Not too long ago, I wrote about Google's rise to power. It might be worthwhile to repeat the Rebecca Solnit quote that I included there again:
Imagine that it's 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the US Geological Survey mapping operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the online world that's more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist wrote that Google is trying to take over "the entire fucking Internet" and asked the question of the day: "Who will stop Google?"
I have been worrying about this. Is it really that bad? When the Internet came into fruition, there was a lot of hope that on this new medium things would be different. Everyone would have a voice. What, then, does it signify that all the loudest voices have converged into a few large conglomerates, creating a wall of sound. Within this wall of sound, it is no longer possible to discern the specifics, no longer possible to discern the individual. Fighting with large companies is often like shadowboxing, because you do not know who or where to strike.
It is always worrying when too much power coalesces. Many philosophers have written about this. Even when there is awareness about it, as is the case with the dictatorships of countries like North Korea, it is hard to do anything about it. But when the masses are fooled and lullabied into a slumber, it is particularly dangerous.
Here is, for instance, a data chart mapping all the different companies that produce our products onto their larger parent companies. Suddenly, very little competition remains:
The same thing goes for our media outlets. Our culture is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer, who use their far-reaching tentacles to extend copyrights further and further into the future so they can keep their precious little milk cows. Lawrence Lessig, in his book Free Culture, summarizes the state of things in his home country the USA:
- 5 companies control 85 percent of our media sources
- 4 companies control 90 percent of the nation's radio advertising revenues
- 10 companies control half of the nation's newspapers
- 10 film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue.
- 10 cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenue.
Taking this together with the changes in copyright law, Lessig comes to a severe conclusion:
Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now. Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were independent of the networks. Never has copyright protected such a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was remotely as long. This form of regulation--a tiny regulation of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding--is now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that our free society has known.
A game for the whole family
But let's get back to the Web. Because, more and more, web companies are creating the same illusion of choice as the food and beverage and media outlets above. It has become common practice for the big companies to acquire hot startups and keep them running independently. For instance, when Facebook acquired Instagram, Zuckerberg pressed the point that they were committed to building and growing Instagram independently, as opposed to their — before then — common practice of scooping up hot startups, killing their products, and redeploying their staff on other projects. It is easy to imagine why. Even now, when I am on YouTube, I often forget that this is simply a branch of Google. Though there is some similarity to the layout and color scheme, you will not find a Google logo anywhere on the YouTube page, as opposed to the pages of other popular Google products like Google Maps and Gmail. Yet, at the same time, when I log in to Gmail, I am automatically logged into YouTube as well. The same goes for the very site I am writing this on, Blogger/Blogspot.
Just out of curiosity, I have taken the Top 100 of most popular websites compiled by Alexa, and tried to group them by ownership. I have broken them down below.
| Owner | Qty | Domains |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | google.com, youtube.com, blogspot.com, google.co.in, google.de, google.uk, googleusercontent.com, google.fr, google.com.br, google.co.jp, google.com.hk, google.ru, blogger.com, google.it, google.es, google.com.mx, google.ca, blogspot.in, google.com.tr, bp.blogspot.com, google.com.au, google.pl | |
| Amazon | 5 | amazon.com, imdb.com, amazon.co.jp, amazon.de, amazon.co.uk |
| eBay | 4 | ebay.com, paypal.com, ebay.de, ebay.co.uk |
| Microsoft | 4 | live.com, bing.com, msn.com, microsoft.com |
| Alibaba | 4 | taobao.com, tmall.com, alibaba.com, alipay.com |
| Yahoo! | 4 | yahoo.com, yahoo.co.jp, tumblr.com, flickr.com |
| 2 | facebook.com, instagram.com | |
| Wordpress | 2 | wordpress.com, wordpress.org |
| Sina Group | 2 | sina.com.cn, weibo.com |
| Baidu | 2 | baidu.com, hao123.com |
| Digital Sky | 2 | mail.ru, odnoklassniki.ru |
| IAC | 2 | ask.com, about.com |
| Tencent | 2 | qq.com, soso.com |
| 2 | twitter.com, t.co | |
| AOL | 2 | huffingtonpost.com, aol.com |
That is a landslide victory if ever I saw one. And of course, of course, I know, these are just local versions of Google, mostly, but the fact that google.com is still #1 even with their visitors divided over so many highly visited domains, just goes to show how big they are. Let me also add that this is based on hastily done research by myself, so there might be errors, but it is an indication anyway (there are also many shared interests and stakes and partnerships that I did not even include). Though all these giants might be rivals, they nevertheless share the same interests. They are all based ever-increasingly upon the collection of information, and will often help each other to missing info in something akin to a worldwide game of Go Fish. CEOs move from Yahoo to Google, and from Google to Amazon, and back. It is all really just one big family.
The Real State Secret
This is all fine and dandy, you will say, but who cares? Perhaps, in the wake of PRISM and the Snowden files, people do start caring. Still, a large group of people hold on to the idea that "if you have nothing to hide, you do not need privacy." Though many sci-fi and dystopian books have pointed out the dangers of such an attitude, there is also a more real danger. Adam Curtis, with his usual wit, intelligence and eye for detail, recently wrote a blog post on the subject of spying. He proposed a wholly different question from the one almost all other journalists were occupied with: Do spies actually know what they are doing?
Well, according to Curtis: not really. He focuses on the British MI5, and goes on to debunk much of their alleged successes. He starts out with a story of Iraqi students in London during the Gulf War who became the first Prisoners of War in Britain since WWII. They were incarcerated for no other official reason than "to err on the side of caution". Curtis then goes on to tell a confusing and ridiculous-but-true story on the various internal struggles of the MI5 looking for a Russian spy inside their own organization. Just being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or "rising high in the organization" was enough to make you suspicious. But here is the important point, the inherent problem of spy organizations:
For most of the twentieth century the combination of ineptitude and secrecy created an organisation that retreated more and more into a world of fictional conspiracies in order to disguise it's repeated failures. The question is whether the same is true today?
Disasters like the total intelligence failure over the WMD in Iraq would suggest that nothing much had changed. But the trouble is there is no way we can ever find out. The spies live behind a wall of secrecy and when anyone tries to criticise them, the spies respond by saying that they have prevented attacks and saved us from terrible danger. But they can't show us the evidence because that is secret.
If organizations whose work depends on undisclosed information still are in many senses above the law, the situation is bound to get messy. Data itself is not criminal. An analysis of the data by humans decides whether it is or isn't. If spies in fact do not know what they are doing, there is no more solace to be found in the knowledge of your own innocence. Google probably has more information by now than any spy organization ever had. They are hardly open about what information exactly they collect, or how they use it precisely. I don't know anymore what would be worse: if they know what they are doing, or if they do not.
