Google and News Irrigation
April 13, 2009
The Washington Post’s Erick Schonfeld asked a question to which I knew the answer. The question here was: “Does Google Really Control the News?” Mr. Schonfeld answers the question by walking down the road, sometimes veering left and sometimes right. He wrote:
The bigger question is whether Google as a search engine is controlling access to news sites. That really seems to be Carr’s main concern, although it is not clear because he uses a Google News search as his main example. Nevertheless, Google’s main search engine is certainly a major source of traffic to information sites of all stripes. At TechCrunch, for instance, it is the single largest source of traffic, accounting for about a third of the total. I have no idea whether this is representative of other news sites, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Google search is a very important middleman indeed.
Mr. Schonfeld’s hook for this story is the Nick Carr posting about Google as middleman here. I want to steer clear of this discussion. My views appear in my forthcoming study Google: The Digital Gutenberg. I do want to ask several questions:
- What if Google embodies creating, intermediating, distributing, and monetizing functions in one system?
- With users clicking on services, are not the users making a decision, which may, of course, be limited by the function of the natural monopoly?
- If one outfit is in charge, is this going to leave much doubt about who steers the automobile?
Stephen Arnold, April 12, 2009
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