The new Google as the old Bell Co.: A Regulated Monopoly, with Constitutional Protections
The inevitable defeat of George Bush's Republican Party in 2008, about two years from now, should lead many Democrats to seriously begin thinking what sort of agenda they would like to push through in the next United States government--on both executive and congressional branches. What are the most important issues of enduring merit? Aside from the well recognized issue of environmentalism, which will most certainly be addressed in some way or other, of equal importance is the existence of free speech in the North American democracy--at peril given the new mediums in which ideas are being diffused throughout the society.
The law tends to be slow in adapting to the emergence of new technologies, which although positive in creating new and unforeseen opportunities are also equally negative in the emergence of unforeseen behaviors detrimental to the common good. New technologies lead to new types of crimes. A typical example would be railroads at the turn of the 20th century. Railroads were great at delivering information cheaply, which at the time was embodied in physical containers such as letters and newspapers; this was an indirect and secondary benefit of its ability to deliver goods cheaply. However, these information gateways began closing off given industrial competition, leading to inefficiencies of scale. The government had to intervene and establish standards and regulations so that the transport of goods, and information, would not be thwarted by short-term and self-centered financial interests. A similar issue has arisen now in the 21st century with the development of advanced telecommunications. While there are many different elements to this complex sector, which essentially comprises of many different sectors and industries (decreasingly so as each becomes digitized), this brief essay will deal with only one element that will eventually be common to all: Google.
Google is so important to North American democracy, as well as to world democracy as internet use increases globally at an exponential scale, that it needs to be given some type of constitutional protection on par with the First Amendment to insure that it does not fall by the wayside to unfair industrial competition, as occurred during the railroad era. Google, in contrast to Yahoo and MSN, delivers indexes that are fair and whose ranking is not unduly influenced by vast inequalities of financial and political power. As mentioned in a previous essay, large corporations probably hate Google because they do not control its rankings; if they were to appear in the top 100 of any search query, they would effectively have undermined the basic democratic principles on which the United States was founded, as stated in the US Constitution. Google places the most humble and poor blogger (Carmelo Ruiz Marrero, for example) alongside the richest and most powerful of US corporations (Pfizer, as a counter example). Google's famous algorithms insure that ALL voices appear on an equal footing. I cannot emphasize enough how important this fact is, not only for internet users in the United States but world-wide as well. (For now, we will ignore Google and MSN filtering activities in China.)
Why should we give Google even more power and influence? Because it behooves us to do so; it is, 'common sense' --a term many liberal writers will certainly cringe at. Let me explain.
One of the first reasons to turn Google into a monopoly is the fact that is common usage had basically transformed it from a private entity to a public service. Whomever has used the internet has used Google; it is by far the most widely used search engine globally; its searches per day exist in the 'millions upon millions' (73.5 million users per month). As noted by John Kenneth Galbraith pertaining to other companies which similarly have gained near ubiquity in US economic history, the level of use and presence in an economy changes its nature. It becomes something like water, in contrast to candy; while we can live without candy, we certainly cannot live without water. Google has similarly become an essential element to information exchanges throughout the world.
A second reason I have for such a conclusion is that Yahoo and MSN are not fair, and do tend to be skewed by corporate practices--or at least it is my conviction this is the case. I cannot claim to have done a rigorous scientific study to verify this claim. However, checking 'here and there' to verify rankings of different ICTAL articles across all three search engines suggests that this is the case. Many of the top listed articles in MSN in such queries, for example, tended to be of a corporate nature. Given Microsoft's history of unfair corporate practices, and Yahoo's increasing financial weakness, the claim is a reasonable one there is both traditional practice and economic incentives to do so.
Yet, aside from the obvious matters of democratic principle previously mentioned, one of the strongest reasons to turn Google into a monopoly (banning all other search engines) is a practical one. It will happen anyways.
The exponential increase in information alongside the inevitable increasing costs of energy, means that the 'private competition' model that currently dominates the search engine industry will not be sustainable in the long run. As was the case in AT&T, defined as a 'natural monopoly' because it was not cost-effective to have two telephone networks operating side by side, information economics seems to suggest that the process towards a single monopoly will inevitably happen. Rather than wait for this to be a foregone conclusion, we should begin immediately to insure that the process is a fair and consistent one, on par with the values so deeply cherished by the American Republic. This point merits some further explanation.
Many studies have noted recently that the amount of information currently being placed on the internet is growing at a scale beyond the ability of many search engines to actually carry. The figures are truly outstanding, and I recommend all readers to (ironically) do a Google search on the matter. Google, and many other contending search engines, have begun establishing vast databanks throughout the United States. (I presume that they are also establishing these in other countries as well.) Search engines, after all, are only automated 'spiders' that 'crawl' the 'web' (internet), going from website to website and recording all the contents of that given website. (The idea that you need to pay a company to have them post your website to Google is one of the biggest internet scams there are around.) All search engines are essentially identical copies of the entire internet. Again, as the internet (defined as the information posted by individuals on servers) drastically increases (due as well to the drastic increase in internet users per se), the ability (and cost) of a single company to hold an exact copy will be drastically diminished. It is at this point where economics 101 enters the fray, as well as another element which tends to be ignored by so many computer gurus: the price of energy (particularly the price of oil).
When Ray Kurzweil writes about the point of "singularity" without incorporating the cost of energy into the equation, he is either telling a very bad joke or is being a fool. I will let users decide which to conclude. It appears as if the oil crises of 1974, and the simple fact that oil is a non-renewable resource for which few substitutes have been found, places a sudden halt on all utopic claims (as Kurzweil's) pertaining to the new information world of tomorrow. No oil, means no electricity, which means no computers, and in turn suggests a return to the Middle Ages. (Apologies for any offense this might cause to the lovers of that religious period in world history.) Google and other companies are very well aware of the intrinsic weakness to their business, which is why they have been placing their facilities next to the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy after petroleum-based derivatives: hydroelectric power. Were all oil to suddenly disappear, they would have their energy sources guaranteed--unless, of course, were a government decision made to change that state of affairs.
Add one and one together, and you get the point.
A laissez faire model of 'private competition' in the field of search engines is simply not sustainable, which will mean that at some point one search engine will begin to gobble up other search engines around--as occurred during the early history of telephony in the United States, and led to the creation of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) as a regulated monopoly. And I would much rather have Google as the predominant search engine, traditionally known for its fair algorithms, than that of other companies as Microsoft that are well known for their unfair and corrupt business practices.
We need to confront these upcoming realities now, so that we do not let the winds of fortune--and corporate greed--determine the character of our civilization for centuries to come.