Google and China: Who Will Control the Internet?
January 15, 2010
I think it is fascinating to look at the headlines from analysts about the “meaning” of the China-Google dust up. Let me point to one online observation and invite you to read the many others available on most news aggregation sites. The exemplary discussion is “China Brushes Off Google Threat, Welcomes Law Abiders”. The news story offered this:
Mountain View, California-based Google said Jan. 12 in a blog posting that it wanted to reach an agreement with the Chinese government to allow unfiltered Internet searches, and would be removing restrictions in coming weeks.
Why did I find it representative? The reporter is putting the nation of China and Google on equal ground. The assumption is that Google (a company) is in a position of dealing with China (a nation) on equal ground. The Bloomberg story said:
“Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information,” Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, said in a question-and-answer session with reporters, a transcript of which was posted on the office’s Web site today.
The issue, in my opinion, is access to the Internet. Google is on the path leading to a position in which Google becomes the Internet. I include a number of references in my 2007 monograph, “Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator”, to technical systems and methods that give Google this “effective guidance”. China—at least for its citizens—wants to define the Internet.
The notion of a free and open Internet is the point. Economics is not the issue. Control is. You can poke around with various queries and find for yourself certain topics or content gaps in most Web indexing services. “Old” information may not exist. A good example is information about the Top 5% of the Internet created by The Point in the early 1990s. I have some information on ArnoldIT.com, but the indexing services do not pay much attention to certain unvisited, deep content. Other examples include information retrieved via certain “stop” words. An example is to search the Department of Energy’s main Web site for SCRAM or ECCS. Information is scarce, and the last time I ran these queries, I found dribbles, not torrents, of information on these acronyms.
The notion of control is important for three reasons:
- A service with control can offer users and customers information on the vendor’s or the gatekeeper’s terms. In one scenario, if you want certain information, you may have to pay for it. With control, monetization is somewhat easier
- A service can create specific collections of information which give that control point a competitive advantage. The notion of exclusives in the world of online has been around long time. One example was my experiments with making the database Pharmaceutical News Index exclusive on a single vendor in order to determine the monetary impact of an exclusive versus multiple outlets for a single source of information. The exclusive won because I could charge whatever I wanted and the users who perceived the content as “must have” paid more for the information. In short, exclusivity—that is, control—was more lucrative.
- The ability to see or index “everything” provides ammunition for information warfare. The battle can be more useful customer data or for “information nuggets” that another entity cannot “see” or easily obtain. Information nuggets can be used to perform a number of useful functions; for example, shape a particular type of information flow.
The dust up between China and Google is a significant step in my understanding of the strategy of Google. I have argued in my studies that Google is a new type of enterprise, crafted to match the emerging world of pervasive data. Google is a domain, and that domain wants to make decisions for itself. China wants to make the decisions itself, particularly with regard to digital information.
Google will be on the world stage when it decides what to do with regard to other nation states’ steps to get its arms around certain Google issues. For me, the Bloomberg story and others have elevated Google to nation state status. That’s exciting. And interesting. A pivot point between China and the “nation” of Google. Just an opinion, gentle reader, just an opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
Oyez, oyez, I am herewith reporting to the League of Nations that I was not paid to point out that the interaction of China and Google is a real nation to a “digital nation”. I did this because I had some time at 6 14 am on January 14, 2010, sitting in an airport awaiting another convenient flight.
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