Who's afraid of Google?

RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world's most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlour or a satellite image of their neighbour's garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.

And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google's deal with China's censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google's business model assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company's “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user's searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user's e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user's medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).

More JP Morgan than Bill Gates

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.

It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant. Granted, this complaint often comes from sour-grapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google's cocksure assertion of its own holiness, as if it merited unquestioning trust. This after all is the firm that chose “Don't be evil” as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is “not to make money”, as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”. Its ownership structure is set up to protect that vision.

Ironically, there is something rather cloudlike about the multiple complaints surrounding Google. The issues are best parted into two cumuli: a set of “public” arguments about how to regulate Google; and a set of “private” ones for Google's managers, to do with the strategy the firm needs to get through the coming storm. On both counts, Google—contrary to its own propaganda—is much better judged as being just like any other “evil” money-grabbing company.

Grab the money

That is because, from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits, not giving things away. Google is a good example of this. Its “goodness” stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith's invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful—namely helping people to find information (at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares to those people in a finely targeted way.

Given this, the onus of proof is with Google's would-be prosecutors to prove it is doing something wrong. On antitrust, the price that Google charges its advertisers is set by auction, so its monopolistic clout is limited; and it has yet to use its dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did. The same presumption of innocence goes for copyright and privacy. Google's book-search product, for instance, arguably helps rather than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readers to buy copyrighted works. And, despite Big Brotherish talk about knowing what choices people will be making tomorrow, Google has not betrayed the trust of its users over their privacy. If anything, it has been better than its rivals in standing up to prying governments in both America and China.

That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy. Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google's profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.

The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates) can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge for Google's managers: how should they present their case?

One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google's trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.

谁在害怕Google?

作为全世界最流行的搜索引擎，Google在如此多的方面以如此快速度的增长，是很少有公司曾经达到的。以任何标准来衡量，这都是事实：它的市场价值和利润的增长；点击它来搜索新闻、最近的批萨店或者邻居花园的卫星照片的次数；它的广告客户数；或者是它的律师和说客数目。

这种快速增长已经足够去唤醒一些关心——偏执的或是正常的。讨厌或是害怕Google的客户名单每周都在增长。电视网、图书出版商和报业人士觉得Google依靠的是不付费使用他们的内容成长起来的。电信巨头们，例如美国的AT&T和Verizon，则开始动怒，因为在他们看起来，Google的繁荣是依靠免费使用他们提供的网络带宽；而它现在却要在即将到来的广播频率拍卖中与他们对抗。很多小企业讨厌Google，则是因为他们依赖于研究搜索公式去赢得高的排名；而在Google调整了这些算法之后，他们的排名落入了地狱。

然后现在政治家们也来了。自由主义者不喜欢Google和中国政府的审查达成的妥协，保守主义者则抱怨它的那些未经审查的视频。但是最新的强烈恐惧来自于它处理用户隐私的方式。Google的商业模式假设人们会充分信任它，还会将他们生活更多的信息，保存在公司里“云”一样的远端计算机上。这些信息的范围从包括了用户搜索记录（实际上，就是他兴趣的记录）和他对广告的回应开始，常常还会扩展到用户的email、日历、联系人、文档、电子表格、照片和视频。甚至很快他们就可以包括用户的医疗记录以及准确的物理位置（从他的手机中获得）。

更像JP Morgan 而不是 Bill Gates

Google经常会被和微软相提并论（顺带说一句，这是另一个敌人）；但是从发展过程来看，它实际上更接近于银行业。正像金融机构成长为大众财产的保管库，并也成为他们个人金融状况信息的保护者，Google现在开始转变为一个更大范围的，也更私密个人信息的保管员。是的，这也适用于诸如Yahoo!和微软这样的竞争对手。但是以全速积累信息财富的Google，将成为考验社会容忍能力的那一个。

这并不能对Google经常被认为很骄傲的情况有所帮助。就算抱怨都经常来自于那些吃不到葡萄就说酸的竞争对手，但是Google对自己的神圣过分自信的断言也让很多人感到厌恶，就像它得到毫无疑问的信任是理所当然的一样。毕竟这家公司选择了“不做恶”作为企业信条，即是明确宣告它的目标“不为赚钱”，如其老板Eric Schmidt所说，“而是为了改变世界”。它的所有权结构建立起来就是为了保护这种幻象。

讽刺的是，还有些并不仅仅是那些像乌云般围绕在Google周围的抱怨。这些问题最好被分为两种积云：一类是对于如何监管Google而产生的“公开”争执；另一类则是“私下”的那些给Google的管理者们，对于如何度过即将到来的暴风雨所做的对策。在这两条上，Google——和他的宣传相反——作为一个和它所谓任何其他攫取财富的“邪恶”公司差不多，它得到的评价要好得多。

攫取财富

这是因为，从公共的角度来看，所有公司对社会的主要贡献都是来自获取利润，而不是相反。在这方面，Google是一个好的例子。它的“善良”堵住了比亚当·斯密看不见的手更少的关于公司利他主义的废话。它提供了被人认为非常有用的一种服务——那就是帮助人们寻找信息（免费的），并且帮助广告客户以一种定位很准的方式将他们的商品推荐给那些人。

这样做，Google的举证义务就会变成了需要原告来来证明它做了什么错事。在反托拉斯这边，Google对它广告客户的收费是由竞价决定的，所以它这个寡头的影响力是有限的；况且它还没有像微软那样利用它在一个市场的统治地位去强行介入另一个市场。同样的无罪推定也适用于版权和隐私权。例如，Google的书籍搜索产品，可以认为是以拯救书籍和鼓励读者购买有版权的作品，来帮助出版商和作者而不是伤害了他们。并且，尽管老大哥谈论着知道明天人们即将作出的决定，在隐私问题上，Google还没有背叛这份用户信任。如果有，那也比它的竞争者做得好，它至少是经得住中国和美国政府的窥探的。

那即是说，利益的冲突是不可避免的——尤其是在隐私方面。Google实际上控制了一个拨盘，当它卖给你更多的服务，可以有两种选择。一个是Google可以自愿的快速清除它所收集的任何用户数据。那可以保证隐私，但是它会限制Google通过销售给广告客户你正在查看的内容所取得的利润，并且使这些服务用处变小。如果拨盘指向另一段，Google保存这些信息，服务会变得更加有用，但是有些隐私方面的糟糕入侵可能会发生。

答案是，就像之前银行所做的，必须在某个地方有个折中点；而且转盘的正确指向很可能随着环境的变化而变化。这会成为Google的主要公众利益。但是，就像银行家们（以及Bill Gates）可以证明的，公众审查也可能为Google的经理们创造一场私下的挑战：他们如何介绍他们的案例？

一个显而易见的策略是为了缓和关于对Google的信任看法，使之更加透明并且开放更多流程和计划以供监督。但是这同样需要更深程度的改变。假设一下，仅仅因为你的创立者是个年轻有为的家伙，你就赠送了更多的服务，社会并没有权力来质问你的动机并没有那么明智。Google是一个资本主义的工具——也是一个有用的东西。无论如何，更好的方法肯定是，在暴风雨正在形成的时候就直面它，而不是仅仅以一句平庸的可能致使毁灭的口号来应付。