Google is just an amoral menace
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
This sentence makes it clear (if it wasn't already) how little this guy understands the Internet. The "ordering of information" is not something that can reasonably have "mere" put in front of it. It is a very hard problem to solve, and the importance of solving it is reflected in Google's reach numbers.
Maybe if he thought about the thousands of programmers who work full time on this problem and the server rooms full of millions of computers Google needs to provide this service, he'd realize there is actually something to it.
It seems like there is a rising trend that anything "anti-google" gets upvotes.
This story and that recent one about Google Checkout
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533849
are like a controlled experiment to measure how much of this dislike is rational. Google did behave badly in the first case. Here they've merely been attacked by an idiot.
An ad hominem attack does not negate the points made in the article, nor does the fact that the article author probably has a bias and some of his claims may be overstated mean that his other claims are without merit.
Google do collect vast amounts of information, and they do generate increasing concern from everyday people over privacy. Note the village who obstructed the Google Street View car as reported in the news last week: the locals quoted in connection with that story were hardly geeks who have thought deeply about privacy issues in the on-line world, but clearly felt that the behaviour was a violation of their privacy nonetheless.
Google do mostly run their services on the back of information provided by others, without adding much or any original content themselves; ironically, Street View is a rare exception to this. On the other hand, Google Search, Google Mail, Google Groups, Google News and so on are all services based on nothing more than presenting an interface to work done by others. They create no original content, do no original research, and provide nothing that couldn't be found through other means.
It would be wrong to assume that such organisational services have no value, of course. If they didn't, no-one would use them.
But it would also be wrong not to consider the implications for the providers of the underlying source material of allowing such services to operate unrestricted. We already have a situation where some sorts of business live or die based on an arbitrary decision of a huge external company that wields awesome power because of its market dominance, yet makes mistakes (ducking the question of whether some of the dubious behaviour is actually a mistake at all).
When a service is fundamental to society and the field is dominated by a small group of organisations that are not directly accountable to the public, there is always a case for government regulation to protect society from abuses by those organisations. This is what we have things like anti-trust laws for, not to mention applicable general laws covering privacy, data protection and the like.
We shouldn't stand in the way of progress without cause, but neither should we assume that new approaches to things are always better, nor ignore the implications of modern technologies and the need to reevaluate old legal standards in the light of new practical capabilities. It is good that the media question the way that a business like Google operates, because for society to function effectively, someone must always question the behaviour of those who wield disproportionate power.
It's very misleading to say that Google "run their services on the back of information provided by others, without adding much or any original content." The people who invented chemistry and physics also did that. They didn't provide any original content; all they did was figure out and describe how things worked; but that was immensely useful.
And it's simply false to say that Google has done no original research. They've had to solve all kinds of problems no one had solved before. If they cared they could have generated thousands of conference papers. But why bother?
Sorry, but I think that's a very poor analogy, unless you happen to be using Google to search for information about how to mine large data sets or how to make enormous amounts of money through on-line advertising.
Experimental physicists and chemists aren't useful because they develop novel experimental methods. They are useful because of what the results of the experiments tell us about physics and chemistry. The methods are merely a means to an end, and if we discovered how physics and chemistry work through other means instead the information would still be the same and just as valuable.
Similarly, Google is not useful because of all the clever algorithms it uses and the fact that they didn't realise "downloading the Internet" was supposed to be a joke. They are useful because of the web pages, newsgroup postings, etc. that they help visitors to find. The content is what matters, the content would be just as valuable however a visitor found it, and the content is written by other people.
IMHO, a far better analogy is that Google is just a middleman trying to get the market to finds content through its services rather someone else's, just like publishers and record labels. Just as in those other cases, it's the people who create works and the society that consumes them who really matter. The middleman is only worth as much as it helps the other roles to function better than they otherwise could.
"That's like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he's covered by the best insurance company."
Wait, what? If a pirate is a drunk driver, then Scribd is a car manufacturer. Does it make sense to sue Ford for drunk driving incidents in their vehicles?
Not saying it's necessarily right to sue the manufacturer based on the crimes of the users, but let's not pretend there's no difference.
Since they are the organizers of information they are also the de facto gatekeepers for users who do not know how to discover knew content without them.
The same way we did before search engines worked very well: via the network effect, by following hyperlinks from interesting articles, from discussion forums like this one, from human-generated links pages, and so on.
The WWW would not cease to be useful if search engines disappeared tomorrow, it would just adapt as it always has, and not necessarily for the worse.
For example, today we have social networking sites, blogs, and services like Twitter and StumbleUpon. All of these allow huge numbers of human-recommended links to be passed around very quickly.
I'm not saying that search engines aren't useful; in fact, I'm not really sure how we've jumped from the kind of Google services that were being criticised in the original article to attacking their search engine specifically. I'm just saying that if search engines went away, it's reasonable to assume that the web-surfing world would adapt, and that new and improved ways to find useful content have been invented and will continue to be developed whether or not search engines are around in their current form.
I used to work for a very large vendor of ICs and one of its erstwhile CEO's famously said: "With respect to technology, if it can be done, it will be done."
I agree and so given that, I think any discussion of morals is only applicable to the person who has to decide whether to associate with the company or project in question for paid labor or in the use of their product(s).
It's not whether the bomb, say, is moral or not as an abstract concept, but instead, given all the information available on the impact of nuclear weapons, whether you decide to design the beryllium reflector for the secondary or not...
I think there are two separate issues.
1.) Amoral: clearly; they are a corporate entity, not a human being
2.) Menace: who or what are they menacing? If you feel threatened, don't use their products.
Well, apparently they are "menacing" content producers on YouTube by [!shock!] deciding that rather than renegotiate higher payments per view they would prefer to stop purchasing the content.
I mean, how DARE Google stop buying the right to distribute someone's creations when the seller raises the price to a point where it's no longer profitable to be involved with the deal? That's evil if I've ever seen it...
Yeesh.
Google makes statements, They make browsers just to push the industry, Bid on the wireless frequencies to make them open to other devices.
Google is not amoral, they simply are easily spun out of context.
People don't see yet how instable these monopolies really are in the age of the internet. Once Google would really corrupt it's core product, search, someone could just go, download the clones of Googles software over at the apache foundation and upload it into a little EC2 cloud at Amazon. There is not even this network effect which allows Ebay to run successfully despite looking quite dated nowadays, because people feel they have to stick with them because eveybody else does.
Google's users don't care how efficiently it runs its datacenters.
As long as Google can afford to provide decent anwers with acceptable latency, it will have users.
I think that efficiency is like programming effort, algorithms, and programming languages in that users don't care. They only care about results and the costs that affect them.
FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum" (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian). UK print media has ~10 national newspapers, which are politically segmented (and income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its political views, and different to the national average in its political views. Tribalism..
A critique is not ad-hominem if the target is a character trait relevant to the speaker's point.
"Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum"
I fail to see how being liberal implies the bizarre views in the article. Bringing up the political leaning of the Guardian was a bit of a cheap shot and not at all germane to the topic.
As I interpret your sentence, that is not what the article you are quoting says, and it is also not correct. This is irrelevant here, however, because the character trait being discussed is not related to the speaker's point; it is merely an argumentum ad hominem.
(For those who don't know: e.t.c is one of many sites that just scrape the entirety of Wikipedia -- er, I think they omit some bits, mostly in the hope of making the true origin of the material less obvious -- and re-present its content as if it's theirs, adding a bunch of paid advertisements, with just a bit of teeny-tiny small print crediting Wikipedia. This doesn't seem to me like behaviour we should be encouraging.
"...Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."
This journalist appears to know little about the WWW. He's writing for an audience that (mainly) know equally little, but who care passionately about other things (artists' rights, privacy, etc), which are inevitably affected by the WWW. So they only see the bad side of the coin.
This is what the DMCA did, not what Scribd did.
Take the following, which is a slightly edited version of the quote: "offering aggregation, lists and the ordering of all the information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."
I took out "little" and added "all the". The whole connotation changes. But the change is so subtle that people don't notice the blatant lack of citation. Can Google really index all information? No, only what is available in formats it can read on the Internet, and it doesn't even have all of that. In the same way, the author doesn't explain why aggregation, listing, and ordering can be termed "mere". There is no solid evidence presented to back up the idea that what Google does is insignificant. A counter-argument is that, despite the presence of competitors in the search field, Google maintains a lead.
What is needed is a standardised video tag like HTML, ported to all browsers, so people can host their own videos.
See a video as a HTML document or a GIF image.
I look forward to a W3C video standard crushing YouTube.
Anyway, I am waiting for the focus to get off of YouTube and for people to start realizing videos can be posted to many places, not just those that only allow 10 minutes and so forth.
Anybody who have have huge comtempts for pirates do not understand the pirates' role in society. Unlike drunk drivers, pirates are the forces of great upheaval, of social changes. Pirates often signal something is wrong in the market. It may be the companies themsleves or the profliberation of DRMs.
If he doesn't understand that, how can I expect him to understand the implication of google?
I don't find this interesting at all (besides its propaganda value) and I doubt few in this community will find this kind of news worth debating.
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