See, hear and seek no evil

There is danger in giving free rein to the world's most popular search engine, discovers Harold Thimbleby

The land of the dawn-lit mountains, Arunachal Pradesh, is a disputed territory lying between two super-powers with nuclear weapons, India and China. If you live in India, Google Maps shows you Arunachal Pradesh in India; if you live in China, Google Maps shows you Arunachal Pradesh definitely in China. The world's leading search engine isn't just a search engine but a camouflaged political persuader.

Google's motto is "don't be evil", which implies that its work could be evil. (My employer doesn't need to remind itself all the time not to be evil.) The problem is that we may like Google today, but it could go bad. Google knows too much about everyone for us to risk that.

Lots of information locked up inside Google could be used against you. Google's cameras have travelled the world collecting photographs and making the images available on Street View. Thieves can look at your house and see your car; now they know where to come if they want to steal to order. If you have privacy concerns this is not ideal, and it may get worse.

But if you are the voyeur, then you are on Google's side: for each person who worries and complains, there are millions more who like it. The marketplace says popular is good - for business, that is. By making information popular in order to run a business, Google is in danger of becoming the new opium of the people.

This gives it political leverage that is the envy of many regimes. How will people vote when a for-profit company gratuitously shifts national boundaries? Where is its mandate?

Google is a US company, and it articulates its rights from the point of view of the US Constitution, free speech and so on. The internet has become so international that our concepts of nation state are obsolete.

The hard-won Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives us rights as citizens, but our notional rights to freedom take second place to international financial intrigue that crosses borders. If the banking elite needs to make pots of money, then it's OK for millions to lose their livelihoods. Fortunately Google isn't a bank. Oh, but what about Google Checkout?

Neither we the people nor our legislators really understand what is going on. Fortunately, Siva Vaidhyanathan has written a stimulating and controversial book about Google. Its subtitle is And Why We Should Worry - and what I didn't worry about made me think and argue. What is going on is fascinating, and as he makes clear, what could be going on if these tools and resources get into the metaphorical wrong hands is alarming.

• The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on Wednesday morning.

• The Strand Book Store, Wednesday at 7 p.m.

• New York University, Thursday at 4 p.m., Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor.

• Panelist for Walls and Bridges conference, Thursday 7:30 p.m. at French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), 22 East 60th St (btwn Park & Madison Aves).

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and a notable Google gadfly, said the company overplayed its hand by essentially trying to rewrite the rules governing the copying and distribution of book content through a class-action settlement. "Google clearly flew too close to the sun on this one," he wrote in an e-mail. "...This is not what class-action suits and settlements are supposed to do."

Vaidhyanathan said that Google now faces the choice of either continuing to fight for its interpretation of copyright law in the courts or scaling back its plans for a digital bookstore. "If Google decides to take the modest way out, it can still ask Congress to make the needed changes to copyright law that would let Google and other companies and libraries compete to provide the best information to the most people," the media scholar says. "Congress should have been the place to start this in the first place."

Part 1:

Part 2:

From National Journal:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/google-s-tarnished-chrome-20110311

From The Hook (Charlottesville weekly, previewing Virginia Festival of the Book):

http://www.readthehook.com/89147/books-time-twitter-hooks-hot-lit-picks-17th-festival

From C-ville (the other Charlottesville weekly):

http://www.c-ville.com/index.php cat=141404064432695&ShowArticle_ID=12680703113536840

Reason.org (libertarian magazine's blog)

http://reason.org/blog/show/google-decontructed

Concurring Opinion (legal blog)

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/03/vaidhyanathans-googlization-a-must-read-on-where-knowing-is-going.html

MacLean's (Canada's leading news magazine)

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/15/the-googlization-of-everything-and-why-we-should-worry/

Hearsay Culture (podcast from Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society):

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6638

University of Virginia alumni magazine:

http://uvamagazine.org/only_online/article/can_social_networking_cause_revolution/

See the comments below the review for my response.

Perhaps the most valuable accomplishment of "The Googlization of Everything" is to point out that Google does not exist for our benefit. Google, in the end, is just another profit-driven business that must serve its paying customers and shareholders. It's "not evil," to use Google's famous unofficial motto. But it's not inherently good, either.

"The Googlization of Everything" is an important book. While a number of excellent histories about the emergence of Google have been published -- Ken Auletta's 2009 "Googled: The End of the World As We Know It" is one -- few writers have tried to take a comprehensive and critical look at the wider impact on society of Google's vast ambition "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Just as the automobile reshaped the world in ways no one could have predicted when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, argues that Google is gradually reshaping our perception of our world, in part because of our unquestioning dependence on Google.