 Well, good afternoon. My name is Jonathan Zittrin. I have the honor of teaching cyber law in these parts and I also have the distinct honor of introducing Siva Vaidhayanathan, who is I guess his official bio doesn't quite capture just how amazing he is because it only makes him look like a professor Which you know, that's great and all that But when you say professor of media studies he's actually mastered media studies in the sense of having appeared successfully on the John Stewart show on the one hand and Also has sort of become the darling of Glenn Beck on the other hand in ways that I will let him explain But let's just say that this book has found purchase in many places including those sometimes thought of as inhospitable to intellectual And that said rather delicately one of the amazing virtues of Siva is you know exactly where he stands I wouldn't call him Doctrinair, he's not but I would say that he speaks lucidly plainly straightforwardly and In the best of ways iconoclastically This is not somebody looking to make friends ahead of Establishing what is true and I think you'll see that Present in the presentation today and the questions and answers that follow a few logistical notes This is being not live webcast but recorded then will later be put on a webcast Index six ways from Sunday by Google and push to the bottom of the search results But you should be aware that should you participate in some way in the proceedings today You could find yourself forever on the internet and The book is available in the back of the room for $25 hello hello and Am I right Siva that you'd be willing to sign the books in some way so With that we're gonna hear about 40 minutes from Siva then question and answer and I'm just glad the dog pile didn't end up being the thing that took off because then it would be the dog Pialization yeah, everything and that just wouldn't be as credible. So Anyway with that I give you Siva bite. Hi, anything. Thank you Siva This is it's always a thrill and an honor to speak at a Berkman event and to speak at HLS Sad to see that even though HLS has managed to take over two branches of government It has not taken over the clouds and does not yet dictate the weather So but I understand people in MIT are working on that and they're very close. So Yeah, so weird stuff going on in the universe Last week Monday and Tuesday Glenn Beck went on a two-day tirade against Google and of course He you know, he drew his thing on the board connecting you know Google to Obama and And of course he has all these stories of a number handful of people friends of ours And you probably know them who have gone back and forth between the executive branch and Google and Of course the omnipresent George Soros the the the wizard behind the curtain of all that is left-wing and dangerous in the world and and so he he was explicitly urging people not to use Google because Try and believe me. It's hard for me to unpack the arguments. I want anyone to say their arguments, right? There's no argument. There's just a drawing of lines, but it has something to do with the fact that both Soros and Google or at least Sergey Brin are supporting Some NGOs that are trying to empower people in Sub-Saharan Africa to make their lives better And this apparently and there may be some US government support as well So this apparently is the root of some sort of left-wing takeover of the world Yeah, if only it were that easy, but So that I mean, I was really scared that somehow people would start attaching my work to this paranoid anti-Google tirade and and what I found was I have a number of Radio interviews that I've done in the past two weeks and then scheduled in the future and I'm getting an increasing number of invitations from AM drive-time talk and some of the hosts are They're not quite willing to articulate and I'm sure that's the wrong verb the The Glenn Beck position, but they are poking at the notion that Google stands in for some sort of elements of the elite that secretly runs our culture and Determines our our value system and that actually the way they express it Scares me because I hope I don't say it that way But I could see how it could my argument could actually be misinterpreted or attached to that because The reason I wrote this book is well, there are a number of reasons I'm gonna get through them but but fundamentally I Started growing concerned around 2004 that the audacity of the company and the brilliance of the company and the success of the company and the ease of use and the And the pure pleasure of using its service and really it's fun, right? It's fun and it was fun in 2000 to use this This service that you know for which we write no checks Often point out to my students You probably love Google because you write no checks to Google and we hate Comcast because we write checks to Comcast And that's not that simple, but that's it's a factor, right? and and and I I grew increasingly concerned that we were allowing one company to Influence heavily our value system. What was true? What was relevant in Google's terms, right? That's the term of art for search engines relevance What was valuable? What mattered in the world and and and my concern of course is tempered by the fact that I'm in awe of the decisions that went into making sense of The web and that's fundamentally what Google has done for us because the web was Nonsense before a decent search engine, right? It was Like webby in the worst possible way you had to hope you found the first page from which to launch your Your meanderings you're surfing and then follow a series of links And hope you could reconstruct the trail later and recommend URLs to people and and that was a lot of work And it was not always easy to Replicate the trail And so the notion that knowledge was actually usable pre-Google was was hard to imagine it actually was as new as it was and as cool as it was we needed this rather amazing insight That fed into Google's original page rank algorithm to help us navigate and make sense of the web and so I This is one of those problems that fascinates me, right? Here's a fundamentally good thing for us and a fundamentally good thing I think for the world and yet there is a reason to worry and that's why I chose worry instead of panic You know and and I I think there's a real difference between worrying and panicking, right? When you worry you are allowed to think right you allow yourself to think when you panic you shut down all thought And so now I find myself in this weird position of trying to move panic to worry and also in some ways minimize the Edges to worry because I want more than anything to have a more thoughtful Conversation about our information ecosystem in every way and Google is a beautiful place to start that conversation Because it touches so many different areas of our information ecosystem now I said I wanted to explain for a few reasons why I wrote this book and I took five years to write this book Not that I was writing every minute of those five years. Of course. It'd be a much longer book. It'd be like like Jonathan's book No, no, no, it's a it's like, you know, it's it's about half the size of John's book not half as good by the way But it's it is a book that took a tremendous amount of false starts to to really make it work Largely because Google does something new and big and special every month That's worthy of attention until the point I had to actually sort of write that whole thing off and say I cannot keep track of all the Google wants to do it cannot be my job I can't write a biography of the company But I want to look at some big themes that might still be relevant five years from now because the last you Want to do is write a book that doesn't matter five years from now because you might as well write a website Or something else that that has that sort of temporality and disposability So that was a huge challenge the other challenges I became a father five years ago and it turns out I don't know if you know this but having little kids is really bad for writing Books there they're really no help at all In my case and it may not be universal but my daughter needed would you know attention and kept saying feed me Change me me me me and there really was no no real time to sort of play around with ideas and work at long stretches My dog is a great help. She's just sat right there at my feet, but the kid knows so now she's five and and she's and now She's thrilled that I'm done, you know, and she she's actually Decided that Google is a person and I overheard her tell one of her friends My papa flew to California and met Google at a party So I and I haven't just abused her on this right because my my wife won't let me Explode her Santa Claus fantasies. It's a bone of contention in our marriage So I'm gonna hold on to the Google as a person fantasy as long as I can and retribution and then we can destroy her Convincer that both her parents are liars at some point But in that process now she is Demanded that I I write no more grown-up books My next book has to be about a hippopotamus who travels to all 50 states. So that's my next project but Another inspiration for this grown-up book came from our friend. Yo, hi who? Had a sentence near the end of the wealth of networks And this is the sentence right Because the wealth of networks is a tremendously optimistic work It's a it's a it's a long and detailed case about fundamental transformations in power and perhaps well Over time and it it makes the case. I think fairly convincingly That many of the assumptions that we've been bringing to discussions of political economy for a couple of centuries are now under some serious pressure Because for for no other reason scarcity of some of our important activities and resources is no longer a factor, but he And of course, he's thrilled by the rise of decentralization in terms of knowledge distribution But he warns things could easily change right. He's certainly not going to be Fooled by this this idea that as the internet has been or as our information ecosystem has been it must always be And he raises this warning near the end of the book And so reading this sentence when the book came out I Started thinking that very question. I thought this is something worth following I didn't know that I wanted to write a book at this moment But I knew this was something to pay attention to and soon after that, of course We started learning about Google's project to scan in millions of books from libraries around the world And that seemed to me to be a perfect example of hubris and and something we should watch very closely because From the moment of its announcement one that did not have any idea how it would end up And I think we all know that it has not ended up as it was originally described So it also occurred to me as I was reading around about Google that that not enough people understood that this is Google's corporate mission statement right to organize the world's information to make it universally accessible This terrifies me Frankly, it terrifies me that any company would assume that it has that goal and that ability within its Talent pool within its Collection of brilliant people And it terrifies me because I don't know I'm you know We're not that far from the 20th century and when people make huge universal pronouncements like that I get a little bit skittish right we had a few of those in the 20th century didn't work out so well You know, I'm a pragmatist. I like I'm more comfortable when I'm really smart really powerful people and institutions make Realistic pronouncements about what they want to do in the world even if I disagree with the pronouncement at least I know where they stand this This alarms me. It certainly Makes me worry right doesn't make me panic, but it makes me worry right because what could come out of this is some lovely things as Certainly, we've seen right most of what Google does is is lovely Um, but then I read about an interview that Sergey Brin had done in which he was asked what Would the perfect search engine be like and he said it would be like the mind of God This really made me worry And so I did a Google image search for the mind of God And I found some interesting things and one of the things you'll see here is of course You don't see the Episcopal church, right? You don't see reform Judaism You don't see the major mainstream religions presenting images and and using the texturing the mind of God They don't have to right because in the real world That's where the conversation is but in the web you get a much more marginal set of conversations and this I think points out the fact that while Google is indexing the web and Presenting the web to us let us not conflate the web with The world right the world's information and the web are not Anything close to the same thing and the value system of the world and the value system the web Thank goodness are not anything close to the same And so I thought that was a really important insight and I wanted to build upon that Of course, I started thinking about this almost theological vision of get of of of Google and I realized well Hey, you know Google's kind of omnipresent and Omnipotent in terms of revenue and and it's omniscient of course and and it claims benevolence, right? And this this this was again making me worry, right? Being a pragmatist. I wanted companies to act like companies and not act like Churches and and company leaders not to act like theologians knowing well. I mean, I'm a PhD in American history I know that you know every major corporate leader from Carnegie to Ford had a Theological bend to his vision of the world. So this is not unusual in American corporate history to use theological language But still it made me worry. So these worries are piling up around 2004 2005 when I decided I really had to write a book about Google And what I wanted to talk about was our blind faith I wanted to talk about the fact that for many people many of my dear friends many of my Colleagues and many of the people I respect immensely around 2004 2005 there was a sense and It's it's been punctured in a healthy way But there was a sense that if Google was going to launch a big initiative It would probably improve the world and the benefits would greatly outweigh the costs and There was a lot of hyperbole in the air at the time especially around the Google books project and this again Put me ill at ease So I wanted to know why we love Google. I wanted to understand the nature of that love, right? Which certainly struck me as more like agape than arrows, but still I wanted to I wanted to get the sense More than the sort of cheap and easy answer that we don't write a check for Google And we do write a check to Comcast that you know, that's a reason enough But but there's more to it right because there's such a deep trust There's such a deep suspension of disbelief when you engage with Google and for most people Who don't necessarily know what a server is and don't necessarily know what an algorithm is or does and we are talking about most people Use Google. This was my concern. What do they think is happening there? What do they think is the nature of the transaction? What do they think they're getting from Google and what do they think they're giving to Google? And so I decided that knowing full well here I was going to try to sell a book in a market first the market of book proposals and then the market of Public attention that competing with Canaletta was folly right competing with Jeff Jarvis is folly They are going to get the they get to ride on the plane They you know they get to hang out with the big guys they get to tell the inside story They get to tell the biography or they get to tell the world in Jarvis's case that everyone should behave like the Google guys because then everyone will be as rich as Google somehow and And so I knew that that world was not for me that story was not for me I wanted to pay attention to us. I am concerned and remain concerned About the ways we invite Google into our lives how we use it whether we use it well What we learn from it and what we fail to learn from it and so that was my motivation To write the people's Google book Not knowing I would end up on a.m. Morning talk radio to talk about this couldn't predict that nonetheless So here's a story to talk about to sort of describe our poverty of The poverty of our intellectual moment Summer of 2009 the aspen ideas festival Eric Schmidt is invited to give a presentation as he often is at events like the aspen ideas festival and after his talk brian lair who's a An npr Wnyc in new york he's a radio host npr affiliate He stands up and he says eric Have we reached the point where google is so important For the world of information and so dominant in the market that we might need to consider Regulating it like a public utility And there's laughter. There's laughter. This is such an absurd question to ask in the united states of america in 2009 And that struck me first like is it really an absurd question? Now I know we all knew that people were laughing because they knew that schmitt was probably making a funny face at that moment I was listening to do it on the radio. So I couldn't really be sure But schmitt's response was essentially well, you won't be surprised to hear my answer is no And his initial response was basically to say look We've already tried the command economy in the 20th century and horrible things came from it And so the last thing we want is for the state to tell businesses what to do in every case And we really should trust in the free market and entrepreneurship and that'll create a much more just world As if those are the only two choices we have right and fortunately brian lair smart guy saw right through that and said Wait a minute. That's An unfair answer that doesn't address the question. We just had this big banking crisis, you know It's not an either or question of you know Stalin or You know, I don't know In rand right those aren't the two choices right those aren't the two choices. We're living we're living with here and And so he challenged him again and so schmitt responded He said so well again, my answer would be no We run google based on a set of values and principles and we work very hard to make sure people know What they are and i'm actually convinced we don't actually understand all the values and principles Um, and then he basically says look google's drawn to be good Right the opposite of jessica rabbit right i'm jessica rabbit says i'm i'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way right google is basically drawn to be good It's designed to be good and he says regardless of who runs the company google will always be good therefore Hands off don't mess with us don't pay too much attention Because after all you know us right you love us and we're always good this trick Really worries me and it's it's a trick and it's actually been remarkably successful and google's not the only company that does this right, but this Really worried me because this is essentially an argument against politics and i'll get i'll return to why that is true Now the fact is when it comes to that question about regulation That's a the wrong question because as we know google is regulated in so many different ways right Take one pervasive instrument of regulation the copyright system It's no accident that google has dozens of lawyers devoted to copyright issues working there right because it's a regulatory system And google has to manage the regulatory system antitrust They deal with patents they deal with Uh securities regulation every day right there's so many different regulatory systems that deal with google and google deals with So let's not pretend for a second that any market and any market player anywhere in the world is free Right the state touches everything everything touches the state That's that's the world we live in to start an argument pretending otherwise Leads us down that absurd road where you can just make a joke about oh, do you really want to live under Stalin right? Uh, and in fact that that's one of the things that really bug me that talk about especially talk about firms that deal with information technology the conversation often ends At that laugh line and doesn't actually go any deeper So we're not allowed to ask what would be best. We're not allowed to play around with different models and ideas So I wanted to so walk sort of walk through three big areas of google's activities and show that they have different levels of activity Different levels of responsibility Over the content they deliver and therefore probably demand different models of regulation And again, assuming that there is a level of regulation everywhere some level now the first I want to introduce is rank and link And this is what google does mostly and that's what we're most familiar with It's what it's what search is all about right if it ranks stuff and it presents links Now in the rank and link model google doesn't pay for the content doesn't create the content doesn't invite the content We do that right we're writing stuff. We're posting stuff And it sits on third-party servers google's not responsible for those servers doesn't have to keep them doesn't have to keep the lights on Doesn't have to make sure that the content is legal doesn't have to make sure the content is Good or bad But when it comes to how it presents it to us then it starts asking some questions right and depending on the context The legal context the state in which google's operating you're going to get different levels of regulation So you get a high level of regulation obviously in a place like the people's republic of china a moderate level of regulation in a place Where for instance nudity or pornography is highly restricted less Intensive level of regulation in a place like western europe where hate speech is illegal and of course a very low level of regulation here in the united states where copyright infringement And occasionally other sorts of abrogations might influence google to take down a link or take down something from an index But this is about the least the lowest level of regulation that google should Expect because it is the lowest levels of responsibility right google is Not really responsible for the crazy stuff that we put up on other servers nor should it be and of course we all understand It should not be it should be held to a pretty low level of liability for all the sorts of stuff That we do the second model is what i call host and deliver this is the youtube model where google servers stand there and and google invites us to upload content that we worked on or Stole and and put on google servers And you would imagine that because these are google servers google has a higher level of responsibility for what happens And what sits on those servers and google assumes this level of responsibility Which is why it spends a lot of money hires a lot of people This has to be the worst job in the world to screen youtube videos for icky stuff And there are actually people at youtube whose job it is to sit in a room And wait for the stuff that's been flagged by some computer that tries to measure flesh tones and videos One of the weird things about youtube is that people are still trying to upload porn to youtube Constantly you know like hours per day where the porn is uploaded to youtube Of course, we never have to see it We don't stumble upon it because google does a really good job of filtering it out Combination of using computers to filter it out and humans filter it out What a horrible job not only that they have to screen for pornography and they probably see the worst of the worst And they have to screen for violence and they definitely see the worst of the worst there Because there's a lot of violent stuff that ends up on youtube at least in the united states Imagine the stuff that didn't get there, right? What a horrible job But so that you know, but they do spend some money making sure that they keep youtube A fairly safe pleasant Experience right they they assume some level of responsibility But of course they're willing to deny responsibility By saying that if there is something offensive it is up to us the community or members of the community To tell google To take something down or ask google to take something down and there have been a number of instances of that Right, which is why every video has a little link at the bottom inviting us to report Um unpleasant or unworthy material in case they missed it or in case there's some other community standard They're not aware of uh and the case of uh The prosecution of three google employees in italy last year I think speaks to this even though it's sort of an absurd prosecution One of the many absurd things about the government of italy And I don't even want to get started on that But they they decided to hold these three google officials criminally responsible for a youtube video that had been up for a month Before italian authorities notified google to take it down And it was a video of a young man being bullied and beaten up and it was a horrible video and there were hundreds of Comments opposing this video complaining about this video Beneath it and so the italian court basically said two things one google's making money off of this and so Whatever sort of safe harbor provisions. They think they're operating under and it turns out in EU law with privacy The notion of safe harbor provisions is kind of murky and Very outdated it was all written in 1994 But that's trivia the important thing was hear that uh the italian judge wanted google held responsible because The comments should have constituted notification Right and and implied in that is that google should be more vigilant upfront about Taking down potentially offensive things or things that would violate people's privacy And and that of course is from a us perspective troublesome to to ask google to be so Active upfront in filtering content is to put a tremendous burden on google or any video hosting service And you know for good reason we worry whether those kinds of costs incurred would Make such a business less inviting for investment You can imagine if the biocom copyright lawsuit had gone differently Against google the same results right biocom basically saying no no we don't care what law we helped write in 1998 That says google doesn't have to take anything down until we tell them About it Now we want the law tossed out and flipped around by the court because now google has a responsibility to To Upfront screen for copyright infringement so that they pay for the screening rather than the copyright holder And of course fortunately Google prevailed in that case that's another case of this second model being controversial the third model I think demands the highest level of scrutiny and the highest level of responsibility And that is Capture and serve in this case google actually goes out into the real world and creates digital content that it Scans into its servers holds on its servers and serves up as part of search Or maps in the case of street view right so google street view google earth and the book search program are the Three I think best examples of this model of content delivery google's a publisher here Completely right google is completely responsible for what it captures and publishes at every step google is making editorial decisions yet google wants a single standard Which is why so for instance if you have a problem with the fact that there's an Untoward image of you on street view somewhere and you happen to know to look for yourself Right, which is part of the problem with the opt-out model Which is the single standard google wants for everything google basically says what's the problem? And in every lawsuit about street view google has basically made this case What's the problem? You can always just ask us to remove the image Who knows how many times it's been circulated every week someone sends me an email attachment of something ridiculous from street View because I've given talks about street view all over the world and people say oh He would like this picture of someone urinating, you know, and I get all these weird So and it's one of those things where you wonder like Like how vigilant do we have to be about ourselves that we're constantly looking on street view to see if the google cameras caught us Doing something bad and that's essentially what google is asking us to do Right don't you don't have no need to be embarrassed or or incur harm for this because you can just ask us to remove it After how long I don't know, you know, but nonetheless, this is the standard google wants An opt-out standard right by default everything gets to be in and presented by google and believe me That's a good system for web search I would assert it's not a good system for these other models in which google is responsible at every level In which it is not acting as a network or a conduit, but in fact is acting as a publisher So here's one of the big lessons here right google wants us to believe and often declares publicly that The nasty stuff that it presents to us through web search Is a reflection of how ugly the web is and not the particular values and decisions baked into the algorithm And this is really important. And so this is a famous, uh search, right? You're probably familiar with it search for the word jew. This was done August you can tell by the moon landing uh of of 2009 And I should probably should repeat the search for I give this presentation often enough, but you know It's probably not that different today And the first entry is wikipedia, which often happens on google search results, especially about What it would call controversial or offensive results And of course jewacht news comes up essentially second jewacht news is a virulently anti-semitic site It pops up often in any search about jewish-related subjects or judaism or the holocaust And it's because there's been a google bombing campaign by Anti-semites to promote this one site and of course anti-semites like many other highly motivated groups Has this organized campaign right to to create links and and nest all their pages to promote this one Site and of course anti-semites in particular tend not to have jobs or dates So they have lots of time to do this sort of thing And and and so what you end up with is Is that it's really hard to displace this finding and a number of years ago I think it was around 2004 The anti-defamation league had a meeting with with mr. Brinn and said, you know, we've got a problem here Right, we've been we've been trying to promote Other they've been trying to do some google bombing themselves and organized campaigns to to move this down and move other things up And and it has been working, you know can google help and what's the deal? Why are you presenting this horrible result for this word? You know some eighth graders not going to know not to type in these three letters And is going to you know is going to come up with this this really nasty result And and brinn basically said look it's not us. It's the computers right It's not us. It's the algorithm. This is how we do our job You don't want to have a situation where where we have human intervention In in the search results that would that would not be good You know what we're going to do and this is what he did he he decided first of all As far as I know at the time and I think still he doesn't sell any ads google doesn't sell any ads on this search term And and that's a good thing because who knows what kind of products would come up But the offensive search results Link comes up at the top where a paid ad might be on many other searches And if you click on that it gives this same kind of explanation. It's not us. It's the computers in fact I quoted from it And this one I did run this morning And as you can see basically it says That The beliefs and preferences of those who work at google as well as the opinions of the general public Do not determine or impact our search results This is where I move beyond worry because that's a lie, right? That's an absolute lie. That happens all the time Let me give you one recent example about a year ago People started discovering that if you do a google image search for michelle obama You get a horrible racist caricature as the top result again google bombing by racists This was alarming and disgusting to everyone involved and so Without telling anyone google removed the image from its index So it no longer showed up for about two weeks until A number of people started raising the question of hey, what about the the jew watch news problem Like, you know, why did you do it for this image of michelle obama and not for for the jew watch news problem? And they didn't have a good answer because they're in a good answer and believe me I'm sympathetic to the fact that there is no good answer And i'm not i'm not going to argue that they should scrub jew watch news from the index or or Manipulated to decrease it. I just want to point out that it is Wrong to say that they never do this because they do do this now They ended up having to backtrack and replace this image in the index and last time I checked It was still the number one result for michelle obama in google image search and you probably check yourself now it may still be Obviously i'm not willing to put it into a presentation And that's uh, this is i mean again, it's not like put me in charge of google I'm going to make the right decision here because there is no good choice, but at least At least I would like the company to be honest about the fact that there is no good choice Now it turns out right now. We're in the middle of a pretty hot search engine optimization arms race We've been a number of accounts recently overstock.com jc penny. They've been discovered abrogating the terms of service basically just angering google by doing some black hat SEO tactics to try to pump up Their results the most fascinating is overstock.com where they were paying People with dot edu domains to create links to overstock.com products because google in its wisdom Has tended to favor links coming from dot edu over dot com because they're more likely to be reliable, right? Hey, we're reliable We'll tell you what Closed maybe we shouldn't be telling people what closed about but still um, you know, but that's that's and it's not an unreasonable value judgment to make when making an algorithm, right? And we're always making value judgments. We're making algorithms. Um, so of course overstock.com figured this out And started pumping up its results by getting all these dot edu links Google found it decided you punish, right? Uh decided like in an old testament way to punish overstock.com as it had punished jc penny Sometime before and so google's doing this massive revision and today on the google's blog Uh, it it announced a major change. It says will alter about 12 of the queries And this is what the blog says This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites Sites which are low value add for users Their grammar not mine Uh copy content from other websites or just that are i'm sorry or that are just not very useful At the same time it will provide better rankings for high quality sites sites with original content and information such as research In-depth reports and thoughtful analysis and so on what I wonder is how this is going to affect huffington post Right because this kind of describes all the crap on huffington post Right and huffington post is the reason that it was valuable enough for aol to get into another ridiculous deal Is that it's mastered seo Right and the and one of the reasons that one of the implications of it mastering search engine optimization is that Uh local newspapers are screaming at them because if you So i'll give you an example there was um At my university there was a horrible, uh, uh murder one student of another last spring and When I was following people tweeting about it I noticed that almost all the links to this story were huffington post Repurposing of my local newspaper In which people were getting just enough information because all you need for most daily updates is is the lead paragraph Just enough information about it From huffington post therefore pumping up huffington post Add position and not going to the charlotte civil daily progress Right that's the sort of practice huffington post goes through but because Huffington post is what you find in any google search of any current news event almost always You tend not to end up on the landing page of the original content provider It's a huge challenge within journalism. It's not really my thing. I don't you know, I'm not I don't have a dog in that fight It's whatever but that is what's going on here This is probably not about huffington. This is actually much more about the content farm Production that's going on That's also corrupting google news and to some degree the larger search engines And it probably has something to do with the overstock.com move as well But tell me that's not human beings making value judgments about what goes into search, right? Tell me that this statement doesn't directly Contradict this statement Right the difference is of course It's not like they're putting a particular editorial decision this page. Yes. This page. No into the algorithm They always do it at one degree, right? They just alter the alter what counts in general knowing that the results will be the same google's changing in a lot of ways not just That they're in this seo arms race, which by the way is creating a lot of chaos In the search results, right? One of the one of the crazy things I I surveyed as much social science as I could about search engines One of the crazy things about trying to study search engines from an academic perspective Um is that you can't repeat experiments You know like you do the run the same search an hour later You're likely to get different results you run the same search two counties over you get different results You run the same search from a different browser in the same computer you get different results, right? I mean there's the weight there's just no way to control for all the variables So there's no way to say google does the following in any in any consistent way And the people who have done the interesting studies of search result results All all did publish their work around 2002 3 and 4 Before google's algorithms were as as quickly updated as they are now, right? It was it was much more stable back then what's going on here now And google is very explicit about this is that search results are increasingly personalized increasingly localized Right that it's all about user satisfaction and google has always been about speed Its user studies in the early days showed that its big advantage was speed, especially in the dial-up world That's why google has the blank page. It's not just an aesthetic choice It was a soothing result right the first time he found google and I did on my blog I asked people tell me about your first time, you know, and that's all that's what they said Like, you know, the web was crazy There were gopher screaming at me and things doing all kinds of stupid stuff and and and bright lights and all of a sudden I found Google so cool and calm, you know, but it actually it loaded faster That was one of the big decisions they made and one of the course choices And the fact that they at the very moment that there was a whole lot of surplus bandwidth and surplus service space available You know around 2000 when a lot of companies went out of business google scooped it all up to make sure that their system was really fast They had the best processing power the best bandwidth So google returns results in split seconds And you know, you might not think that matters because we like to think we're above that But no like a tenth of a second matters to our satisfaction And google has consistent results showing that so it's all about speed. It's all about pushing more and more information out there It's all about favoring the new. These are some of the changes also temporality matters Right, especially in the age of twitter, right temporality matters and search results, which means search results are increasingly biased toward the new And that can be good if you're trying to keep up with what's going on in north africa But it's not necessarily good if you're trying to figure out How a big idea moved over time even the last 10 years, right? It's not necessarily the best situation, but in trying to keep everything fresh This is the these are the value choices google is making which makes it better for shopping Right google is getting better for shopping every day Not surprising that this is their goal After all if you look at the way that bing is advertised, it's all about shopping Nobody ever said there's no commercial. It says go to bing to Figure out climate change Right. No, there's no commercial says you only have questions about climate change use bing right. No It's you want to book an airline ticket? You want to shop for shoes bing is a decision engine. It's all about shopping Right and frankly most of what we do online is shopping and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm all in favor of shopping but let's Sever these two value systems from our point of view and I think this is really important google is getting better and better for shopping every day Therefore it's getting worse and worse for learning every day Now we had had a really good ride for 12 years in which one search engine has actually done a really good job Helping us shop and helping us learn. I'm convinced that that's not going to be the case very much longer And we are going to have to start pushing at this system Experimenting in new ways trying to figure out new and better ways To enhance learning in this environment or it's going to all be about shopping now That eric schmidt quote that was a direct appeal to the ethic of corporate social responsibility And this is what makes me worry most and i'm giving you a little hint This is probably going to be my next book if not book article Well the hippopotamus book is next after the hippopotamus book I'll probably have to write about corporate social responsibility because it fascinates me I wonder i'm not convinced but i have a hunch The corporate responsibility has gotten us into all kinds of trouble It's been a growing and pervasive ideology in the private sector since the late 1960s And i'm convinced that it is depoliticizing us Maybe i'm not convinced but this is what i want to test that it's depoliticizing us It's it's using our sense of consumer satisfaction to alleviate guilt just enough That we don't make the next step to political activism This deeply worries me i'm not sure i'm right I have to confess i should drive my prius to whole foods every couple days right I'm as guilty as anybody i've fallen for corporate responsibility claims But one of the things i learned from google which is the most sincere Example of corporate responsibility i can find i mean they really buy this stuff right they they uh they have arguments Of ethical nature at the highest levels every day and at every point in the company as far as i can tell They're not lying to us about this They may be lying to themselves. That's what i'm afraid of and ultimately what i'm afraid of is that eric schmidt argument Don't pay attention to us. Don't ask hard questions of us. Don't invite state regulation where it might actually create an optimal situation because Trust us. We're good. Isn't it better to make it a matter of consumer choice After all if we were bad you would just go to bing If we were bad you would just go to yahoo If you were bad you would just go to yandex or one of the other russian search engines that actually does better than google and russia so So this is something that makes me worry quite a bit because i think we may have caused ourselves more trouble Than we wanted and there's a reason that corporate social responsibility is so dominant and so important In our current socio political and economic situation and that is that It's an essential element of both libertarianism and neoliberalism. It is a big element. You may remember about it a year and a half ago When john mackey the ceo of whole foods wrote an op-ed in the wall street journal Against the health care plan and his argument if i may sum it up was something like We don't need any sort of big national program for health care Because look at my company. I make sure my employees have great health care and every company should be as good as my company A and b he ended it with something like and by the way if you just ate a lot of kale You would never get cancer and so why do we have to worry? And i've tried kale i've driven my Priests to whole foods to buy kale and i'm not going back for kale, but that's that's a whole other talk I've got a whole kale talk But basically something interesting happened in 1970 Because this gentleman Milton Friedman Wrote an op-ed in a short article in the new york times magazine in which he said This this was the title of social responsibility of businesses to increase its profits and he was making A macroeconomic and microeconomic case that this is what firms should do They are actually legally obligated to enhance value for their shareholders and all this nonsense It was growing through the 1960s that corporations should be respectful of their various stakeholders He basically said this this is just ridiculous, you know, we should Just push on to make money Now you would think that libertarians would embrace much of what freeman of course they didn't embrace much of what freeman had to say But freeman was actually not a libertarian And the recoil intellectually and libertarian Communities was actually quite interesting, but there's there's a There's a An interesting thing that grows out of this and that is that within libertarian circle circles It became really clear that if corporations don't offer consumers and investors choices That are socially responsible that that can mitigate negative externalities like pollution and discrimination If that doesn't happen We still have the problems in the world and we're going to have to invite the state in to solve them Right, we're going to have to invite the state in to solve market failures We're going to have to invite the state in to mitigate negative externalities like cancer And we don't want that right so how do we how do we counter the argument that the market doesn't satisfy everything we need? And if the market can actually create harms Without the state well, let's make it let's let's build that into market choice And this trick has worked to the point where people who are not libertarians who are basically just neoliberals have endorsed it as well Which is how we get into our current situation. So this is one of the reasons i'm deeply afraid that it is depoliticized us so There's this concept that i identified in this book that i'll expand on in the next book after the hippopotamus book Called public failure. It's the opposite of market failure market failure We know is when the market can't satisfy a need right and Especially a common good can't uh public good can't satisfy a public good And so we you know The market won't support opera. So we have government institutions that subsidize opera Okay, that's well understood apparently now. It's not that popular argument, but that was the argument market failure i'm sorry public failure is when We design or or Inhibit the state to such a degree that it cannot do its job It cannot do what we charge it to do. We design it to fail Think about the prison system We designed it to fail so we could outsource it to private companies Who have then of course been more expensive and more brutal than the the other system that failed Right, we designed the public schools to fail. So now we outsource billions of dollars to companies that are cleaning up and doing education More expensively and still failing right? This is public failure. And here is I think the the starkest example of public failure After hurricane Katrina The state and federal disaster authorities had been defunded and declawed to such a degree. They couldn't deliver water Thousands of people. So walmart did walmart stepped into the vacuum of public failure an interesting thing happens in the wake of katrina If you follow, um libertarian Arguments coming out of some quarters like george mason university You see this example being put forth for an argument that maybe the state shouldn't be in the disaster relief business at all because after all How could the state possibly create a system that works as well as walmart? Shouldn't we just rely on the fact that walmart will always want to drive its trucks down from arkansas to save Thousands of people because it makes walmart look good Not that people have a choice. They still have to shop only at walmart in most of arkansas and louisiana. Anyway, but thank goodness for walmart All right, don't get me wrong. I'm really glad walmart saved Thousands of lives. I'm glad someone did But isn't it a shame that we had to get to that point, right? And now the argument is flipped on its head. It's not that At least in some circles. It's not that. Hey, maybe we should have actually had a disaster relief system That could have saved thousands of people upfront and been a public effort that we could all have a stake in Instead it becomes hey We don't have to worry walmart will take care of us So this I think is a really major worry Ultimately, this is what i want to leave you with the chaos of the web The chaos of the web demanded governance At the very moment when we were being told or at least we had in our minds that the web was either Ungovernable or best left ungoverned We knew better. We knew that the web in 1999 and 2000 was ugly and messy and and unwieldy and Impossible to use effectively and so Caesar came We essentially accepted the role of Caesar Right. Caesar stepped into a vacuum into into a vacuum of chaos a power vacuum and said I will rule benevolent benevolently And that's essentially most of the citizens of the roam or roam. We're actually pretty happy with how Google rule of google rules Caesar rule Oh, a little slip, right? So um, so what we have in this situation is a benevolent ruler who is Running the web very well Reflecting values that many if not most of us share at least from the united states perspective and doing so in a way that Doesn't demand us to pay it Right. We don't have to pay a tax directly to google. I mean, this is a really neat situation But let's at least get a full understanding of it, right? It's not a situation I necessarily want to change. I do not want to stab Caesar I do not want to call for a coup d'etat. I don't even want to boycott google I think we should embrace google and use it as much as possible But use it intelligently wisely and we should push back at it publicly when we can and when we see a problem And I don't think we have had a mature enough level of discussion about Uh, this major player in our information ecosystem, which is why I think everyone should buy and read my book Thank you very much Yeah, sure. I'll uh, let's talk. Hi So, uh, google and most other search engines do that as well as Collecting what is close to a personal dossier on users and it's also important to remember that there are two levels of google users there's the the Usual google user, which I think is probably the vast majority of google users Those who do not sign in and register with the google service and therefore google knows Only what its cookies can follow On a particular browser and it might not be one person But it's at least one browser and google knows of course the ip number so does know the zip code essentially right It knows where the computer sits and the search results are tailored for that And that's pretty specific in and of itself you get a pretty good level of targeting If your ip number comes from a university They're gonna Relate those search results to what other people at that university set of ip numbers have expressed In the past and and that's not a bad way to guess in terms of both search results and advertisements The google prime users right the super users those of us who have a gmail account or upload things to youtube and a register with google And tend not to log out Um, because we're too lazy, uh, they google has a much richer body of information about What we do and what we care about and what we dream about when we fantasize about and all sorts of other things so Google then uh, essentially, uh, tailors results in that sense So google's doing both of what she said now you could say perhaps we need a regulation that keeps google's profiling at the ip number level and i think that's not a bad Conversation starter and that may actually be a worthwhile policy that sort of intervention though As a blanket top-down Intervention would so threaten this new area of the advertising industry that you end up with All sorts of complaints from for instance major american newspapers that are trying to make money through the same kind of advertising Dot com i'm now an investor and director in tagman and just a whole raft of interactive advertising Companies and actually i'm not sure i would agree with that I think actually they are a they're concerned and b is what they want to deliver a value And the advertiser doesn't really want to know whether you're Uh, 34 or 35 or that he wants to know are you small medium or large? And so actually everybody is disservice by this even the doctor doesn't need to know even the medic doesn't need to know your name Actually ten or ten percent doesn't need to know your name might want to know your age Might want to know your gender might want to know whether you listen arcade fire Whether you watch saturday night live those are the sorts of things that well, and that's why facebook is a valuable Um, uh template for advertising targeting as well So yes name doesn't matter to anybody and they don't care about having a dossier in a formal way about you But they do want to know you as a member of a series of niche communities And then they can effectively associate And it's a really, you know sort of powerful idea within advertising and right now it's the only way anyone's making money in advertising So it's uh, I'm just saying I don't want to I don't want to knock down your idea I actually think your idea is is really fruitful. Um, but that is the the political um barrier to it. So Uh, yeah this gentleman One of the real problems with the old google is not evil You know statement is that you know regardless of what the good intentions are of the people who are currently owning and operating google It's a publicly traded company. At some point it could fall into the hands of people who are perceived as being more evil I you know benet labot rupert murdoch Who are you know pick your favorite corporate villain? Uh, there's no there's no inherent corporate dna that keeps The character of the company the way it is through the retirement and death of its founders for instance Which you know, even if it doesn't publicly taken over that could that that will occur or worse, um poverty Probably may be worse than death for a corporation. So imagine that over the next 10 years the Predictions that jonathan zitron made in his book come true and the the open web matters less and less to us The open internet matters less and less to us the The proprietary lockdown device matters more and more at that point apple or some other company like apple has the ability to Siphon away a significant amount of ad revenue and imagine that the um the gated community of facebook does the same And google ends up not being as wealthy as it is right. It's easy to be good when you're rich That's not a problem, right? If it's a choice If you have almost no money, it's really hard to be good And that may be a situation I think a more likely situation than a massive turnover is a sense that 10 years from now We have no idea what google's financial situation will be we have no idea whether it's going to cut and run on the Book's program. I mean that was one of my fundamental things like why are we trusting and depending on this one Company that at that time had been around for six years when I announced the book search program And at that time had actually been a company for less time than brad pitt and jennifer aniston had been married And and look how well that went right so in other words like companies are ephemeral and by their natures are ephemeral and their existence is ephemeral and their profits are ephemeral and And you know here you had the 150 year old university of michigan Right and the 300 year old harvard university saying oh, please six year old company. Please run Please be the custodian of our of our heritage and our great knowledge And we'll give you access to many millions of dollars of material And we expect essentially no no payment in return And that to me was just absurd. I mean that seemed reckless Because we don't know what the company's going to be like in 10 years and that's I think an important thing Just because google's been really good to us and for us for the last 12 doesn't mean it will be for the next 12 In fact, I would bet that it will be very different So one one of the factors that will is also pushing it to be different besides the bing shopping model is of course The facebookization of everything and so last year, you know time spent on facebook surpasses google and Additionally, I think it's interesting to kind of look outside of the the u.s. context and look internationally I mean facebook has developed agreements with mobile operators in more than 20 countries to actually provide free internet access via mobile devices for folks who've never had Data plans on on mobile devices before but it's through through the facebook zero program Which basically means facebook will be the web for the next billion of people coming online So but what I wanted to actually ask was about again sort of looking at international context What what happens when you start to look at? um Well one other dominant search engines and other spaces but also some of the alternative projects which are would Are marginal now and I'm thinking of you know archive.org or the conversations that seem to be endless conversations about the the digital uh public library that Where they're starting to be a new initiative, you know the berkman's involved in so what what do you see as I guess on one hand in international context on the other hand in terms of possible alternative projects and how they could scale Okay, so that's great because this is actually the conclusion of my book. Um, so two things one I had Three four years ago great hopes for the android initiative and a couple of for a couple reasons when android was first proposed Right in this notion that google would be providing Uh mobile phone operating system. I had assumed I took seriously the policy positions of google at the time that this would help wrench open um our our domestic mobile phone markets and you know Radically alter the position of the FCC on a lot of important questions and eventually google would march to protect network neutrality on The mobile space none of that happened Right, it's now actually oh, but here's my great hope my big hope about android And I don't think anyone at google actually said this explicitly, but I I truly wanted The goal of android ultimately to be a cheap phone a cheap phone that people in countries without Steady electricity could use a cheap phone that could be used on fairly um Low power digital networks rather than the 3g 4g etc networks that we have here and in korea And in europe I wanted and I really and I still remain hopeful that google recognizes That that is where the growth in the mobile phone industry will be Over the next 10 years and it wouldn't it be better to create the first smartphone interface that can work on anybody's nokia Uh, uh, you know five-year-old nokia Rather than have it come on these three four and five hundred dollar devices I dropped mine in a puddle earlier today So my mind's on the expensive mobile phone right now. It actually works right now But you know, but so like it's been very disappointing to see google go for the expensive Phone and I understand that you do that to establish a name to establish a lot of good reviews about it and journalism about it And and it is a lucrative market if you can you know license Your app store out that way too And it's a good way to to become important and android is now the fastest growing The fastest growing Mobile phone platform in the world Yet we haven't seen it adapted for for these areas of the world where If you can imagine connectivity is worse than it is on at&t if that's possible so So that I mean that that never happened it may happen, but it may not happen and Uh, and I I was really hopeful that that would be part of that transformative effort of Android instead it turns to me it seems to me like google's panicking to some degree panicking about facebook panicking about apple and deciding that it really needs to muscle in on that space at the high end of the market and Resign on network neutrality for the mobile space because after all that's where the partner is it It's not and we shouldn't forget When flashing on the don't be evil sign and remembering its big conflict with china a year ago that All those phones are built in china And so there's no way that google pulled out of china And I hate when people say that google pulled out of china It did not google closed down one search engine that was based in the people's rubble of china so that It didn't do the active censoring now It just does passive censoring right the search results are still censored just like they were before It's just the government does it instead of google does it and things are no better for people in china Things are no freer in china and yet google retains thousands of employees doing research Thousands of employees working on mobile phone projects and lots of contracts with companies that frankly Aren't necessarily good for workers There's there's been a lot of nasty things going on in those factories that make our phones that I dropped in a Puddle today and and you know that should be part of how we challenge any company that makes an assertion about corporate social responsibility And so I mean one of the things that happened last year with their their showdown with china is I just saw it from the beginning as as deeply ridiculous and the fact that they they managed to earn cred from Human rights organizations. I thought was shoddy like I thought that there wasn't a real examination What was going on because google did nothing to make life better in china absolutely nothing And google did not pull out of china by any means All they did was a surface level move And I frankly think that because I think companies should do what's good for themselves That google should have just said hey, this is the law in china and it's horrible and we don't like it But what we really don't like is the abrogation of our security Which was the real issue and what I really really bugs me over what happened in china a year ago Is that the story should have been that gmail is insecure and the story should have been that 30 us companies had had its security violated by this same Breach the same people were were were breaching the security of 30 us companies some of them defense contractors That's the story the story is all these stupid companies have really bad security and we're in danger Right, but that didn't become the story it became hey Look how brave google is for standing up for against censorship and for human rights in china when in fact nothing changed To make china better as far as I can tell Nobody in the government of the people's republic of china has been adequately chastened for this despite the fact the secretary of state called them out by name Over this issue in a speech about internet freedom when this was not about internet freedom. This was about security And so that whole event I think Should have raised our concerns in a completely different direction instead Nobody thinks of gmail as basically insecure and people active in In dissident organizations around the world still rely on on gmail and other google products for To do their business and it's probably not always a good move, but you know, we've lost that we've lost that message Yes, I'd like to give you a reference for your corporate social responsibility and then ask a question Gil friend wrote a book called the truth about green business gila has been doing Environmental business consulting for many many years And the book is interesting and i'm sure that he's thought about corporate responsibility, especially as relates to The green movement in very deep ways. I'll talk to you afterwards. I'll write it down. Okay It seems to me That i've been smelling something beginning around and about When egypt turned off the internet People started talking about mesh networks. And how do you get around all this stuff? And maybe there's some way that we should Do a people's internet douglas rushkoff Has called for a conference in september to talk about that Forming a people's internet. There's a group that's that's buying trying to buy a satellite to provide low-cost Access to the poorest people in the world And it seems to me that that you're building some of the foundations around the search part And so I want to ask you Am I smelling something that there might be a fire and is this at all possible? Okay, is it possible? I don't know. Is it worth pursuing? Definitely and i'm i'm firm in the belief that Um Things are as viable as they are desirable, right? So um I don't know that doug rushkoff's meeting is going to produce A takeaway that is someone can run with in the next five years But thank goodness. He's doing it. Thank goodness. We're at least exploring the possibility because now surprise surprise Like 20 years after Al Gore stood up there and talked about the information super highway We're realizing that the privatization of every step in our information ecosystem Has some costs as well as benefits right and that they may not satisfy all our needs It really didn't surprise a lot of people in this room, but we're all sort of realizing that now, especially in the wake of the um The sort of pressures on wiki leaks and so forth that that had gone forth that you know, all of a sudden people were saying Can you imagine corporations are being careful and and chicken? You know, well, of course they are they're corporations, right? Why does this surprise you and when you rely on these corporations this is what you're going to get right? um, and so there may in fact We may in fact need some other models for how to pursue this now I didn't actually get to what the conclusion of my book is the conclusion of my book is something called the human knowledge project Which I say what we need to do is stop focusing on the next six months and start focusing on the next 50 years and say we Want to we may want to and I actually want to create an information ecosystem that levels out The discrepancies and access to information around the world that is what I would love to see in the next 50 years That's what I would love to leave my child and not my child Actually, my child's fine, right? My child can actually get into university databases if she wanted to and look up hippopotamia But what I care about is a child in South Africa, right? Or a child in sudan who doesn't have access to all these amazing things And so often we focus on when we think about information policy and we think about information initiatives We focus on my daughter. We say what would be good for my daughter's classroom? What would be good for my daughter's? Mobile access Or what would be good for me? We're not hurting right? I got more access to information I ever need and I ever knew it will need Right, but we should be trying to focus on those who need it most those who can use it most those who can make the most use of Information on smallpox or malaria right information on effective water use in farming That's the sort of dream we should have about information connectivity It shouldn't be about the five hundred dollar phone Right, and it shouldn't necessarily be about what's good for my students or my daughter That that is my starting point I say we should actually convene a 50 year planning conversation or conversation that plans the next 50 years That says okay, if we're going to get to the point where no kid in sudan has Less access to information than a kid growing up in sweden if we're going to get to that point What will it take to get to that point some of the barriers are political obviously Some parts of the world will not sign on to the system and that's okay We have certain technological barriers, but those are actually the least of our problems We have tremendous ability to actually make this happen Then we have legal and policy challenges copyright first and foremost among them Right that we would actually have to address through legislatures, which actually is how it's supposed to happen And we have a coordination problems across states and across ngo's and so forth And so I would want to bring in representatives of states of ngo's of private companies of libraries around the world and say How do we create a global digital library that could serve this need over 50 years? What are the barriers? Let's list them Let's come up with strategies to approach those barriers and we might even agree at this meeting that it's not worth doing But let's at least agree. It's not worth doing rather than say Hey, look big rich company is going to do it for us because we get nothing good out of that in the long run we get But again satiated right we think oh cotton candy is food And that's not really the lesson that we should be learning or passing on to anybody kind of this weird irony, right? It's all about information, but it strikes me as a very opaque organization So I was wondering if you like if you had access to anybody people in google If you were to able to do interviews and things like that I had polite access right I sat down with a number of important people at google and they gave me their line on How they do what they do and that was very helpful and very kind, but I wasn't writing that kind of book You know, I wasn't trying to get inside what google does the research. I was doing basically I interpret and and repurpose Real work that real social scientists do right. I don't actually know how to do real social science work I was never trained to do it. I have a phd in american studies, which is the undisciplined And so if anything i'm trained as a historian So i'm essentially doing history of the last 12 years and the next six months right or the next 50 years, right? So so my techniques and my sort of My ethic and my approach and my theoretical frameworks come from from history But what i'm doing is i'm i'm looking at scholars like judith barrylon Who's a scholar in israel who's done a lot of the early work on search engine usage? And a lot of user studies I'm I'm using a lot of work on privacy done by legal scholars Or people like michael zimmer at university of milwaukee or university of wisconsin milwaukee And and and sort of building on their findings And working them into my argument, you know So my job is in many ways to be the translator of this much more important and brilliant work being done by People who are working harder than I am And and and actually deserve to be known better So that's not really my purpose my purpose is to Free ride on their labor, but you know if I can help them out, whatever But ultimately I'm trying to bring a new framework for our interaction to google if I can do that So that's my goal and thus I dodged your question about my research methods because I've been dodging that question since my first job interview So, um, I think we have to wrap up right one more. Okay. Yeah Obviously android is an open source Solution I think a lot of people well Prepared it like let's talk about steve jobs and opener. Yeah But ultimately it's it's up to the carriers to implement you know Full-blown android or hobbled or you've got to buy your apps through our store either, you know domestically or abroad So there's a little confusion. I think in the consumer's mind that this is Ultimately the the challenge with giving it away is up to the carriers to implement the the thing so as far as Um, obviously I'm sure Like metro pcs now has like a google phone Prepaid which obviously starts to hit the market that you were discussing. Um, and so the price point will come down on those phones But ultimately doesn't come down to african law true And I agree. I think google realizes that you know, that's really that's where the future is You know the next 50 to 100 years because they're getting away from the investment in You know infrastructure that we've gone through from the distrilized age and they're just going wireless they're just going so um The question is obviously getting back to um, the google books project which seems like it's near and dear to your heart and i'm not in library science, but um, I knew the team over at Here in cambridge who did the ingram viewer and they began sort of playing around with that and Some fascinating insights about sort of culture over the last couple hundred years key to sort of specific terms and words um So if uh for whatever reasons You've addressed today, you know concerns and hesitations about the google books project Like what is what is a viable alternative because Uh, you sort of similar to walmart You know With katrina, you know that they had them and actually home depot both had the best infrastructure Far and away than the u.s. Government or fema could actually get product to people who were in they were in desperate straits Um, you know google has you know this vast Stash of cash they have the infrastructure they're able to go out and say these libraries I would add for now and for now to both of those. True. I agree And meanwhile, you know, there's been some talks about how do we do this or how do we implement it? But google is actually out there Doing it, right? I actually don't think they're doing it. I think that they are Talking about doing it if by it we mean an actual global library project. They're not doing it Um, they're making a big bookstore the biggest used bookstore in the world Which is nice in itself. I love used bookstores. I love shopping I've bought stuff from the google bookstore But that's what they're doing and they're not doing a library and they're not doing it based on the principles of the librarianship And they're not doing it by with the ethics of librarianships to to use one example They don't respect user confidentiality the way librarians would And the libraries to my great frustration have not recognized that there is a fundamental Difference and distinction between these two models Of how to build something to the point where in my own university library, which is a google partner I'm invited from the university library catalog to click on View this through google books and then flip to the google site and at no point am i warned that i'm now exiting a system That does not track my usage and entering a system that does and that i think is deeply irresponsible So that's my problem with the libraries So google's making a bookstore. It's not making a library even though sergi bren wrote an op-ed in the new york times October of last year saying we're building a huge library So in case stanford burns to the ground we'll still have all their books. That's not what they're doing If they were doing that if they were actually interested in preservation And anyone actually works on the project to google never uses preservation talk, right? But brinn hasn't been keyed in on this, right? They're actually dealing with preservation They would deal with high quality scans instead. They're low quality scans. They're really low quality scans sometimes with human hands in the front right they would deal with Something like decent metadata and their metadata is a disaster And they would have a search system that actually made sense and their search system is ridiculous There's no reason for one book to be ranked above another in google book search No reason because there aren't hyperlinks between and among these books and the only thing that they've talked about in recent months Is books that are linked to from other web pages get priority That again biases the new it biases the techie because who makes web links, right? My mom doesn't make web links, but I make web links because I live in the techie world, right? So people in the techie world And you can see the biases that emerge from that are going to have their books favored in google book search That's all we know about google book search search, right? So a librarian would design a search system with a very different set of priorities in there A librarian would focus on the quality of images If especially were if it were about preservation a librarian would key it up with a Print on demand service over time So it would actually be well integrated with public print on demand So there would be redundancy in the situation knowing that all of these files may be unreadable in 50 years But at least we'll have the paper And a librarian would would have built in good metadata from day one instead of scrambling for it later And so I don't think that what google does has done Is anything close to what it claimed it would do or what people thought it would do or what the hyperbole was about And for that reason, I think the job is left undone and it's really up to libraries librarians Universities and governments to build a library over the next 50 years There's no reason we need this service to be super great in five years But we should be able to get it in 50 years and it is going to cost millions of dollars But if we don't want to spend that money, then we don't really want the thing, right? That's that's why I mean it's it's viability is is equal to its desirability if we really want it We can really get it, but if we don't get it means we didn't want it See because exactly which is why I don't want us to think like consumers I want us to think like citizens and that's believe me. That's what people in The highest levels of university administration are saying right now too And that's what especially people serve on boards of regents and boards of governors at universities are saying too Why do we need this acquisition budget in the library? Why do we need this library based scanning program? For preservation when google's got it That's dangerous and that actually puts in sort of anti google ways. It puts everything on google servers You know google's google interior the interior mind of google understands the need for redundancy But we're now putting all our chips on google And that's because we've got all these Folks who aren't necessarily thinking about 50 years down the line. They're thinking about next quarter's budget Making these decisions. So my job is to get us to think 50 years and down the line ideally and sure I might never change a mind and we might Collectively decide it's not worth the effort and not worth the money and I'm happy with that What I don't want us to do is say some of us want it and at least google's doing it because that I think is the Is a really bad situation All right. Well, I'm out of voice So thank you very much