Recent presentations from Google outline the company’s goal: to control the means used to bring information to consumers using PCs, Smartphones and even TVs. A monopoly worse than the one Microsoft has been found guilty of, is actually building itself up and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
The latest presentations from Google, available on Bloobble, show the company’s definite mission: to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In our digital age, information is a currency almost as sacred as oil itself. Behind philanthropic intentions and a love for mankind, it seems Google isn’t far from controlling information, and one may ask if what was once a little startup isn’t set to become the digital Big Brother of 2084.
Google is already on your laps and in your pockets
Google is proud to say that “you don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer”, bringing you that answer wherever you are, and who is going to complain? Using their “Search, Ads, Apps” motto, they’ve penetrated markets we never thought they would. They are the number 1 search engine by far and can even be found on consumers’ computers with Google Desktop. Deciding that it wasn’t enough, initiatives like Google Wi-Fi offer wireless Internet access to entire cities like Mountain View and San Francisco. The Empire wants to ensure you can use its services and have access to information anytime, anywhere.
And because not everyone carries a computer everywhere they go, Google brought us information by getting into what almost everyone carries today: phones. At this point, we have to note that even Big Brother didn’t dream of such a presence in people’s lives (what could be closer and more omnipresent to you than your own pocket!). On certain phones like the iPhone, one doesn’t even need to open a browser to access Google as icons allow you to directly access YouTube or Google maps.
At this point, we ought to ask if too much information doesn’t kill information. Aside from the impact the digital age has on newspapers, it seems that the whole journalistic world is bowing down at the feet of the Google god. Online magazines hire entire teams just to tailor their pages and sometimes even cheat by placing tags that will only be seen by the Google bots just so they get to the top of the search lists. Journalists are trained to favor words that are more googled. The Company has managed what no one did before: have Medias willingly tailor information according to its own standards and with no one complaining about it.
Google is watching you and you’re going to watch Google
When you set yourself to control how information is brought to people you also end up deciding what is brought on the channels you control. Hence, on November 5, 2007, they announced the open handset alliance, and on the 12 the availability of the Android SDK. Android is an OS based on Linux for mobile platforms. What’s the big deal? The OS is the omnipresent component of a platform. It decides what can be run, how it runs or what can’t.
What Google is currently accomplishing on Smartphones can also be seen as the best example of what it’s about to do on TVs. Google clearly says in one of the slides we’ve made available, that it wants to target consumers aged 14 to 24 years old, and one way of doing it is bringing its content on TV.
Google’s way of achieving this is so simple it’s surprising no one saw it coming. Since YouTube is so popular and YouTube belongs to Google, Google starts by bringing YouTube to TVs. It has already started by integrating its video service on Apple TV. As it did on the mobile platforms, we can imagine the next step will be an OS for TVs as they use more and more computer-like equipment (watch out for the next Eee TV from Asus and Home Theater PCs). After that, there’s no stopping Google from choosing what we’re going to watch, read, and know.
You may think this is way overboard, but Google itself says it wants to make information “useful”. Usefulness is a subjective concept. What is useful to one may not necessarily be useful to another. Google does spend a considerable amount of time learning who we are. It follows us wherever we go and even monitors what we see, what we click on and even what we buy thanks to applications like Google Cart. At some point however, Google has to decide what it thinks is useful for us. Actually, Google has already taken that step by defining relevancy criteria in its search engine and we are only a step away from telling us what we can watch or not.
Google or gulag?
Will we ever see a Google Union? In a sense, we already have. Those who aren’t in the search engine are out of business and there aren’t any rebels to say otherwise. After hearing so many concerns about Microsoft’s monopoly for the last decade, it’s surprising not to read more comments about a company which has started to manage so much more than our PCs, but all our accesses to information. It’s true that there are competitors and we haven’t completely lost our ability to decide what we’ll see, although, if it isn’t on Google, chances are not many will see it. What we know today is that the Search Engine company decided it was going to organize information, and define what was important and relevant for us and with no significant counter-power; do we think that we’ll have the choice to say otherwise?
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Latest Presentations uploaded on bloobble.com
Without competition, we sure aren’t heading the right way. Thanks for the presentation.
Reducing the number of ways to access information can be considered as an improvement because it helps to find it quickly without to learn and use a lot of different tools.
Unfortunately, consequence is also that the only remaining way is becoming very sensitive to any kind of censorship.
To protect its business, Google can do like other companies are doing: add rules which are driven by its “customers” including political organizations, large companies…It has already be done by Google in China under the pressure of Chinease government.
So it seems very dangerous to have a single way to access the information: it can also become easily the only way to access to “pre selected” information, channels, news….