Big Brother Precis #2

Google as a Big Brother

Today, the search engine Google dominates almost every aspect of web search. This is due large in part to Google providing the most results per search, Google is able to do this because they possess the massive amounts of resources needed to dynamically crawl a large percentage of the Internet. Google is easily king in the world of Search engines, providing 75% of the external referrals for most websites. Google has sparse competition with Yahoo, Alta Vista and the newly founded Microsoft Live Search. If these search clients don't pick up the pace, they are going to be crushed by Google, which would mean a internet-wide monopoly on web-search.
Google was founded with good intentions, always repeating the motto “Don't be evil”. Originally the main page was completely free of advertisements or any sponsored results. Now almost have the page is delegated advertisement space. As it seems Google is trying to make as much money as possible, which is really what any business strives for. The trouble is that this business has a deep value to the accessible content on the web, and Google's competition is doing nothing to stop them. Yahoo is much more interested in acquiring large sums of money from pay for placement advertisement, than actually trying to compete with Google.
If Google continues down this path eventually they may corporatize search and in the process destroy the open Internet. Google has always spoken out for net neutrality, yet if people only have to pay to get to the top of a Google search page, how much of a difference is there. Google also has access to a huge wealth of personal and sensitive information, what if that information got into the wrong hands, and what if Google allowed it? Our privacy is threatened enough in this post 9/11 world, but with the advent of social media sites and other forms of expression, quite a bit of personal information is just waiting to be cached on one of Google's millions of web servers.
This brings us to another point, Google saves web pages as a cache, so in a sense a history of every page on Google is created. If a webmaster wanted to remove some less-than-legal material from his site it could still be found and traced back to him via Google. The only way for the Web Site owner to prevent this is for him to include a “noarchive” metatag in the coding of the web site's header. On top of that information is the fact that a key engineer at Google used to be employed by the NSA, Google is associating itself with people whose job it is to spy on us.
Google has a huge influence on the popularity of web pages, and as there are no written standards or rules that webmasters can review, Google can deny search access to any web site. Effectively killing traffic for that particular page, this can easily be used in the reverse fashion by giving one web site an unfair listing on any particular search. Google's process of page ranking is already slanted towards larger more powerful sites anyways. The process is no longer democratic but rather, those with the larger wallets are on top. Google Watch is dedicated to keeping Google under a watchful eye, and is trying to attract attention to what exactly is going on at Google.
I found this article to be fairly persuasive, and by the end of reading it I was pretty fired up. One thing I think it was lacking was providing sources, they make a very good argument, but who is to say if any of the “facts” they provided were actually true. Lack of proper citation aside, the article makes an excellent point, Google is becoming the big brother of the Internet. I can't really blame Google for this current power shift, I think it's due large in part to Google's so-called competition giving in so easily. It's a big greedy mess and it seems like noones going to win in the end. With the Internet being openly misused for data-mining operations a system such as Google's provides these spies with all the valuable information they can handle. More than anything Google has become a main artery of the Internet, and they are in fact a Corporation, theres no positive to this fact. Webmasters have no choice but to suck up to the kings in California who are essentially holding a gun to the head of the Web. In the future I think we might see a great struggle over these issues and with the kind of ammo Google is packing I can't see us, the underdogs, even putting up a fight.