Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Siva Vaidhyanathan: Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us on this rainy afternoon. My name's Alex Meriwether. On behalf of Harvard bookstore very pleased to welcome you to this afternoon's Friday forum events with Professor Civa Friday often here to discuss his newest book The Google zation of everything. Before we get started I just want to take a moment to mention a few of our upcoming author talks upcoming events include journalist Greg Lindsey on March 21st discussing the intersection of air travel and urban planning. In his new book arrow trouble us and next week tickets go on sale for March 22nd event with science and technology historian James gleich. For his newest book entitled The information a history a theory a flood finder complete calendar of events online at Harvard dot com. While you're there sign up for our weekly e-mail newsletter and of course our Google calendar. You can also keep up with store news via Twitter Facebook and are fresh from the Prince or March events flyer you can pick one up on your way out. After Professor VI in a fight he and oftens talk will have time for questions and C-SPAN will be passing around a

microphone for that. Pointing There we go. After that we'll have a book signing here at this table and you can buy the book up front at the registers. Please note any questions you ask may be recorded or will be recorded and will people be possibly broadcast as might any on silent cell phones this is a great time to make sure that those are turned off. On behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm pleased to introduce Civa Vida Yonathan here to discuss the Google ization of everything and why we should worry. Many of us use Google dot com and other Google products every day our e-mail our calendars even our phones have been Google ised and his new book Professor VI Deon Thun urges us to take a closer look at this company whose stated mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. And its review of the Google ization of everything Kircus reviews states that vide Yonathan

unmasks the monster beneath the friendly interface with the suspense of a horror novel and calls it an urgent reminder to look more closely at dangers that lurk in plain sight. Professor Vajda Yonathan is a cultural historian and media scholar and the author of several previous books on technology and culture including copyrights and copy wrongs and the anarchist in the library. He's a noce and associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia and a fellow at both the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the future of the book. We're very pleased to bring him to Harvard bookstore this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming Professor Civa Yonathan. But it's a pleasure an honor to be here and thank you for braving the rain and joining me today. So Google is 12 years old its voice hasn't even changed yet. Right it's barely an adolescent

and yet it's it's been an important part of so many daily activities for so many of us. The reason one of the major reasons I wrote this book is it struck me as weird historically weird. Technically weird sociologically weird that one company would serve as the lens through which we view the world in so many ways so many times a day. I'm not sure at least I wasn't sure at the beginning that we should complain about this situation after all we invited it. We celebrate it we relish it and we do it right we Google all the time. And so I tried to enter this project with that sense of weirdness first and foremost I wanted to I wanted to constantly remind myself and remind my readers that this was not the natural state of things right. Things could have gone very differently. So go back to when Google was a newborn. You probably had not even heard of it in its first year

1998 when it first rolled out for public use. It was actually hosted by the Stanford University servers you founded at Google dot Stanford edu. The first few notices that I was able to find in the popular press refer to it at that u r l and even early on it was clear that Google was going to be the darling of people who are excited about technology technology technologically sophisticated. It accomplished a couple of things that had been eluding a lot of other companies that had been trying to organize the web and help navigate the web. First and foremost it had a blank page or it was just a box through which you would enter text and generate a fairly clean selection of links and the links would be in order and the order seemed to make sense to us right. It struck us as intuitively right. It's intuitively relevance and the great leap that Google made

early on was first of all to use that blank page. And at a time when if you remember the web in the late 90s and some of you might the web was crazy it was full of all kinds of flashing things and crazy things and every page looked like you know walking down Times Square in the middle of the night it was just a lot of attention grabbing devices on too many web pages in addition to certain major search engine services of the day. AltaVista for instance or Yahoo even which is still with us and and actually not going anywhere for a while. Those services tended to crowd their pages with content. Some of that content they would actually pay to create others they would pay to harvest from other places. There was no sense that these other portals to the Web understood the web the way that Google did right. The folks who started Google understood first of all that you and I are perfectly willing to create content that Google can then harvest and link to and

share with us. And they don't have to pay us right does it. Amazing insight the other insight about that blank page was the blank page was trustworthy. The blank page said I'm not trying to sell you anything and I'm not trying to take you anywhere you don't want to go. And at a time when it was clear that many search engines were actually auctioning off the positions of their search results Google made it very clear largely through word of mouth and thus through the press ultimately that its search engine results were generated. By their algorithms purely and their algorithms were at a distance from the immediate interests of the company in fact the company had no interest if you can imagine until about 2003 the company wasn't even selling advertising. It was just running on venture capital money and it hadn't even figured out a model for selling advertising well until about 2003. So for the first four or five years of Google's existence it was there to be great and it worked. So in 1998 it debuts right by the time Google is

one year old it's just starting to walk. It was already organizing the web for us it was already making it clear to millions of web users that the Web didn't have to be a chaotic place that one could use it to draw a usable map for information to get from one place to another. Well before search engines were good before Google really reinvented the search engine one had to find a good starting page and follow a series of good links to other pages. Write and collect that trail and sometimes try to guide other people through that trail to replicate the same information. And it was maddening it was chaotic and you didn't know if you were missing some good stuff. But most of the time you can even find good stuff you found a lot of scary stuff or weird stuff or inappropriate stuff in there just was no method to the madness of the web. So Google almost immediately sets itself up almost inadvertently as the custodian of the web. Now over time Google did something else very clever. Google had to figure out what puts

one link above another. Why should one page be more important than another. And the term that Google uses for the criterion upon which it would rank these links is relevance what which page is more relevant to the search than another page search. There are a lot of different ways to do this right. In the early days of web search the number of times a search term showed up on a page counted for a lot right because a page if there were a page about the Boston Red Sox It might say Red Sox a lot on that page and that's a pretty good guess you would think for the importance of that page to that search. Problem is didn't take long before people figured that out and they would make a page about something completely different and just loaded up with invisible text for common search terms right terms that people people were using all the time anyway and that would trick people into going to these unrelated pages you can imagine that pornographers are masters at this very early. And the

fact the pornographers people who put up pornography pages in the early days of the web were generally so much smarter than anybody doing anything else on the web largely because it was the only kind of business making money on the web at the time. The big trick for Google as it became the custodian of the web was to figure out how to make the web less offensive less threatening more usable more pleasant. And if it can do that Google figured eventually right. I'm using Google as if Google is an actual person or animal which actually my 5 year old daughter sort of says sometimes she thinks Googles a person when she talks about my book she says she imagines that I've actually met this person named Google. And I go to California to meet this person named Google and apparently Google invited me to a party one time I don't know there's some story she tells her friends. So but imagine this right. You've got the web which in the late 90s an early part of the OTS was a scary place and many reasonable people were not sure how much interaction they wanted to have of the web. These were days when it was hard to convince someone that doing something like banking was a good idea on on the web

and that's probably the end of the list right. Shopping was risky. Research was risky putting your kids down in front of the computer without someone looking over his or her shoulder was risky. Right that sort of activity it was important for everyone who wanted to make money on the web to make the Web a less frightening place. And we didn't even notice this was going on. But so Google has installed some more criteria. Instead of using this sort of number of times the search terms appear in the page. Google decided that there's a vote of affirmation out there and it's called the hyperlink. If there are people creating web pages around the world and they happen to be interested in the Boston Red Sox and they start creating web links to what they consider an authoritative page about information concerning the Boston Red Sox may actually be the team's official page and maybe some fan page where a person has tremendous insight and maybe ESPN page but they're going to start creating links saying you want to find out what's going on with the Red Sox These are the pages to look toward. They don't spell out those words but by creating hyperlink it was interpreted as a vote of affirmation. And

so the great insight of Google's engineers in fact Google's founders figured this out and wrote a paper when they were in graduate school that the basically made it so that. Page's relevance would be scored by the number of votes it gets from around the Internet. And then they waited that because they knew that if for instance ESPN starts pointing to somebodies homemade page about the Red Sox that's a really powerful vote of affirmation right. Or if if in some other areas the Wall Street Journal Web page links to somebodies financial advice blog there were actually blogs at the time but you can imagine that counts for a lot. That's a major f sense of affirmation within that field. And so those votes are weighted more than if I put up a link to somebody's page on my blog for instance right. So that was major insight number one major insight number two was that you can start scoring the results based on the quality of the page and this happens a little bit later and in Google's history it actually happens in the last couple of years. Google starts saying there are certain design elements of a page that work

better for us and we think work better for for our users our readers and. And those are often expressed graphically and not just textually. Right so it's not hard to imagine that pages that are trying to trick you into falling into the pornography world are going to be full of lots of extra video links that go into strange places lots of extraneous code. What they call Mall where you know little programs that embed themselves in your browser and ultimately your operating system and potentially corrupt your computer like the bad people in the world are going to load up their pages with lots of nasty stuff and Google has an interest again in making the web usable trustworthy and pleasant. And so Google starts downgrading the scores of pages that are designed in such a way and upgrading the score of pages that are designed cleanly that have keywords in them that relate honestly to the subject of the page. And of course have these votes of affirmation and so within a very short period of time the Web becomes a trustworthy place and lo and behold

this in combination with the widespread use of encryption for instance you get people actually shopping and actually banking on the web and the more time people spend on the open web. Ultimately the better it is for Google because Google is a starting place. Instead of having to follow links you go back to the central place and it gives you a menu of places to dive into so you no longer are actually using it in a Webby way. You're you're you're plumbing for depth when you do a subject search on Google. So that's the nice story but again Google's 12 years old. It's an adolescent its voice is just starting to change. By 2004 when Google is merely six it started remarkably expanding its areas of interest. And about that time I started really taking notes I could use Google from GS from 99 from the time I first heard from some very tech savvy friends that this was the search engine to trust. Around 2004 Google started launching a number of other projects and we're all familiar with what those projects became projects like Google News projects like G-mail and the

Google Books project in which it's through its scan in millions of books from dozens of libraries around the world ultimately started with five including this universities and then and then moved onto to many others. And this project kind of blew my mind. Right so in 2004 I start reading about this project to scan in millions of books and I start seeing this amazing hyperbole coming from people who are who are working for universities and university libraries for people who are big fans of Google and from people who just want knowledge to spread and they start saying what an amazing thing that this big powerful company is going to spread knowledge to every corner of the world pretty much for free. And I start reading things from in all sorts of corners basically saying this is going to unleash information in a remarkable way create a new library of Alexandria that anyone can go into. And I'm sitting back there saying. You know Google 6 years old right. I mean Google at that point was around for less time than Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have been married. Right and look how well that turned

out. So I said why is a university like the University of Michigan or Harvard University or Stanford University asking a six year old company to be the custodian of this immense amount of wealth and knowledge. This can't end well is basically what I thought it might start beautifully but it can't end well. This was obviously a controversial project when it came to copyright right to the publishers and authors whose work was being scanned in without permission raised all sorts of issues and eventually lawsuits and the lawsuits were settled in a way that made it very clear several years down the line that Google never really intended to make a library. It intended to make a bookstore. And I love bookstores and in a bookstore bookstores are great There's nothing wrong with a bookstore. But I'm not too pleased of the bookstore that tries to pretend it's a library. So from the about 2004 I started seeing that Google's real corporate mission statement which is believe it or not to organize the world's information to make it universally accessible is actually kind of scary. You know I was born in the 20th century I lived for about

you know 40 percent of the 20th century and I know enough about the 20th century to know that when somebody makes a big grand statement like that you need to step back and be aware right because 20th century involved a lot of big grand statements that didn't turn out so well either. Not that anything close to chaos and nastiness and horrible tragedy was likely to come from anything Google is doing. But nonetheless I thought What an odd thing what it strange way to run a company to say that the goal of the company is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. Son knew enough about the web or at my jobs actually his kind of study why writes a new novel about the Web to know that they're organizing the web. They're not organizing the world's information and the web is not the world. It wasn't then it isn't now. Right. Because what's valuable or important or relevant on the web is a refraction of what's real in the world. And you can do this by doing a basic Google search for a subject you know a lot about. You will see the pages that you might not think of as the most authoritative but they are the most relevant and

according to the standards Google brings to the table the best design pages with the most links to them. But the web is merely an abstraction of the sort of thought that many people on this earth actually engage in every day. But think of the number of people who don't engage with the web yet think of the ways we engage with each other and with information it doesn't actually get accurately reflected on the web. It's really important to remember that Google itself has value judgments and biases built into its algorithms that distill their results in a particular way. And there's nothing wrong with that it actually is so much better than the absence of that it's so much better than what anybody else has thought of. But it's not the world and it's not the world's information. And I'm enough of a pragmatist and enough of a pluralist to think no one institution and no one company should actually have that job of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible. The mission statement of Harvard University isn't that audacious right. If you can imagine Harvard not being

audacious right. In that case I mean I'm I'm sure the mission of Harvard University actually reads something like to to educate the young men of New England to be clergy or something because that's what it originally was meant to do. But but really that's that's a stunning mission statement now we're probably all more familiar with its informal model the company's informal motto which is don't be evil. And I started thinking what that means because every time Google does something that causes friction in the world. It sends its cars through the streets of Europe taking pictures of people without their permission and in Europe people are pretty sensitive about anybody taking a picture without permission and putting it in a searchable database. It had some bad experiences with databases they didn't call them databases in the 30s and 40s but they had some bad experiences with people keeping too much information about people in centralized place and then using it to pull people out of their neighborhoods and houses and sending them off on trains so you know a little bit of sensitivity in Europe about privacy and about personal information that we don't necessarily have that kind of level of concern here in this country are a lot more trustworthy if nothing else the private sector and and major corporations. Right but that's

there's been a lot of conflict in Europe a lot of tension in Europe a lot of stress and and friction over these sorts of things in the United States of course we've had a lot of friction and controversy about YouTube about things that show up on YouTube and a lot of friction and controversy about the Google book program. Right. And understanding that every time that Google is confronted with a situation in which somebody is upset. And somebody calls for some sort of intervention or regulation. Google's basic defense is trust us we treat you well we've always treated you well. We have this internal ethic this internal motto of Don't Be Evil they don't actually don't say those words out loud like the CEO of Google Eric Schmidt who's about to step down to my knowledge has never stood up in front of an audience and said we believe not if we believe the motto Don't be evil. I've never heard him say that but it's embedded in many things he does say in many other major officials at Google say things that sound like a deep declaration of corporate social responsibility.

So I started asking that question why do we fall for that every time. First of all Secondly why do we think that a company that had that that is basically 12 years old is going to be anything like it currently is in the next 20 years. Why would we think that future performance is in any way predicted by past performance because it isn't of course conditions change or a company's change or Economies change politics change. And we do know that in the world of new media or the world of digital communication with the markets dealing with the Internet that nobody is king for very long right. Because when Google started everyone was concerned that Microsoft would be calling all the shots in our information ecosystem. I thought that I thought that was true. Right Things shifted over time. Now Google is the one we worry about now we start to worry about Facebook in fact. Google's worried about Facebook for some very legitimate reasons in terms of competition and for for advertising dollars and our attention.

So as I started stringing together these concerns I thought it's really important that I come up with a way to sort of distill what Google means to us and what we mean to google other really great writers had gotten inside of Google had traveled on the plane with the big guys a run Google had told the story of the company had written the biography of the company and other people had written lots of books about how we can all learn from Google or other companies can learn from Google make a lot of money. I couldn't write books like that and other good writers had already done that right my contribution. I hoped as I started this book was to delve into our relationship with Google. What does Google mean to us and more what do we mean to google what is the nature of the transaction. Why does Google do all this for me. Right why do they spend so many billions of dollars on services. That helped me make my life better and they don't ask for any money from me. What's going on there. I mean we should be a little suspicious of that. So what is the nature of the

transaction what am I giving Google. The obvious answer when you think about it for five minutes is I'm not actually Google's customer neither are you. Right. I'm Comcast customer so I get mad at Comcast all the time right something doesn't work or my bills too high get out of Comcast and write a check to a no on Comcast customer. But I'm not Google's customer I'm Google's product I'm what Google sells to advertisers. That's nothing new right I'm NBC s product every Sunday when I watch Super with everyone I watch the NFL right. NBC selling my attention to beer companies and and car companies. So it's not a new model but I think we forget it because of the depth of interaction and and immersion in Google. We consider Google to be a part of our lives embedded in our lives. Google keeps very good track of our intentions and our desires in our fetishes and obsessions and and focusses the results of our searches to reflect what we've already told Google we really really like thinking about.

Now that has some interesting implications. And Google is changing right so I described earlier the ways that Google mastered the web figured out a great efficient and effective way to help us navigate the web write some brilliant ideas about counting these links. Waiting waiting these links properly. So in recent years in the last two years Google's added yet another layer of standards or criteria. And what they're really focusing on now is what they call the user experience. They want our experience with Google to be really satisfying deeply satisfying and more fun than it has been before. More satisfying in a social way more satisfying in an intellectual way more satisfying and is most important in a commercial way. So they are taking. They're taking the record of our expressions and desires that we enter in the little box right. It's our it's the confessional we confess to googling what we really want and what we really did or what we shouldn't have done and are

thinking about we probably should be thinking about. We put all that in the google box. We get results. Google makes a note it doesn't necessarily associate that text you put into the box with you as a person it doesn't care about your name it doesn't care about your social security number but it cares about where you're sitting when you're doing that. So it knows generally in the world where you are and can associate your set of inquiries with others who sit in the same general area it might also over time if you happen to have an account with Google like a G-mail account build up a pretty rich set of indicators of the sorts of cars you like the sorts of shoes you like the sorts of books you like kind of like how Facebook does it just as we tell Facebook all the stuff foolishly a Facebook. I like this music. And of course Facebook's job is to take all that data and associate ads in the column to try to sell us stuff. While Google's trying to do the same sort of thing with the record of intentions that we give data we give Google and again it's not anything that's easily exploitable. As far as we know it's not easily

attachable to our name and so security number and address as far as we know it does know our location in many cases especially if you have a Google phone an Android phone and Google knows where you are almost all the time or use GP S-CHIP and or Apple knows where you are if you have an iPhone. So with all of this data Google is increasingly focusing the results on you customizing the results and localising the results so you're not likely to come up with a result that is distant from you or is sort of out of character or out of place or out of the field through which you usually explore. That has some pretty amazing implications. First of all that's really great Think of the time they're saving us right. I think a lot about a particular sports team or I think a lot about a particular kind of car. Maybe I have a car that breaks down a lot and I do a lot of searches for parts and repairs well Google is going to help me save time so I'm not clicking too much

is going to keep giving me results that reflect those sorts of areas right. Because Google eventually will understand to a lot of searches for that brand of car. That's really great for shopping for buying. It's not so great for learning. If we want an information ecosystem that actually serves us well as curious people as citizens as people who are trying to navigate the world and make sense of the world as people are trying to who are trying to figure out what these symptoms mean as people who are trying to figure out what's going on with climate change as people are trying to figure out what's going on with health care reform we might actually be better off not having focused information we might be better off coming across a set of results that surprise us or challenge us a set of results that don't reinforce where we already were and where we already are. We might be better off coming up with a set of results that aren't particularly geared toward consumption. And we're better off coming up with a set of results that are a mixture of

ways to help us consume in ways to help us learn. Now for a dozen years we've gotten very lucky. Google has served both of these interests remarkably well. Think of all the times Google has helped you answer a really important question and of course if you are in any way doubtful or critical of Google you probably went to a second source. You might have called the library and you might have called someone who's written a book on the subject you might have called a doctor instead of just going to web M.D. through Google right. You might have clicked on the second page of results you might have run the same search on another search engine. All of these are very healthy techniques and another reason I wrote this book is I wanted people to learn how to use Google in a better way. I use Google every day dozens of times a day I used google to find my way to this store right. I'm not in any way going to advocate that we not use google but I am going to advocate that we use Google in a wiser way not just a smarter way a wiser way. I want us to all understand that Google has biases and limitations. Baked into its algorithms

that Google is a company it's a publicly traded company that must satisfy the desires of its shareholders to enhance value that is its job number one. And it's been so good at that it's been so wealthy that it can afford to be good. And so it has for the most part. And even when it's bad it thinks it's being good which is part of the problem. But with all that we could be better right. The real problem is with us. The real problem is we are so addicted to the speed and convenience of that lovely set of results that comes in a nice set of 10 with a value attached to each and we trust it we trust it so much that almost nobody clicks past result number three on the first page of results let alone click to the second page. That's absurd. Right nobody clicks a second page. In fact next time you do a google search Please click to the second page to see what's there. You never know right. But we've seen study after study academic studies and industry studies show that people do not

even question the judgment that Google makes. People do not question the judgement to the point of clicking on results for five or six. It's one two or three. And actually if a lot of people start clicking on too it soon becomes number one. So with all that I think it's him it's incumbent upon us to mix it up a little bit right to bring a little bit of diversity into our information ecosystem to make sure that while we want Google to keep getting better and keep serving us so well you know in a way that all we're really given it is this list of our desires and that's not that bad a price to pay considering the value that's brought to our lives. But let's do it in a more intelligent way in a wiser way. Let's understand what the real risks and costs are. Let's understand that we actually have the power to manipulate what Google learns about us and how it follows us. And you can actually do that it takes about seven clicks. Most people don't want to make those seven clicks right we don't want you on Facebook when it's clear we should be doing it. But on Google you really can customize what information you give Google. To a large degree there is a

cost to that and that's another important thing we need to learn about Google. If you customize the way Google tracks you and limit if you limit the amount of information in the kinds of information Google follows about you you degrade the service that Google gives you. And it's a real obvious tradeoff once you start clicking on those things you start seeing that Google no longer helps you shop as well. But it might actually help you learn a little better and challenge you a little bit. So as Google becomes better for shopping and worse for learning that raises I think a really important question for us as citizens. As citizens of the country and citizens of the world because I happen to think there's more to life than shopping although not today please shop. This is important shop here and shop a lot. But after after you get out here maybe not shop quite so much but when you think about the extent to which we depend on this medium of the World Wide Web to learn about the world. Maybe we need to imagine different systems. Maybe we need to invest more in systems like public libraries and university libraries and their outreach is to other communities. Maybe we

have to imagine that we can build a system it might take 50 years. Build a system that can equalize the maldistribution of information across the world to the point where and I don't think this is impossible that a child growing up in South Africa has no disadvantage compared to a child growing up in Sweden. When it comes to access to information we have the tools to make that happen right now. We might have the political will to make it happen right now. We haven't even tested it. And the reason we haven't tested it is that Google's been too good to us right. We've we've been going on believing that cotton candy is real food. And Google keeps feeding us great services that simulate this equality of information. This democratization of information and Google of course is sincere that it would like the number of Web users in the world to increase exponentially. It would love Google would love as much as I would love for every 12 year old growing up in South Africa to have access to amazing information and is pouring money into such projects. And that's beautiful. But we should not rely on this 12 year old company to

guide that effort because over time they're going to be hard choices to make in terms of policy hard choices to make in terms of technology hard choices to make in terms of practice. And so as a citizen I think it's imperative that we start asking questions about whether we want Google to handle all of our shopping and all of our learning needs. And if we don't and if we recognize that Google in 20 years is almost certain to be a very different company maybe even owned at that time by somebody completely different like the reincarnated head of Rupert Murdoch or something right who knows what's going to happen down the line. But at that point Google won't be the Google that we grew up with. Right the mature Google is going to have different pressure is going to have different. Who's going to know what the World Wide Web is in 20 years we didn't know what it was 20 years ago right. And and as we move more of our information seeking habits and shopping seeking habits to lock down close devices that aren't really on the web but are connected through digital networks nonetheless and the more time we spend in the gated community of Facebook as opposed to the open web

the less money Google's going to make in the long term unless it can keep expanding its market so this is an interesting battle going on that we should be paying a lot of attention to. Right Google wants people to be comfortable with the web as I said at the beginning and is doing everything it can to keep the internet open and free because that's good for Google not just because it's good for us it happens to be good for us which is nice. But over time not everything that's good for Google will be good for us. And we have to be prepared for that divergence. And at those moments we're going to have to ask Are there things that we want to preserve and extend and build that Google should not do for us or could not do for us. And under those conditions we might want to decide to take some other route. Crazy it may as it may seem the route we might want to take is the old fashioned public library. We might want to invest more in its presence in its power and its expansion because that is a reasonable citizen driven. Good old fashioned Republican with a small r institution and it's there to help us as citizens and as there to help us as information seekers as

learners as students as teachers and we take it for granted because it works so well and we make this sort of false conclusion that Google sends information to us so efficiently that we need the public library less. But in fact Americans these days use the public library more than ever. Americans these days are visiting public libraries in record numbers. The Americans who happen to be visiting libraries or record numbers don't subscribe to broadband access at home. In fact they can actually write the check for Comcast for broadband access you know. And that's what we have to remember because our goal as citizens should be for maximum empowerment of all citizens. Our goal is consumer should be to get the best prices consumers. And again that's such a different way of being in the world and I think it's time we start taking both roles seriously instead of just one. Thank you very much and I'd love to have questions for you. Thank you.

Yes sir. Well the. Only thing that worries a lot in my search phrases. Well that's one word. Yeah right. Right. Yeah. I like that. Surely a few years ago. Well right. That's right so you're right about the politics of preservation surety. Traces this story go away for sure thank Richard. Yes. Right.

So so a couple things to it. Yeah a couple things to remember about this very case now. Everything we do in the electronic environment is traceable by somebody. And Google may actually be low on the list of potential problems here. And I say that because first of all Google has done what it could do under our laws to keep federal investigators away from fishing expeditions and their data. Unfortunately for us and for Google our laws are on the side of the government. That's right so that's a problem with our government and not for Google. And and I think this is a really important part of this right. We've become so dependent on companies behaving well right we've become so dependent on us demanding that the companies we use in our lives treat us well and are responsible that we forget that sometimes it's not up to them. The fact is our leaders wrote some really bad laws that not only give investigators way too much power that has no real oversight and accountability and the embedded in it. And that didn't happen too

long ago and it doesn't seem to be changing for the better in recent months either. But on top of that. Google is not the only private company in the chain right Comcast and AT&T and Verizon and Time-Warner are all part of the surveillance system and they keep rates data on what we do as well. In fact if you work for university the university keeps logs of much of what you do as well. And sometimes they purge the logs and sometimes they don't and sometimes the Anonymizer logs and times they don't. But right now the government's on a big effort to get Internet service providers to cease purging and anonymizing the logs they want to have a record of who logged on where from when and did what. Because they want to use it for investigation or for data mining. Right. And so those companies actually don't want to be a part of that they don't want the responsibility. They don't want the expense to be the custodian of that kind information. So it's not like they're really defending our interests or defending their own interests it just so happens in this case. Most of those companies actually do want to protect us

if they can. They'd rather be on our side than the government side but not out of love. It's actually out of concern for just having too much of a hassle and expense of hassle nonetheless. We're losing in those companies or lose right. So you're absolutely right to be concerned about the fact that any of us could get snagged. In some sort of fishing expedition for data it's too easy to come up with what are called false positives in the sort of data analysis games and we've already seen a case of a number of innocent people dragged into bad situations took years to extricate themselves from because they happen to have the wrong data points in a system that's a much bigger problem. I'm not ready to write that book. I'm angry enough to write that book but I'm not qualified enough to write that book now. I'm not anti Google but what I'm against is our own faith based embrace of Google in all things and that's why I think there will be times and privacy is one of these areas. There are times when we might want to in fact I do want to invoke the power of the

state to restrict the amount of information that these companies can hold about us and the manner in which they hold about us. I think that's really important as being more important every day. Now that's an argument we need to have and it has to occur at a better level than trust us we're Google We've never done you wrong. Right. That's really where I'm coming down like. I just think we need to be more responsible citizens more engaged citizens and more engaged users. And we do want to use the power that people have which at times actually involves the state to take care of our interests. It's a question of back. Oh yeah Google SCOTT OK so Google Scholar started around the same time around 2005 2006 and Google Scholar was is a neat idea that came out of this. This policy that Google has inside where they let employees spend one day a week 20 percent of their time working on projects that don't serve the bottom line of Google they that are not about their prime project and a couple of folks at Google decided there's all the scholarly literature that's really helpful and might be really

valuable to people outside of the scholarly environment right I get access to this amazing collection of information through scholarly journals by virtue of working for university. But if you don't work for university you don't go to a university. You're you're outta luck as you don't even know it's there. Standard Web search doesn't bring this up. So they invented Google Scholar and they got permission from all the scholarly publishers to come through and let Google index their information to present these days. Access to these and to these articles now of course as you've if you've used it you know that if you're not in a university environment you generally have to pay ultimately for the article that you find at least you can find the article. So that's all great and I you know I think that's a super thing up to a point the problem again is how they do it right. How they do the search system for one thing. Because there are biases built into that search engine. One thing about scholarly articles is they don't link to each other right. If I write a scholarly article as I have and my friend Jonathan here who's another professor writes scholarly article they're not even if they're about the same subject even if we saw each other in the footnotes there's

no electronic link. Right there's no hyperlink like on the web and that hyperlink is the magic thing that Google follows. So what is it that makes Google rank one result over another in Google Scholar. Nobody really knows. And I've used enough to know that it's not dependable. You'll lose a lot of stuff you miss a lot of stuff and again just like with web search. If you do the same search a week later you get different results. Right the instability of it is maddening as someone who needs to pay attention to where articles are. If you do an exact title search or author search in google scholar you generally find what you want. But if you're just grazing around in a subject area it's maddening it's many. I mean again better than nothing. Poorly designed and because it doesn't make Google any money they're not likely to make it better they don't need to it's good enough. So I tell my students especially graduate students. Starting with Google style is fine but do not stop there. There is going to be there are going to be a lot of articles that Google scholar does not show you and the only way to do that is to walk through the professionally

built indexes available through the library. But again you have to be affiliated with university to get that level of access and thats a shame. I think that should be on the agenda of what I call the human knowledge project this 50 year plan to to give everyone in the world decent access to decent information. Yes or. No. This is law. Well. It is but it's not even a subpoena a subpoena would be great because a judge issues a subpoena. What happens right now is that the FBI can use national security letters to wrench out information on just about anything and that requires no oversight at all that's just an FBI agent saying I want to do this. And it has not

only the power to compel someone like a bookstore for instance to hand over records of what people of have purchased but it also has deniability built in so that the subject of that security letters not allowed to Him side that the the firm that's handed that security letter is not allowed to tell the subject of the investigation of its existence so you don't get to defend yourself if you're being investigated. It it. Yes I know part of it is part of the Patriot Act those national security letters are but there are other things other elements of their investigative power that come from earlier laws from the Clinton years. And and basically what we have now is a system in which if you're a really bad person doing really bad things you don't have to worry about any of this powerful investigative power because you're going to use strong encryption and you need a strong Christian a really smart way that actually don't take that much investment. So the really bad people in the world are totally escaping from the surveillance state. It's just the dumb people right. The people who.

And you've read about them they got arrested for being really dumb and coming up with plans that were never going to work right because they were too dumb to know to use in corruption. And they met in public places and they used e-mail to forge their plans and they get busted and then the FBI has a big press conference and everybody cheers. But we have a really absurd situation. We're bad people who want to do really bad things are basically outside of the power of the law. And so the FBI which has to show that it's doing something and is up snagging people who perhaps aren't that dangerous. Lies. Well yes. Right. So what they're doing they're

actually. Question their motives. They're also right. Yes certainly there. Could be. So what's happening right now so. That's what. They're fighting for. Government has a website. Oh yeah sure sure sure right. But again all this goes above and beyond the search service really which is what I concern myself with. I mean I think there's a much larger challenge both in terms of enhancing security and enhancing justice and I don't think we're serving either of those schools

well with the current system. But again that's another book that I haven't written and I'm likely to rate and it is probably not the subject that I should be addressing right out here on C-SPAN Right. So yes. Yes very very courageous. Yes yes. Sure sure sure. In Company years yes. That's the church. I think you're absolutely right and in in in Internet company years it's actually quite old. Right it's actually quite established. But that speaks to my point. I think

in a stronger way than my cute way of expressing it earlier right. And by that I mean that because Internet time is so compressed 12 years is a time that demonstrates it's its power in success right it speaks well to its its ability to thrive and you can actually look at his balance sheets and its returns as quarterly reports to see that as well. That said we know that the environment shifts so quickly and the nature of companies shift so quickly and and Internet company years are so compressed that week for that reason we can't expect it at 20 to resemble what it is at 12 or perhaps even to expect it to be around 20. Right. I mean. General Motors has been around for about 75 years and that's pretty impressive but it's not what it was and it almost wasn't a year ago. Right so. So that's a long company but that's an industry that's heavy that builds things that last an industry that basically bought off the government and made sure it had tremendous subsidies to make it happen at every point not just lately but you know that's a

different game so you know that industry has a different time compression factor than than internet industries so while you're right I mean I wanted to I wanted to really compare it to the older institutions with deep roots that are ultimately I think the proper custodians of our information ecosystem libraries and universities and not just not limited to libraries universities but the sense of our collective culture. This notion that we should I think we should have a diversity of interests and we should respect the gathered wisdom of these institutions and the people who work there and not just be dazzled by the news. That was really my point. Yeah yeah the biggest danger is it's cheap or free you know. And you know universities Renner under such pressure to do whatever they can for almost nothing. So most universities at that I know of are now considering if they haven't already shifted their

email hosting to Google letting Google post their emails and that at least with students if not for staff and faculty and what's going on with that is that basically Google gets a customer for life of the student graduates and the student wants to keep that email consistent because he or she already has lots of job search information on that email for instance that person is going to remain a Google customer through e-mail so it's a nice trick for them right. But nothing really sleazy about the danger is of course that universities are supposed to keep the highest level of privacy respect for their for their students and that's compromised Once you shift important information to a third party. And I'm not convinced that in that instance and in instances where. Professors are being urged to use Google Documents service in classes and as part of course where in those cases I'm not convinced that universities are looking out for the best interests students in all cases. They're going

for the cheap and easy and not necessarily building in proper safeguards through negotiation because there's almost no reason to negotiate with someone to give you some for free. You know but that's I actually think you know in the real world someone's trying to give you something for free out on the street. You should be wary right you should be negotiating. But that's really not how it's working in universities right now. OK sure so any record of a student's grades in any way like a paper that's been graded or comments about performance or recommendation letters that I happen to write for a student are not supposed to be distributed beyond the authorized recipient. So if I write a recommendation letter in which I will often say how a student perform in my class only only the recipient of that with the student's permission is allowed to read it and the student has to waive the right to read it him or herself actually. Legal according to federal law and any grade report can only be shared with the student I can't even tell parents what the grades are which drives parents crazy right so that's a sort of. But then that's really important because you never really know who you're dealing with and the other side of the phone. So so

respecting that sort of relationship and treating students as a as adults is a really important part of the culture of our institutions and an important part of federal law. And I'm afraid we're letting that slip in a lot of different ways when we invite Facebook into the classroom. We invite you to go into the classroom is we're encouraged to do increasingly. We run a lot of risks and I don't think we thought all through this. Yeah well you can go to the privacy settings and come up with a comfortable level privacy sense but as I say when you do that you do limit the functionality of a lot of its services. But the other thing is just know if you're aware that everything you type into Google's search box is used in some way either by associating it with you in some way or collectively as part of your community then you might actually be a little bit careful about how you construct

a search. You might want to turn off the ability for Google to follow you for certain searches and turn it back on when you're doing innocent searches or innocent searches that might not be misconstrued. There are deft and clever ways to use Google using the tools that Google gives us the problem is the defaults are set the defaults are always set for maximum vacuuming of the information right. So the Google wants you to be already comfortable and unsuspicious and therefore willing to give it everything to be used in every way and shared as widely as possible. The default is always maximum. It's up to us unfortunately to train ourselves to be wary to be careful to be too worry and then take action. I think this is the wrong way to have a system and I wish that our laws actually made it so that companies had to convince us to turn on the spigot. Right so the companies had to say by the way if you let us collect the following information we will give you a better service and this is exactly what it

will be. That's an honest transaction. But to have the default on maximum and have us have to guess what we should set it to. That's actually not very honest. And so for a company that proclaims to be responsible I think fundamentally it's deal with us is dishonest. OK. Yes. Yeah. Yes so Google has so many competitors in so many areas I mean think about the fact that Google Now is a mobile phone company and so Nokia is a competitor right. And so is Apple. And and so is the Blackberry. Right so that's one market in which it has intense amount of intense competition in the area

of publishing now Google is involved I said it's built a bookstore right but it's also trying to offer sales and access to electronic versions of periodicals through the same system. And those deals that they negotiate with vendors and with publishers are real thorny. Now I'm actually a huge fan of what Google is doing in the publishing area. I'm not a big fan of what they're doing with the library content but it's actually I'm not actually that upset about Google. I'm upset that the university libraries are suckers and went for this major corporate welfare deal without getting enough out of it and not protecting our interests. If Google wants to do this and and create cool things and make money from it I I have no problem with it. And what were Google's doing in publishing both in periodicals and with books is. Really undermining the powerful position the Amazon's been in for a number of years right. Amazon is the problem in the publishing industry and believe me if I thought I could sell even one book I'd write a book about Amazon but Amazon make sure I would never sell a book that I who knows about

it. Actually I'm sure Amazon doesn't care what the books inside say write what's inside the book. Amazon just wants to sell items they sell widgets and that's actually part of the problem. They're really good and efficient about selling widgets at a cheap price and by driving down the price and considering every book to be a commodity rather than a discrete cultural item they do great harm to people who write books for a living and people who sell books for a living and people who publish books for a living at the same time for people who read. It's a great deal. Right so there's. That's the massive trade off. It just so happens that we subsidize we have huge government subsidies for Amazon because if you buy my book in this store you have to pay sales tax and if you buy my book on Amazon you don't have to pay sales tax. Oh I didn't say that. But that's an extra I mean we subsidize them and we have government policies that make Amazon richer and challenge stores like this and that's a shame and that shouldn't happen but it is the case. Amazon has has had a heavy hand in all its negotiations with publishers. It's been dictating the terms in terms of the percentage that publishers get

the royalties that authors get in some cases. And and it's been trying to force down the price of electronic books to this commodity level of 999. And by doing that it doesn't respect the fact that publishing is not that simple. Every book is not going to yield a return if it's priced at 999. And if consumers get used to paying no more than 999 and consider every book whether it's 100 pages or 400 pages to be worth 999 then you're going to have a real tough time selling books that we know can't sell more than five hundred or a thousand copies. I'm talking about scholarly books mostly that we know might fail or are likely to fail and only sell a few thousand copies when the publisher thought it would sell 50000 copies right for books like that. It's important to come up with a price point that actually covers the money sunk in into the production process. But Amazon wants to disrupt that system and treat all books like a commodity. So what's happened with the competitors like Google and now with Apple doing its bookstore and with Barnes Noble doing its its electronic bookstore and a lot of independent publishers contributing

electronic books in new and interesting ways as well. And that often gets lost in the big newspaper coverage of this industry. You have now more players who are able to work with publishers in gentler and more competitive ways. And so publishers now have the ability although it rarely happens to say no to Amazon and they didn't that wasn't the case for before about seven or eight months seven or eight months ago or a year ago to say no to Amazon in terms of book distribution as electronic but distribution was death. But now that there are enough competitors out there and Google is a big reason why and I know a lot of people the publishing world are thrilled that Google is involved in this because Google's not out to cash in in a big way on the sale of of books that's going to be a major side project for Google but always a side project. And so Google's role in the publishing industry its role with newspapers its role with magazines over time I think will be beneficial. At least that's how it looks today to all of those industries. And

I'm really happy to see them deal in a less coercive way with the Google deal and less course of way with publishers because if it were just Amazon we'd all be in trouble. Yes. Oh. Yes yes yes yes. Yeah. Well so in terms of being an come to competition. So in the United States Google has for the last couple of years had about 70 percent of the search activity and that number hasn't necessarily changed even as being has gone up because most of the the the

new users can bring is bring in it's taking from Yahoo which is actually a partner in being. So in some ways it's a zero sum there. It is taking some of the searches away from Google a little bit. But Google is also growing. And Google is growing not so much in the U.S. but it's growing tremendously across the world. So for instance in Western Europe Google is more than 90 percent of the stare of searches in most Western European countries in places like the Netherlands and Portugal. It's more than 96 percent. And I actually don't know why. I don't know why Google is more popular in Europe even though it's held under greater suspicion there. Look we love Google in this country but we don't use it as much as the people who fear it over in Europe. It's kind of weird but that that's weird and that's happening. But there's tremendous growth in Africa there's tremendous growth in the Arab nations are tremendous growth tremendous growth in India where Google has managed to come up with multiple language search engines for the various 14 to 20 languages in India. It's come out with with most of those I lose count right now how many of those languages run search and no

Indian company had the audacity or the money to sink into that complicated linguistic challenge. Google did it. And so there you there actually are a number of homegrown search engines in India that have since failed because Google now not only can take you through a language search in Telegu or Hindi or or more rocky but can take you through a really effective search in the language of commerce in India which is English. And so the growth in India has been tremendous. The two places that Google has not been able to grow are Russia and the People's Republic of China. And actually Google's not so strong in Japan or South Korea for different reasons. In South Korea. The government helped invest early on in a search engine that specialized in korean language search and every language is a different challenge in search because syntax is different in every language right. So doing these relations among words and terms is a complicated thing and Google does really well in English despite having one of its founders born in Russia its not

that good in Cyrillic apparently. And within Russia there is a strong sense of nationalism so the homegrown search engines in Russia are much more powerful and popular than Google even though theres very little web censorship in Russia in China of course you have explicit Web censorship a huge thorny relationship between Google and the People's Republic of China and you have a number of search engines that are sponsored by the or at least allowed to thrive by the government there are a number of other reasons why other search engines do better in China than Google does and Google's actually doing worse. Now that said in the United States I think that Google is actually much more concerned about Facebook than it is about being. Being is explicitly about shopping or it doesn't even fool you. Nobody goes to bin to try to research climate change right. You go to Google to try to research climate change and that's not always that great right. But you go to Bing to book an airline ticket to buy shoes right it's as it says in the commercials. A decision engine you will never see a commercial for being saying use being to find out about dinosaurs. It's just not going

to happen right. They're not interested in grabbing you that way because it's hard to make money that way. Right it's hard to make money with dinosaur links but for that reason Google is adjusting to what beings do in the market by becoming better shopping. But more importantly Google wants to keep you happy with the open web so you spend less time in Facebook that's the real competitor because the dollars are in the ads and they're really afraid that Facebook is going to manage to leverage all that information we get Facebook about the things we love in the people we love and turn that into a really efficient advertising machine. So far Facebook is not mastered it which is why our Facebook pages are filled with ridiculous ads that are inappropriate to us. Many much of the time but everyone's pretty concise pretty concerned and confident. The Facebook wall will crack the code at some point soon. I would be surprised.

So where do you appreciate it thanks for comment. You know I signed up so thank. Heavens. No. Less.