The Googlization of Everything. Siva Vaidhyanathan
media industries has apparently been losing money—or at least making less money than before. Yet Google has succeeded spectacularly. This fact has generated a significant sense of envy among media industry leaders and has led to many outbursts and frictions. Interestingly, Google’s power over the media phenomenon of the first decade of the twenty-first century—YouTube—has challenged many of the core beliefs and values of Google itself. If the stakes are high for governing the Web in general—a mostly textual collection of pages that are hosted beyond Google’s control—they are enormous for running the most important source of visual entertainment and information in the world. YouTube is where politics and culture happen online. Video is uploaded at a rate of ten hours of content per minute and consumed at a rate of 200 million videos per day worldwide.46 YouTube videos produced by Barack Obama’s supporters generated more passion and interest than his official election campaign. YouTube is where global terrorists try to recruit followers and boast of their gruesome actions. It’s where serious academic lectures and goofy home videos intermingle. It’s where dogs ride skateboards. And while you and I create and donate the content, Google hosts it on its servers and acts as publisher of all this potentially litigious and controversial material.
Ever since Google purchased YouTube in 2006, when the video service was just over a year old and already a major sensation on the Web, YouTube has changed Google, and Google has changed YouTube. YouTube has become the central battlefield in the struggle to define the terms and norms of digital communication. YouTube is where Google most clearly governs, and not always gently. As YouTube grows in cultural and political importance every week, we hear more stories of important video clips coming down. It’s understandable when YouTube removes a clip after a music or film company sends a “notice and take-down” letter to YouTube complaining that a user-posted video contains its copyrighted material and thus possibly infringes on copyright, but when someone demands the removal of clips simply because of their political content, that’s a different problem. Here is an example in which copyright acts as an instrument of political censorship: U.S. representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) was running for reelection in a close race in 2006. Back in the mid-1990s, she chaired the New Mexico Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Her husband was being investigated about accusations that he had been sexually involved with a minor, and one of the first things she did as head of the department was remove his file. Soon, however, people across New Mexico found out about the cover-up. A political blogger in New Mexico posted on YouTube a news clip of Wilson and others discussing it. But New Mexico voters could not view the clip for long: the TV station invoked the “notice and takedown” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to require YouTube to remove the video clip. Any of my media studies students could explain why posting a news clip of a public official under scrutiny and up for reelection is considered fair use under U.S. copyright law: it constitutes an allowable use of copyrighted material for the purpose of news and commentary. But when it comes to the Web, the copyright act respects fair use only as an afterthought, long after the provider has removed the content. The clip came down, and Wilson was reelected.47
In another blatantly political example, the radical right-wing American columnist Michelle Malkin posted a video of a slideshow she had spliced together showing the consequences of violence by Muslim extremists. For some reason, the editors at YouTube judged it inappropriate. When Malkin asked YouTube officials to explain the their reasoning, especially in light of the fact that YouTube is full of clips that seem to glorify violence against American troops, she got no response. Malkin started a conservative YouTube group to protest the removal, and soon that group was flagged by users who dislike Malkin’s politics for having “inappropriate” content.
The Malkin story is troubling and revealing on a number of levels. One of the clever things about YouTube is that it uses its members to police its content. Thus a virtual community could, in theory, enforce something like community norms. However, YouTube has no mechanism to establish what those standards or norms should be, and reaching a consensus among billions of viewers would be impossible. So YouTube employees make these decisions internally to minimize controversy. Current YouTube policies make sure that sexually explicit content rarely comes up in a YouTube search, and that’s nice: YouTube is one of the few places on the Web where you can be confident that people won’t appear naked uninvited on your computer screen. But such broad policies effectively invite flame wars and flag wars, in which competing political activists flag the other sides’ videos as inappropriate. That is what seems to have happened in the Malkin controversy.
I watched Malkin’s video on a competing site. It’s pretty dumb and simplistic, consisting merely of images of victims of violent extremists, spliced with some of the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed. If all dumb and simplistic material were considered inappropriate for YouTube, far fewer videos would be posted there. In her writing, Malkin recklessly associates the deeds of a handful of marginal, murderous thugs with the sincere and humane faith of more than a billion followers. She spreads bigotry on her blog (to which Google’s Web Search links) and her books (which Google offers on Google Books). But that does not mean that this particular video is bigoted: it’s not. But because it’s by Malkin, it’s a target. Author-based rather than content-based editing is bad policy. The Web should always be the sort of place where you can find troubling and challenging material. It should accommodate stuff too controversial for the mainstream media. Because YouTube is a commercial enterprise, it has no obligation to present everything or to protect anything. But as it folds itself into the pervasive entity known as Google—which increasingly filters the Web for us—we need to find ways to pressure it to be more inclusive and less sensitive.48
MARKET FAILURES AND PUBLIC FAILURES
Google walked into its regulatory role out of opportunity and necessity. The Internet in the late twentieth century was too global, too messy, and too gestational to justify national or international regulation.49 Some illiberal states, such as the People’s Republic of China, chose to step in and aggressively perform those regulatory duties either through direct action or through proxies in the quasi-private sector.50
In the more liberal world of the United States and—to a lesser extent—Europe, a presumption that market forces can best solve problems and build structures so dominated political debate from about 1981 onward that even considering the possibility of state involvement in something so delicate and new as the Internet was implausible.51 After the recent collapse of the corrupt and disastrous command-and-control economies of Eastern Europe, it was difficult to propose a way of doing things that fell between the poles of triumphant market fundamentalism and incompetent, overbearing state control. Of course the market had survived and thrived. There seemed to be no other mechanism that could deliver positive results to a diverse, connected world.52 The notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good was impossible to imagine, let alone propose.
This vision was known as neoliberalism. Although Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher championed it, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair mastered it. It had its roots in two prominent ideologies: techno-fundamentalism, an optimistic belief in the power of technology to solve problems (which I describe fully in chapter 3), and market fundamentalism, the notion that most problems are better (at least more efficiently) solved by the actions of private parties rather than by state oversight or investment.53 And it was not just a British and American concept. It was deployed from Hong Kong to Singapore, Chile, and Estonia.54 Neoliberalism went beyond simple libertarianism. There was, and is, substantial state subsidy and support for firms that promulgated the neoliberal model and supported its political champions. But in the end the private sector calls the shots and apportions (or hoards) resources, as the instruments once used to rein in the excesses of firms have been systematically dismantled.55 Neoliberalism may have had its purest champions in the last two decades of the twentieth century. But it’s still with us, and harming us, today.56
Our dependence on Google is the result of an elaborate political fraud, but it is far from the most pernicious result of that fraud. Google has deftly capitalized on a thirty-year tradition of “public failure,” chiefly in the United States but in much of the rest of the world as well. Public failure is the mirror image of market