Posts Tagged ‘google’

This may be a week of Costa Rican sun and 24 hours of travel speaking, but amidst the search for viable business models for journalism, should we actually want monopoly?

As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, monopoly rents were a large reason newspapers were able to sustain expensive, important journalistic endeavors like investigative or foreign reporting. As the geographic monopoly source of information, newspapers could charge extraordinary rates for advertisements. In turn, these profits subsidized the type of reporting that Paul Starr rightly notes is essential to democracy. More efficient competition, like targeted online advertising, has undermined this status quo.

So, does (limited?) monopoly information control, have a desirable benefit? Could Google’s continued rise and importance to online advertisers signal a new opportunity to capture monopoly prices and subsidize “hard journalism”?

It goes without saying that this vast, unprecedented level of global monopoly would have terrible effects, so, more prudently, perhaps the title of this post should be “should we wish for false-monopoly?”

It’s late; help me figure this out.

Today Georgetown hosted the Eighth Scholarly Communications Symposium to discuss the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement. Siva Vaidhyanathan and James Grimmelmann both had great points to make. The session was recorded and will hopefully be posted soon, but in the meantime here are my notes:

James Grimmelmann

• Google Book Search (GBS) started out as an indexing project
• The scale makes individual negotiation prohibitively expensive
• Hanging over all this is the orphan works prohect
• Google is becoming potentially the world’s largest book seller
• This is an elegant solution to breaking the orphan works logjam because it is opt-out
• “Google may become the only game in town for serious online access to many of these works.”
• Book Rights Registry
• Settlement makes almost no provision for the privacy of readers
• Privacy is at the hear of an intellectual history that libraries are at the center of
• No consumer-rights work
• First sale, etc. are shot
• All copyright owners are bound by this because of its class-action nature
• If this lawsuit was to try the copyright status of GBS, it didn’t need to be class-action
• Class-action was necessary to solve orphan works, but paradoxically throws all those unknown owners behind the worrisome provisions
• “This is not the way these types of things should be done in a democracy. We have public institutions to solve gigantic issues, not the courtroom. The courtroom’s adversarial approach is the wrong way to determine the future of information.”
• But the settlement is still a net positive

Siva Vaidytanathan

• Most books will never pop out in GBS. Even rediscovered works will only make a couple cents a year.
• GBS will have minimal impact on out-of-print works – otherwise they would be in print
• Lessig, Doctorow, etc greeted GBS with much excitement. It was a big company fighting for fair use.
  • Copying was incidental and necessary – what mattered was the user experience
  • Siva disagreed with Doctorow over whether or not Google indexing would be a boon to authors
• Sony Betamax had created the general right to copy for personal uses and gave breathing room for technology companies
• Fair use isn’t supposed to be decided en masse. It need to be determined on a case-by-case basis
• Libraries should have done this, especially because they have special rights under copyright
• “Nothing about Google is just about what’s on the screen.” GBS was about gathering the lexicon of humanity – they want semantic analysis of text to improve search function. This was not simply about creating an index.
• Google was imposing the copyright norms of the web onto the rest of the world – the default is expecting copying by search engines
• If Google had lost, they would have been betting their whole business
• Deal with libraries was quid pro quo – libraries got a digital copy of everything they gave Google. That is payment for the use of the material. That was the APA’s silver bullet.
• Google needs to still care about this project in ten years.
• “Why are we betting everything on what may be a fly-by company in the scale of history.” We are sacrificing better options for expediency.
• The nondisclosure agreements are anathema to scholars and academics, but that’s how Google works
• Libraries are one of the few noncommercial places in America. Google’s vending machine is troubling because it changes that.
• Deeply troubled by lack of user confidentiality
• We need to know how book search algorithm works
  • It doesn’t reflect what experts consider the top books in a given field
• The gatekeeping function is about standard and term setting. That’s where winners and losers are picked. This is far subtler than it used to be.
• Not convinced we’ve missed the opportunity
  • Outlining the Human Knowledge Project (like Human Genome Project where scientists rejected Venter’s Solera – a private project. The two databases complement each other)
  • Pool resources globally – to preserve and extend the record of human knowledge

Q&A

• Budget setters may stop physical collections
  • Scans are not archive quality and have errors that may be undiscovered
• Because the libraries are not parties to the lawsuit, they have no real standing
• Google’s presence takes the air out of any other digitization plans
• Access medium, not a preservation medium.
• Rare materials should be digitized more because that’s what people cannot get access to
• Open Content Alliance is a “heartbreaking” story

Georgetown’s Scholarly Communication Committee (of which I am a new member) has put together a great event to discuss the Google Book Settlement. Entitled “Google and the Future of Higher Education,” it will feature UVa Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYU Professor James Grimmelmann and GU Press Director Richard Brown. Vaidhyanathan is a close watcher of Google and the author of an upcoming book called “The Googlization of Everything” and Grimmelmann has written extensively on Google and the Book Search settlement.

The event will be held on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 10 a.m – 11:30 a.m. at Lauinger Library [map], Murray Room, 5th Floor. Please remember to RSVP to wco4 (at) georgetown.edu

The official description follows:

Eighth Scholarly Communication Symposium
Google and the Future of Higher Education

On October 28, 2008, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced the settlement of the litigation concerning the Google Books Project.  Under the project, Google has been scanning millions of books provided by major research libraries and other sources.  For those books not in the public domain, the publishers and authors claimed that Google’s scanning infringed their copyrights.

The settlement presents significant challenges and opportunities for higher education.  It creates a mechanism for Google to pay rights holders for the right to display more of the books’ texts than it currently does under the current program.  Google will then distribute payments to copyright owners.  Google, in turn, will generate revenue through advertising and by selling to users the ability to see full text.

At stake is the clash between seemingly competing missions.  The academy, at its core, creates and disseminates knowledge.  Google’s goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”  Is the academy surrendering its mission to a private corporation?  Is this a new intellectual enclosure movement?  Our speakers are uniquely situated to shed light on this case and its context for the Georgetown community.

Hope to see you there.

This fall, a wide ranging group of academics, activists and businesses announced the Global Network Initiative – a set of principles and governance mechanisms for ICT corporations operating in authoritarian states. As readers of this blog know, this is just the type of thing I’m interested in, and I jumped on the opportunity to write a term paper about the topic.

So, for my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course I wrote a paper about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. A lot has been written on the subject, of course, but I think the paper adds to the field by arguing that these companies could do much more beyond the Global Network Initiative (which is still laudatory). It is embedded below and a PDF is available here. Let me know what you think.

Freedom Fighters: The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms

I’m cleaning out my RSS feeds and finding some great stuff I had left to look at later. One of those was a post by Erik Hersman from way back in August about anonymity and trust online. He was puzzled by some comments made by Marissa Mayer, a senior Google executive, concerning how anonymity was an enemy of trust.

Speaking at a conference, Mayer said,

“…I think it’s really important as we look at tools to think about how we can support fact checking, how can we guard against misinformation, how is there going to be established an element of authority and trustworthiness? …I grew up with the newspaper and the encyclopedia, which you could trust. And now you have blogs, which are held often as news and often aren’t factual. Or you have Wikipedia, which usually gets most things right, but there are a lot times there is vandalism or corrections that need to be made.”

“When you look at the elements of anonymity and the lack of accountability that happens on the web, it really does start to create doubt in the fibers of who can you trust… The physical world has been around a lot longer, and in the physical world you really can’t do anything anonymously. So when you look at systems online that break that paradigm where you can be completely anonymous, or be whoever you want to be, without any sense of history or of what you did last week, that’s not really reality and that breaks down the elements of trust and authority.”

I think there are a number of things wrong with these statements, including the points raised by Erick, that anonymity is an important defense against authoritarian governments. “Having these open, trusting, everyone-knows-everyone systems is all well and good when you live in the US. It’s not so good in other parts of the world.” I also think there are other problems.

The Premises are Wrong

Mayer has two premises which I think are flawed. The first is that “newspapers and the encyclopedia” are trustworthy. In my 19 years of experience though, I’ve seen that proven false time and time again. The New York Times was shown to be less than trustworthy thanks to Jayson Blair who fabricated and plagiarized stories. Broadcast news was shown to be less than trustworthy thanks to Rathergate. Even the Executive Branch of the government was proven to act and speak on falsities when Colin Powell spoke at the UN. Further, information has never been garnered solely from “trustworthy” sources; it comes from unverified and non-factchecked cocktail party conversations and grocery store gossip, too.

Secondly, the idea that you cannot be anonymous in the physical world is nonsense. It didn’t take the Internet to create anonymity. Sure, Bernstein and Woodward knew who Deepthroat was, but that is functionally no different than your ISP knowing who you are. And as for deciding “whoever you want to be, without any sense of history or what you did last week” only coming about with TCP/IP, that is innaccurate, too. Many a teenager reinvented himself at college and many an individual left town to start a new life. In fact, without pervasive communication technologies like the Internet, I think it is fair to say your history didn’t follow you as easily.

A False Dichotomy Between Anonymity and Trustworthiness

As for the substantive point, that anonymous discourse is inherently less trustworthy, I think it is lucky that this view isn’t true. Psuedonymity, which I view as persistent anonymity, allowed Hamilton, Madison and Jay to write the Federalist Papers under the psyedonym of “Publius.” American Revolutionary War pamphlateers were often anonymous, and countless whistleblowers, including those using WikiLeaks, have been able to inform the public via anonymous speech. As I said in a recent post, anonymity is essential for a free society.

The Supreme Court has recognized as much, saying

“Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.”

Anonymity can allow for even more trustworthiness, as in the case of election voting where booths and privacy increase our confidence that the voter chose without undue outside pressure.

Sure, anonymity has and continues to allow offensive, negative speech to flourish. But Mayer’s concern that anonymous online discourse drives its recipients away from engagement is less of a worry than chilling important speech by forced identity. Information, whether digital or physical and whether from anonymous or identified individuals, should always be verified and vetted. Unknown IP addresses have been wrong, but so has Dan Rather. I hope Google recognizes this and continues to allow online identities to run the spectrum of verifiability.

[CC-Licensed Photo Credit]

One of the great things about Christmas Break (besides my mom’s cooking and sleeping in) is the ability to catch-up on things I’ve bookmarked, starred or left open in tabs for weeks. Many of these provide for great blog posts.

Andrew McLaughlin is one of those guys who I hope I get to meet at some point because his work seems to align so nicely with my interests. Not only is he in charge of Google’s international public policy work (the topic of a recent paper of mine), he has years of experience with technology, Africa and development.

The latter was the subject of a ten minute talk he gave at BarCamp Africa this past fall. In it, he posits three notes about the role of technology in development. His focus is Africa, but the principles are applicable around the developing world.

His three notes are:

1. Pay attention to the economic ecosystem: OLPC is disrupting domestic business efforts by forcing local entrepreneurs to compete with free. Experience shows that charity isn’t always as sustainable as for-profit markets. A better approach would be to open-source the designs and let manufacturers and distributors compete, bringing profits to the developing world.
2. Ignore statistics: A look at the spending capability of Africans suggests that Safaricom and other carriers in Africa should not be successful. But they are. McLaughlin says ignore the economic indicators and find ways to appeal to African consumers.
3. Realize that some of the most innovative companies are African. McLaughlin points to Nation Media Group, an African media company whose work shows the future of journalism. Stop thinking about Africa as a charity case of disfunction and focus on their capabilites because, as Eric Hersman says, “if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.“

McLaughlin’s points are salient and smart – I look forward to the rest of the BarCamp Africa vides for more insight.

As you’ve probably heard, Google is releasing an Internet browser called Chrome. It’s an early product, but has some innovative features which will make it a compelling product for many. As others have pointed out, Chrome is much more indicative of an attack on Microsoft Windows than other browsers. If it is successful, as I imagine it will be if Google decides to promote it heavily, then it has a number of important implications not the least of which is the concerns about privacy.

Another question is the future of computing freedom. GNU, the project that started free software, is turning 25 years old, but in some ways, the specific goal of a free operating system is outdated. The move towards cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) means that more and more computing is done through the browser. In fact, as Nick Carr points out, Chrome represents Google’s effort to improve the browser. The end goal, it seems, is to replace Windows and Mac OS X with lightweight, browser-based computers. The day when computers are sold with only a browser is near; traditional programs – downloaded and installed locally – are quickly being replaced by online versions. If the browser is the OS, does Chrome (and Firefox), both free, open source browsers, represent the culmination of the goal of free software advocates?

I’m afraid not. In place of one proprietary set of code, network services provide many more. Hosting photos on Flickr? Using Gmail? Posting to Twitter? Connecting on Facebook? These services all lock in data to some extent. Tinkering is limited so customization falters. As Tim O’Reilly wrote a while back,

“Take note: All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and Google’s AppEngine to Salesforce’s force.com — not to mention Facebook’s social networking platform — have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we’ve known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches?”

Luckily a group of developers and activists are pushing back against this dependency on third-party lock-in. Blogging at autonomo.us these smart folks are raising the red flag and in the case of Identi.ca, creating more open services to compete with proprietary leaders. Evan Prodromou is the creator of identi.ca, a micro-blogging service which embraces computing freedom to an extent Twitter does not. Unfortunately, the network effects in play make Identi.ca a difficult success story.

So, as you try out Google Chrome, an admittedly exciting product (if it were for Mac…), keep in mind that the sites you are visiting do not embrace the same ethic as Chrome or GNU – they are the new digital silos.

Update: Thanks to Greg Grossmeier, I see another examples of a free network service – Tiny Tiny RSS is an RSS Reader like Google Reader, but it is open source and self-hosted. Check out Greg’s post about the site.

I’m a huge fan of Google. I advocate for many of their products and have converted many friends to GMail (the most recent declared her soulmate status with the web mail service only 1 day after leaving Apple Mail). But for every new user, the power that Google wields increases. An increasing number of critics are surfacing and calling for regulatory oversight (see the proposal for a Federal Search Commission), user-based push back (see TrackMeNot) or even writing a whole book about their worries (see Siva’s Googlization of Everything). Many of these concerns were outlined in a recent article by the Boston Globe about the opponents of Google.

For a number of reasons I don’t have the desire to outline, I think many of these concerns are overstated and the proposed solutions are misplaced, but it is worthwhile to have people question such an important institution in today’s world. The one concern I have about Google isn’t really a problem from their end, but really a result of a market-based decision by users to search with the familiar company. Google’s share of searches tops 60% and, in turn, they shape the public perception of truth and knowledge. I was reminded just how potent they were by a recent blog post about the design choices they make on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Decisions as apparently minor as typography, spacing and color have profound effects on the results searchers click on. In turn, people experience different information than otherwise.

Because users are choosing this, and because Google has an interest in providing the best results, and because I’m not convinced this is worse than in the past, I’m not overly concerned about their power. But it is important to bear in mind the effects of search engines in today’s world.

In recent days, there have been a number of cool translation-related initiatives which have come through my feed reader. In the past, I’ve mentioned how translation is going to be important to avoid the fragmentation of the world wide web, and these developments are welcome solutions.

The first are the hints of a new service from Google called Translation Center. Google knows that its mission of making all the world’s information universally accessible requires widespread, accurate translation. The new service, uncovered at Google Blogoscoped, will bring together translators and those seeking translation. Volunteers and professional translators can bring web content into other languages through a manual translation effort through tools provided by Google. It is unclear if this will be a marketplace with payment or just voluntary exchanges. This development comes 7 years after Google offered volunteers the ability to translate Google services into their native language through Google In Your Language. This effort has seen the explosion of more than 100 localized versions of their site.

Secondly, TechCrunch reports that VoIP provider Jajah has introduced JAJAH.Babel which provides instant Chinese-to-English translation through a phone. Users call a number, speak Mandarin or English into the phone, and a few seconds later the translated version is read back. Apparently the technology works pretty well and could come to replace in-person translators who accompany business people, diplomats and others around the world. I’m surprised that the service works with Mandarin which I would have thought we be a more difficult language to translate, so I hope they expand it to other languages soon. Imagine the help this will be to tourists in China who now have a phone number which can explain to the natives what they need, in their own language.

Finally, a post from the recent iSummit held by iCommons explains the difficulties and promises of multilingualism online.

While statistics are difficult to get, it appears that less than a third of the web’s users use English as a first language, and only a third of all websites are in English. Unfortunately, building a multilingual web is more complex than simply using an automated translation service. Computers have yet to understand local contexts, cultural references, and do not have a proper grasp of grammar… Translation is extremely difficult, especially in a distributed context. For example, when translating from English to Chinese, one has to decide whether Traditional or Simplified Chinese will be used. Furthermore, a volunteer from Taiwan may use different characters or metaphors to describe events than a volunteer from Beijing. As such, volunteer management is often more structured and complex than one would initially assume.

These questions will certainly loom large for Google as they embark upon the Translation Center, but hopefully they can create a compelling product which motivates people to lend their language skills to bridging the gap between societies.

Update: Google now has Google Translate for iPhone.

Tim Lee, who blogs at the great group blog the Technology Liberation Front, has a review of James Bessen and Michael Meurer’s new book, “Patent Failure.” The conclusions:

• For large, publicly traded firms, patent portfolios are net losers. To defend a corporation’s patents typically costs more for non-pharmaceutical patents than the intellectual property makes.
• This disincentive for innovation has risen sharply since the 1990s when courts loosened restrictions on patent granting and litigation.
• Patents suffer from the lack of notice they offer. It often isn’t clear until costly litigation occurs what the patent covers (in contrast to both real property and trademarks and copyrights).
• A number of proposed fixes could help the excruciatingly complicated task of reforming the patent system including raising patent fees, increasing stringency of granting patents, providing a safe-harbor for good-faith, accidental infringement and ending software patents.

Secondly, via White African, a New York Times article on the Kenya technology scene provides a glimpse into the burgeoning technical industries in Africa. Although the article develops into a discussion about Google opening an office in Nairobi, it provides an insightful look at the ingenuity which is required to innovate in a city where Internet is slow and expensive, people cannot afford the most advanced gadgets and mobile phones are the primary means of connection.

[Photo via NYT]