The Googlization of Everything. Siva Vaidhyanathan
or not by the major Google services.36
None of these arrangements have stopped media from complaining. The media baron Rupert Murdoch has blustered about Google’s ability to monetize the Web in general and Murdoch’s News Corporation in particular. “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” Murdoch said in April 2009.37 In a speech in June 2009, the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, Les Hinton, proclaimed, “There is a charitable view of the history of Google. [It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.” Hinton went on to complain that the news business had made a mistake by offering its content for free over the Web, and thus “gave Google’s fangs a great place to bite. We will never know what might have happened had newspapers taken a different approach.”38 And Robert Thomson, the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal, went even farther by comparing Google to a tapeworm. “There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues—inevitably that profound contradiction will be a catalyst for action and the moment is nigh,” he told an Australian newspaper in April 2009. “There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet.”39
By the autumn of 2009, Murdoch had grown so alarmed at the decline in advertising revenues of his publications and the continued growth of Google’s revenue even during a crippling global recession that he threatened to block Google from scanning stories from his prize properties, the Sun, the Times of London, and the Wall Street Journal, and begin charging for access to all of News Corporation’s online content. By early 2010 he had done none of those things. But his anger and accusations of free riding set the tone for debates over the relationship between Google and news sources.40
Google has some simple rejoinders to the complaints of Murdoch and others in the journalism field. First and foremost, Google drives traffic to quality sites, although the amount of that traffic is a matter of some dispute. The Wall Street Journal is a quality site. Its readers, and Web readers in general, have approved of its content by linking to its articles despite the fact that they have always sat behind a paywall, largely inaccessible to those without a subscription to the paper. Second, the fact that Google makes ad revenue off search results for a subject does not necessarily undermine the value of the site itself on the advertising market. There is no zero-sum game going on here. Although it’s true that Google presents a potentially cheaper and more effective way for firms to purchase advertising space, that is true regardless of whether Google includes news results in its general searches (Google does not place ads on the Google News front page but does so on the first page of search results). In the meantime, Google officials have been working with news organizations to figure out ways to generate new interfaces that would privilege “mainstream” content over the noise generated by blogs and aggregation sites such as Huffington Post.41
It is these secondary sites, not Google News or Google Web Search, that pose the real problem for news organizations, and potentially for Google. Many blogs reuse material from mainstream commercial sites, often copying most or all of the text of a news article in a blog post. And many blogs generate revenue through a different Google advertising placement service, AdSense (which is distinct from AdWords, described above). This service allows bloggers and other Web publishers to earn money from click-through ads placed on their sites by Google. Google takes the context of the content on the site into account when placing ads. So a blogger who has ridden for free on content from the Wall Street Journal could profit from readers who chose to read the story on the blog instead of the Journal’s website and clicked an ad on the blog page.42 If there is any substantial free riding on news content going on in the Google universe, it is through these aggregators and Google AdSense. Still, that seems a trivial problem compared to those that the American and European journalism industries have been facing since the global recession started in 2007.43
If Murdoch has a valid point at all in his complaints about Google, it is a minor one. The process of scanning a news site to pick a story to read exposes readers to advertisements. A particular news story might interest the reader and solicit a click. A particular advertisement might do the same. There is a chance that no stories and no advertisements would warrant a click. But at least if a reader is viewing the official site of a news organization, that organization has a chance to profit from that reader’s attention and curiosity. If we assume that most readers ignore most news stories, then the rare and selective clicks from Google Web Search or Google News to a specific story on a news site are worth something to the reader, but possibly less than the scanning time that the reader spent on Google. Murdoch assumes that if Google did not offer links to news content, then readers hungry for his company’s work would spend more time on official sites, giving those sites a better chance to attract a click on an advertisement. Whether this assumption is correct is an empirical question that no one has fully explored. In the meantime, this battle remains one of bluster and legal technicalities. Murdoch believes the world works one way. Google believes the world works another way. Murdoch is losing money. Google is making money. There is not much chance that under current conditions we will be able to design a system that supplies citizens with the knowledge they seek, consumers with the content they desire, and firms with the revenue they need. The intransigence and arrogance of the parties involved do not help.
In the meantime, and contrary to its Murdoch-inspired public image as an insurgent force against mainstream news, Google has been working furiously on a system that would combine the efficiency of news search with the depth and professional quality of serious journalism. The company has a team of engineers working with major news organizations such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press to experiment with better ways to present serious journalism coherently and systematically, so that quality journalism does not get buried among the detritus of a million shoddy Web pages that share search terms. Google is essentially bending its news-search and indexing services to favor established, commercial sources in hopes of keeping the Web filled with quality content. What’s good for the Web, after all, is good for Google. So clearly, Google’s future role in the journalism industry will be far more complex—and perhaps more positive—than Murdoch’s shallow accusations of free riding would indicate.44
Viacom is the most notorious accuser of Google as a free rider. The video production company, which owns MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central, among many other major video services, objected to the fact that millions of fans of its programs had the habit of taking bits of those shows and putting them up on YouTube. Digital copyright law in the United States is clear on these matters: the service provider has no legal obligation to block copyrighted content from appearing on the Internet if it’s put there by a user, a third party. An Internet service provider is simply required to remove the content on receiving a notice of its existence. That way, providers don’t have to spend resources inefficiently filtering and blocking the actions of their users. Congress decided to insulate them from liability for the damage that their users do, much as phone companies cannot be held responsible for crimes planned or executed using the phone. So the burden of enforcement, according to a law that Viacom helped write back in 1998, rests on the copyright owner to defend its own interests. Viacom no longer likes this policy, as the burden of scrubbing YouTube of Viacom content quickly became expensive. So in 2007 Viacom filed suit against Google asking for $1 billion in damages. In early 2010 Google prevailed in a court ruling. So for now, Google and other Internet companies may be secure in the belief that they are not responsible for the copyright infringement their users might commit within the United States.45
The political significance of the case is clear, regardless of Google’s victory in court: even though YouTube itself loses money, Google overall makes money. Therefore, Google is a source of Viacom’s anxiety. Google does, in fact, try to police the content of YouTube, even though the law does not require it to do so. In fact, Google regulates YouTube more heavily than it regulates the Web in general, largely because of the more immediate threats to its reputation and the potential to offend millions of users with violent, hateful, or sexually frank videos.
YOUTUBE TROUBLE
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