There was a great article recently on Fast Company’s blog entitled “Google’s success may mark the end of everything else”. You can read it here – http://ow.ly/5PtAM . I enjoyed reading the article, as the domination of the tech space by certain companies has always been a topic of interest to me dating back to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuits. Whereas JD Rucker raises some very valid points, there are also some that I disagree with due to the much bigger picture.
Why we should be cautious – Google’s power over us
The article breaks down the reasons for Google’s dominance into different categories such as mobile and social, although the most important thing is the data that Google currently owns. In our zeal to utilize what was disputably the best search provider on the web, we willingly handed over petabytes of data to Google. An individual user’s data means little, but the web usage data from hundreds of millions of users gives Google the advantage of the best market research data on the planet.
Whereas it was possible for Steve Jobs’ intuition to beat Microsoft’s market research to develop products that could best the software giant, comparing the market research that Jobs had to surmount to Google’s would be like comparing climbing Manitoba’s highest hill to climbing Switzerland’s highest mountain. Both from past experience and from simple common sense, we can come to the conclusion that Google has the ability to consistently create incredible products that users will love. As such, their monopoly should hold.
Why we shouldn’t be afraid – Our power over Google
The thing that the article fails to discuss is our ultimate power over Google: at the end of the day, we don’t have to use Google.
A large reason for Google’s rise to success has been freedom: the freedom that Google provides to its users over other platforms. Android phones allow developers a wider range of freedom than Apple phones through a mostly unfiltered App store. Gmail offers you the freedom to store as much email as you want. Unfiltered search allows you to share with the world whatever you want.
To prevent Google from dominating us unfairly in the internet marketplace, the key will be to hold them to this expectation of freedom. As we put more of our trust in the hands of Google, in exchange for our trust we must analyze Google more and more closely to ensure that our relationship with them is still in our best interest.
The moment our freedom to enjoy choice of internet service provision appears to be under attack, it is up to us to call foul. In the same way that Microsoft was found in contempt of the law for the way it forced software upon us, I imagine that Google’s quest to dominate the internet will inevitably come to this point. If/when we get there, people may turn to the grassroots, and punish Google for abusing our loyalty by migrating to new independent internet services.
Google got to where it is today by providing users of the internet with what they want and need. Although it is a nice dream to imagine that Eric Schmidt quietly waged war with the Government of China for the better of free-speech, the truth is that he did so for the quality of Google’s search results. As such, in a strange way, Google is utilizing data to act democratically: studying us in order to provide us with what the majority of us want. While this sounds a little scary, it should be ultimately okay with us. In order to prevent a larger-scale Google monopoly from turning into a 1984-esque scenario, we must simply hold Google to this goal of providing us with what we want, (while they draw profit,) and not going too far outside of what the data says for their own benefit.
Maybe one day, we should vote for who will become CEO of Google. Maybe this vote will be through a measurement of the attitude of blog posts and Tweets as opposed to ballots. In the meantime, we must look out for our own interests, and maybe try searching on Bing sometimes.
