Google Showing Itself to Be full of Shit
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It has been a time from hell for Google. Once the much-loved and unblemished hero of the web, the giant internet group has suffered a series of blows that have exposed for the first time its feet of clay.
The company that stood for "freedom of the net" is accused of humiliatingly submitting to Chinese censorship, conniving at the suppression of freedom in Tibet, exploiting the work of American writers and of running what is arguably the biggest porn and violence website in the business.
The Association of American Publishers joined Agence France-Presse in suing to protect their copyright, and the United States government complained that Google's much-praised satellite maps are too spy-friendly.
And that's not all: Google faces a batch of lawsuits from companies that once benefited from its search engine and which were then consumed by it.
The biggest worry of all, though, is not commercial.
It also faces suits from the US government. There are disputes over breaches of copyright, trademark infringement and invasion of privacy. Some of Google's aggressive gambits into new businesses have brought angry responses from competitors such as Microsoft and Apple, many of which are now collaborating to stop the steamroller in its tracks.
In media-land, it's Stop Google time, as newspaper groups began talking seriously about locking their content away from Google's "spiders", which raid their sites many times a day, "stealing" their copy to sell on to someone else.
The biggest worry of all, though, is not commercial: it is the abrupt shift in sentiment among Google's almost messianic customers, who are suddenly asking awkward questions.
Google, founded eight years ago by a couple of geeks (each now worth more than $10-billion, or R60-billion), had always presented itself as the superb search engine which gloriously spread the internet - and free access to vast amounts of information - across the world.
It made finding information simple for even the least computer-literate, introduced speedy access to academic books and papers, the ability to search out the best online bargains and a super-fast email site. And then there was Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Book Search and Google just-about-everything-else.
Google broke all the business rules and ignored all the textbooks. It never spent a penny on promoting itself, but grew by word of mouth and the joy of using its irresistible - and free - systems. As a result, it became the epitome of corporate virtue, the good guy prepared to take on big business, all for the greater good of humanity.
Its corporate slogan, as every schoolkid knows, is "Don't be evil", and its concept, pursued with brilliance, captured the world's imagination. One commentator remarked: "As far as the Internet ecosystem is concerned, Google is the weather."
But not anymore - or not so much. The Chinese episode was in many ways the most damaging blow yet received to Google's reputation for virtue, integrity and courage. Google's PR machine could have had little idea of the storm it was about to unleash as it made its explosive statement: "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn in response to local law, regulation or policy."
In other words, Google had agreed to block anything embarrassing to the Chinese regime. For mentions of Tiananmen Square, Tibet or abuse of civil liberties, don't look to Google China.
To be fair, none of its critics seemed to care that Google had actually held out longer against the Chinese than any other media group. Microsoft and Yahoo! surrendered a year ago; CNN is often seen as a Chinese mouthpiece; and even Rupert Murdoch, in his search to get his Star TV established in China, sold his highly profitable South China Morning Post for fear that it would anger the Chinese. (Even then he had to throw in the towel last year after almost 20 years of trying.)
Google's problem is that the world expects better of it. It had stood up to the US government and championed free speech, but now, in a single move, it has lost the high ground. One freedom of expression advocacy group, Reporters sans Frontieres, accused Google of hypocrisy: "They have two standards.
One for the US, where they resist government demands for personal information, and one for China, where they are helping the authorities to block thousands of sites." As a result of the cave-in, China now controls the one medium that many thought would elude them.
"Google were the only ones who held out," remarked Peter Pain, a freedom-of-speech campaigner, last week, "so the Chinese government had to block information itself. But now Google will do it for them."
It seems to Google-watchers that the problems "come not as single spies, but in battalions". Its very size and speed of growth already made it a target for those who favour the underdog. The beginnings of the backlash were apparent well before last week, but now it has begun in earnest.
For over a year, media analysts have been warning that, left unchecked, Google has the ability to demolish entire industries wherever it operates: retailers, book publishers (already in dire trouble) and, of course, newspapers and magazines. It would positively wreck the high street as we know it.
Google's ambitions, they claimed, knew no bounds, and Google was blithely prepared to prove them right. In recent weeks it announced deals that will quickly grow its new media tentacles, from buying and selling magazine and newspaper ad space to the radio and television advertising market. It has threatened Microsoft (no one will blame it for that), Apple, Sun Microsystems and even the big telephone companies with rival systems and a new way to make internet calls. Google has not yet moved into oil or farming, but other than those, no business is out of its reach.
Every company contains the seeds of its own destruction, and it may be that even Google, the miracle of the new media age, reached the tipping point in the past week. Yahoo! and other rival search engines are getting their acts together and working to out-Google Google with new products and even better sites. From South Korea comes the news of a new rival, NHN Corp, which has profits of $86-million against Google's $1,7-billion, but which has seen off Google in its local market, delivering far more relevant search results.
"NHN's user-friendly approach outshined its rivals," said an analyst from Samsung Securities in Seoul. Other local sites are trying to outshine it too - pinpricks in the skin of the giant, but between them adding up to a significant threat.
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