Google’s obvious dominance over much of the internet has long been cause for both consumer and social concern, and it was probably inevitable the government would step in at some point, in some way, to realign the inner workings of the web.
The question is whether an antitrust suit is the right approach. There are reasons to think it isn’t, and we expect the government will have a hard, though not impossible, task of proving that Google doesn’t face at least the potential for serious competition in search and any number of other businesses, like browsers, where it also dominates.
The pudding will be in the proof in this case. What will the Department of Justice be able to tell us about the way Google structured deals across a broad array of contracts to attempt to keep Google in front and competitors at bay?
That’s interesting. But more interesting is understanding the way Google has collected our data and then used it to ensure that its search is “just right” for us. Most of us use Google because, frankly, it’s just better at finding what we are looking for.
Do most people understand, though, that if they search for the terms “liberal” or “conservative,” Google will serve them different results based on their search histories? We don’t share experiences of the world through Google. We get reflections of ourselves and our past thoughts.
Sometimes that’s helpful. Maybe Google knows you are allergic to peanuts and the recipes you are returned are peanut-free. Sometimes it is disastrous. If the algorithm senses you prefer a certain point of view around an issue like immigration, say, it’s likely to direct you to material that reinforces your preferred point of view.
If we consider how Google works versus an internet resource like Wikipedia, the social problem is clarified. If you and your neighbor seek out the entry on climate change on Wikipedia, you will read the same material. You don’t have to agree with the statements, but you have a starting point of facts. Wikipedia isn’t after your data, and it isn’t selling you ads. It operates on a nonprofit model that has the company on a shoestring budget by internet standards.
But if you and your neighbor do the same search on Google, there is a strong chance the results you get will be different based on your search history. Some of those results may be better than others. You and your neighbor may well get different “facts.”
This is where the government’s case about Google might be most valuable to the public at large — many of whom use Google’s products without complaint and are unlikely to grasp the nuances of “consumer harm” the government will have to prove.
But if the federal lawyers can pull back the veil on Google, they will do great good. They need to show the public just how deeply internet companies profile us, how they construct eerily accurate avatars based on our online behavior and how they use that material to sell us to advertisers and to manipulate us into staying with them online — using game theory and algorithmic reinforcement of our likes, dislikes, prejudices and biases. They know things about us we would hide even from ourselves.
It’s unfortunate that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt dismissed the antitrust suit as “largely driven by Republicans, at the end of a term of a president whose polling indicates that he is unlikely to be re-elected.”
Political parties should be irrelevant to the national concern our biggest internet companies have created.
The business model Google relies on has made it one of the world’s richest companies. But that model forces it to gather as much information as possible about every user.
An antitrust case won’t address that problem in a meaningful way. That will take new and smart legislation that will put the public and national interests in front of Google’s interest in building a search engine that prints money based on the profiles of its users it creates and sells.
The national crisis Google presents is not its market position. It’s the company’s business model — which is the internet’s business model. That’s what must change. And for it to change, we must first come to a common understanding of how these internet companies function. Armed with that, we can better debate and institute reforms.
— The Dallas Morning News
