and Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner has published an essay asking Google to return to its former motto, "Don't Be Evil". For full details check out The Register's <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/opera_founder_adwords_blasts_google/">earlier coverage</a>, but the short version is that von Tetzchner thinks speaking out against Google's monopoly position in both search and advertising temporarily cost his company its Adwords campaign. Whether or not this is true, here's the thing: it's easy to believe Google did because actual documented examples of Google "being evil" abound.
That said, I take issue with von Tetzchner's piece for two reasons. First it presupposes there was ever a time when Google wasn't evil, which I see no historical evidence of -- Google is "evil" now because Google has been "evil" from the outset. It's "evil" is in the core and there is no going back to some idyllic time when Google wasn't evil. Its evil may not have affected Tetzchner until recently, but that by no means precludes its prior existence.
As Tetzchner himself notes Google has long blocked browsers it didn't like (for whatever reason) from using its services <em>even when those browsers worked just fine</em>. It's currently engaged in a rather nasty campaign to switch anyone not using Chrome to Chrome by implying that anything other than Chrome is insecure. Browse google.com using Firefox to see what I'm talking about.
Or take another example currently in the headlines, actually there are quite a few in the headlines these days, but the one that I've been following is the class action lawsuit against Google for systematically underpaying its female employees. That's not something that started this year, nor is it something that affects just one part of the company. It appears (from statements made by the U.S. Department of Labor) that the problem is deep, systemic and existed from the start. It's impossible to know for sure of course because <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/29/google_tries_to_hide_diversity_data/">Google won't comply</a> with the US Department of Labor's request for data -- despite Google's own claim that the data will exonerate it. Ha!
Google went so far as to try to have the request thrown out because the US Department of Labor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/22/google-gender-discrimination-case-reporting-restricted">dared to tell the Guardian</a>, "the investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters." Trying to have a data request thrown out on one hand, while saying the data disproves the assertion on the other smacks of well, bullshit.
But never mind the fact that Google has always been evil, the second and main reason that I take issue with with Tetzchner's essay -- while agreeing with him about the problem -- is that there is no practical top-down way to fix the situation. Regulation, which is Tetzchner's suggestion, is probably needed, but it won't do much beyond raising some money for governments.
Will governments step in to regulate Google because it's abusing a monopoly position in both search and advertising? The magic eight ball on my desk says, "signs point to yes". The EU has <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/27/google_record_antitrust_fine_europe/">already fined the company a record 2.4 billion Euro</a> for favoring its comparison shopping service over others. Ironically, in my experience, Google's comparison shopping tools are some of the worst of the web, but never mind that.
My contention is that whether governments step in and regulate and fine Google over the long term doesn't particularly matter for the average user of the web. A governmental hand slap -- even if it's the largest in EU history -- isn't going to help because Google is already an integral part of the ecosystem of the web, and as anyone with an inkling of how ecology works can tell you, you cannot just yank and rearrange ecosystems without severe and often unanticipated consequences.
Take search for instance. That DuckDuckGo you use and love? I know, I do too. But a lot of its data comes from Google and Bing APIs. Take away Google and DuckDuckGo will be scrambling to expand its results. Still, don't stop using it, just recognize that that doesn't mean you're free of Google. I tend to worry less about the advertising monopoly, that will probably go belly up on its own -- along with its competitors -- once the ROI for customers finally reaches absolute zero, which it shows every sign of doing in the very near future.
And I know, you're immune to all this because you don't use Google services at all. I used to think that too until it occurred to me that that's an incredibly myopic view of the web. The web is an ecosystem and all of it is interconnected and interdependent, even if Google is a cancer on the web -- and I think that metaphor is apt -- it won't disappear or even change without a rippling cascade of consequences that are difficult to even imagine let alone predict.
Consider just the simple case of the companies I do chose to support and who products I do use. Most, if not all, of these other companies probably rely on Google in some form, whether for advertising revenue, analytics data, e-mail or half a dozen other small, but important parts of their business. Via those companies I am still dependent on Google. The entire ecosystem is at this point dependent on Google and that's something that no amount of regulation is going to fix.
Is there a way out? I think there is, but it won't happen overnight and it will take your help. Given the current lack of diversity in so many areas of the web, if the ecological metaphor holds, the web is incredibly unstable. That's an opportunity.
It's an opportunity for new species to find niches, to gain a toe hold and to still be standing when great ecological collapse of the current system happens. New companies, and more importantly new models of interaction, will stand a better chance of surviving. To be a bit more concrete, if you stop using Google services, if your company stops using them, if your company resists the buyout offers and forges its own path, if your open source project rejects centralized code hosting, uses open protocols for communication (Google is hardly the only dangerous monopoly out there) and so on, collectively these add up to far more than the sum of their parts. These seemingly small actions start tipping the ecosystem in a new direction, after all what really kills off a species is an ecological change and in the case of the web, users like us can create that change, we can make the web an ecosystem that's hostile to rigid, hierarchical, centralized forces like Google.
The good news is that this is already happening in the tiny niches of the system that the Googles and Facebooks pay little attention to, right now the rapid new growth is perhaps most noticeable in things like distributed social systems (for example, <a href="http://scuttlebot.io/">scuttlebot</a>, et al), new protocols like <a href="https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs">IPFS</a>, even once far-fetched ideas like DIY mesh networks are quietly happening, not in silicon valley, but outside, on the fringes of the ecosystem. Will these specific efforts survive? Possibly not, but something will, the ecosystem of the web is far too young to have reached equilibrium.
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