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Discussion
Mark Choate's on Google's Competitive Advantage
Mark Choate:
Google’s success is dependent upon the assumption that a link from one site to another implied some level of endorsement such that a page with lots of links to it must be better in some way than a page with only a few links to it. Google’s PageRank algorithm (which is how the search results are prioritized) is based in part upon how many other sites link to a given page. If you have two separate pages, both with similar content (as ascertained by word count and position), favor is given to the page to whom more sites link than the other.
When a person participates in a transaction online, a residue is left behind that is meaningful. When one page links to another page, information is embedded in that link, and when a user makes a choice and clicks one link instead of another, there is information about the choice embedded in the action. There is no such residue on books, other than dog-eared pages, smudges and coffee stains, nothing that can compare with the usefulness that that can be gleaned from these fingerprints that are left online.
This has proven to be a remarkably effective strategy for Google, so effective that Google was able to enter the Internet market rather late in the game and very quickly become a leading online business. When Google was launched, Yahoo! was the leading search engine. History has demonstrated that Yahoo’s competitive advantage was not sustainable at all. Why is Google’s story different?
Every day Google learns more about the content that is distributed on the Internet. The knowledge is a consequence of the steady aggregation of knowledge in the form of links created by human beings. As a result, Google’s site makes it easier for me to find the information I am looking for. As Google aggregates this data, the search engine continues to improve. For this reason, it will be very difficult for a new entrant in the market to compete with Google. Even if they were able to reconstruct Google’s software and technical infrastructure, they would not have the years of aggregated data documenting user behavior and capturing those moments of human judgment that Google has already acquired and will continue to acquire.
But what is interesting about Google is that Google isn’t entirely transparent in the same way that Wikipedia is. In fact, Google’s core search algorithm is proprietary and proponents of the Enterprise 2.0 label often say that Enterprise 2.0 firms are moving away from proprietary technology in favor of open standards.
The source of Google’s success is Google’s masterful understanding of the value of the online transaction. They know the value of information and they have taken creative steps to find ways to measure those moments of information exchange that take place so frequently online. Google has not opened up its API to outside developers because of a belief in their part on some intrinsic value in openness. Quite the opposite. They have opened up their API because they have discovered that it is in their best interest to encourage as many transactions with Google as possible, so that Google and Google alone can sleuth through the evidence that is left behind.
Google also isn’t collaborative – at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Google really operates just like any other business. In exchange for a service (like receiving a list of search results), the user gives Google a little piece of information. Google aggregates that information and uses it to improve the search service as well as to create revenue through the sale of advertising. This isn’t collaboration; it’s capitalism.” (http://www.cutter.com/offers/enterprise2.html)
Google as an enclosure of the common
Toni Prug:
"Google is a tool for better utilization of the commons, engineered for vast private profits, whilst relying on the common production and utilization of what it provides. The larger the common, the more websites that Google can access for free and provide as searchable, the better the sales pitch to advert buyers and Google users, and larger the profits. Google utilizes the labour of the common without privatizing it. Yet, as we have seen with the most funding for technology coming from state funds in USA, Google’s PageRank patent – a concept whose history of has recently been developed (Franceschet 2010) – is held by Stanford university who also got a large number of shares in the company. While the commons are open, the source on which Google built its empire, the algorithm producing their presentation to the users, is closed. Google’s use of the data it stores on its users is also entirely opaque. Their book digitizing is another project where Google used commons to create a vast catalogue of commodities. Again, like in the case of their search system, it uses what the common produces, adds value to it by making the access easier, and repackages it into forms which accommodate profit streams. You cannot copy and paste books that google scans and provides on their website, although they might be copyright free. All of the Google’s processing power is proudly done on cheap hardware running versions of Free Software operating systems, another commons on which Google business model entirely depends.
Google confirms the thesis that ‘capitalist abstraction rests on the common and cannot survive without it, but can only instead constantly try to mystify it’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 159). The example of estate agents is another illustration of it: ‘location, location, location’ is a name for the proximity of the property to the common, to quality of the neighbourhood. It is commons like parks, cultural events, libraries, recreation, education, child care, health, transport facilities, that give value to private property (2009, 156). Google is like estate agents, it places its services in the midst of the best common they can find. In both cases, the larger and better the common, larger their profits can grow, once embedded into the flow of the common being produced and utilized." (http://hackthestate.org/2010/03/05/series-on-commuonism-open-process-the-organizational-spirit-of-the-internet-model-2/)
We need Open Process Search Systems to replace Google
Toni Prug:
"? Search systems, as several participants at the Deep Search conference noted, is an essential component of the Web. And given the importance of the Web, and its embeddedness into multiple key aspects of life, the society cannot do without one. The architecture and protocols of the Internet and the Web might be open, developed by IETF via open process, running mostly Free Software, but the architecture of search systems remains closed. This is not good enough. As part of the democratic practice of the common, we have to have search systems built on the basis of IETF and Free Software principles. We need Open Process search systems.
Search systems have four distinct components: Crawler, Index, Search and Rank, and GUI. We could and should build a public infrastructure where first two components are shared, and on top of the indexed Web, open interfaces to various Search and Rank algorithms and user interfaces are provided (Rieder 2008). There are different ways this could be done. One is through existing grid systems used in academia, this system is already distributed, staffed with highly skilled people and like the rest of the Web, mostly built using Free Software. Other option is to internationalize Google. A worldwide public organization could demand from USA to break Google search system away from the rest of the company, release all knowledge to do with how it operates (technical documentation) into the common and make it into a separate globally owned company. Democratic ownership would also ensure accountability in dealing with user data, something Google arrogantly refuses to do. The form of such global ownership, the model of the new management of the commons, remains an issue to solve. Google uses Free Software to utilize the commons (Web) as their core profit stream. Yet neither belong to any single nation.
Hence, the solution on how to manage it should not belong to any single nation’s economic and legal system – regardless of where the Google corporation, or any other entity utilizing the commons for the profit, is legally based. Indeed, in the discussion on the patenting of biological material, the question of disclosing the origin of the material part of a patent application is one of the key political issues (Howard 2008). When a seed of a Brazilian, or an Indian origin is to be patented, mandating disclosing the origin in the application can be used to deny bio-piracy by the more developed economies of the biological material originating in less developed countries. In a similar way, who gives the Google right to utilize what is common to the world, the Web, for private profit and without global accountability?
Why would we allow Google to be subject to the laws of any single state? The French state attempt to control what Google does within their web-territory renders the tension between the commons, for profit organizations and the state visible. The question is then, why do not other organizations, in other states, do what Google does, and why not use them instead? They might do so in future better than Google does, and thus become a predominantly used system, but that is beyond the point. They would be under the same logic presented here, regardless of their location. Furthermore, i can limit my websites exposure to Google by denying their spiders access to it. That still does not address the core issues at stake here. Google would still be utilizing everything that belongs to economic system of which i’m part of, which at minimum, in the narrowest sense, is the national economy to which i pay taxes, in which i live and work, in which i produce and consume. As a member of such entity, as a citizen of a state, i want to assert the ability to dictate conditions under which anyone, including Google, utilizes anything produced by any members of the state i live in.
In other words, a state ought to control its economic affairs. Yet, with the Web, such affairs, economic activity, cannot be fully geographically located. Although i work in London/UK, the product of my work may appear is text based, and as such can be hosted by any of the servers i choose for hosting, in large number of states worldwide. Who should have a say in the economic benefits derived from what i produce? The state does it by having me immediately pay taxes on what i earn from it. Institutions which might impose and enforce copyright or patent over it might benefit long term from it too. Yet, organizations such as Google benefit economically from it as well. While the state and institutions i work for have a more direct and historical claims over my work, and while these relations are known, regulated and even democratically controlled to a very limited extent, entities like Google derive economic benefits from it without any regulation or democratic control.
Any organization that seeks to utilize the commons and that does it on the large scale should be, under the some form of democratic management of the commons. No entity should be allowed to utilize the commons without a form of such control. In order to give credit to the remaining Google company and to keep it developing, part of the revenue from the adds would have to go to the company. The difference would be that in this case accountable organization would be setting what kind of adverts to accept, or reject, instead of relying on couple of super rich people and their sense of good and evil. Although, banning adverts for guns is a welcome decision (Lowe 2009, 140).
In short, the issue of utilization of the commons ought not be left to the capitalist corporations. First the states, like the French are trying to do now, and then us, the political multitude in becoming, should intervene. The disruption that Google’s project introduce into the sectors adopting the possibilities of new technologies, mass book scanning for example, are welcome. But not under the rules chosen by the Google’s board." (http://hackthestate.org/2010/03/05/series-on-commuonism-open-process-the-organizational-spirit-of-the-internet-model-2/)
