Click G For Media Monopoly

With many teeth in the information dissemination pie, Google has popped up as the new Big Media—without really creating any ‘content’

- Siddhartha Mishra

“Currently, the predominant business model for ­commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always ­correspond to providing quality search to users.”

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote those words—evergreen and prescient—20 years ago and 12,383 km away. People today could find it a tad ironic that the words were not merely courier-delivered by the two, but actually authored by them­—the quote is from their Stanford paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, which dates back to the same year that the search engine came into being. So, do truths change? Maybe.

Why they called it ‘Google’ and not the now-odd-sounding ‘BackRub’ was because “googol, or 10^100, …fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.” Google became the gateway drug to the larger fix that was the internet, or even what Maggi was to noodles, but it was primarily a search engine. Not anymore.

If the World Wide Web is indeed a gossamer mesh spun by many over time, Google is now the largest spider, the one that has the gardeners worried. It watches over everything, and decides which pieces of data flow where. Almost every other form of normal online activity seems to happen through it, as if it were the ether itself. Or a looming omnipresence/omniscience. But, in a way, it too is being watched now. Or rather, searched—its giant, mutating form is eliciting more than a little interest for the way it dominates and controls the landscape, without itself being subject to any reciprocal commitment. Since no one can escape its all-pervasive nat­ure, others are beginning to resent the way it itself eludes an externally set responsibility while exerting huge power.