Transcript

The Googlization of Everything and Why It Matters

February 16, 2012

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everyone, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Media and welcome to our ongoing series of Personal Democracy Plus teleconferences calls, which we do every week with movers, shakers, thinkers and doers in the field where politics and technology collide.

This week we are excited to be joined by a long time friend of PDF, former speaker at our conference, Siva Vaidyanathan who teaches at the University of Virginia, and is the author of several really important books; one, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity; The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the Sytem; and most recently, The Googlization of Everything and Why We Should Worry, which came out last year from the University of California Press.

We’re going to be talking about all those topics and also taking your questions. I should say that the call is being recorded and will be turned into a podcast and you can Tweet during the call if you have a question or comment using the hash tag PDPlus, P-D-P-L-U-S. Or you can just email me directly and I’ll take your question, [email protected], and I’ll plus it into the conversation. And also about half way through, we’ll open up the lines and let folks who are listening chime in directly if you feel like it, but I will be keeping an eye on my email and on that hash tag.

So Siva, I guess you know a lot has happened since the book came out a year ago and I think we actually had this call on the calendar once or twice earlier and we had to reschedule for different reasons, but in some ways I think it’s kind of fun to come back to you a full year after the book came out and sort of ask you not just to re-capitulate the themes, obviously the concerns you were raising are still quite relevant. But also you know, to look at some of the particulars be it Google’s role in the information universe as well as some of the other big players and there have been some important events in the last year, and I would love to get your take.

So, why don’t we start what if you -- is there anything you would change now that it’s been a year since you wrote The Googlization of Everything. Do you still feel like the book holds up well or are there arguments that you would modify or expand on?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, so one of the things that I could not have foreseen is the sort of personality change that Google has gone through since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO and Larry Page has taken over as CEO. It’s not a radical personality shift, but you know first thing Larry Page did was shut down a few of the sort of extraneous beta services that weren’t particularly popular, but were important to very small, discreet groups of people -- you know, the newspaper history project for instance, just to name one. But clearly at that point Larry Page was saying, “Let’s get back to our core mission a little bit.”

The second thing that I think that’s more interesting is that you know, Larry Page decided to take on the sociality of the web front and center instead of sort of nibbling around the edges of it, and I think GooglePlus is but one element of that.

One of the maddening things as you know yourself as writing about anything tech-based, internet-based is the frenetic pace and the question of, “How could I possibly be done when tomorrow something huge might break?”

And the other problem you have writing about these issues is let’s say something breaks and you think it’s huge and then lo and behold it’s not so huge anymore, Googlewave being a really good example of that.

So, there are a couple of things I would have made maybe stronger or more sort of better articulated. One is the overall privacy issue, privacy question largely because I think we can learn a lot about what Facebook’s going through and what’s going on in the web in general from looking at Google’s experience, that’s point number one. And I think you know, while I tackled it and I did make it central, I think I could have done more.

0:05:20

But the second thing is that I think most of it holds up because Google is no less important in our lives and Google is no less important globally. In many ways it may actually be more important today than it was a year ago even though Facebook has taken so much of the energy and attention.

But one of the things I tried my best to do and I think I failed is to explain the brilliance of the people who work there. Like what it means to view the world algorithmically; what it means to approach really big intellectual questions from the point of view of a Google engineer. And the only way that I knew that I had failed was by reading Steve Levy’s book and the (inaudible) and realizing, “Oh my God, he nailed it.” And I really didn’t.

And so fortunately I think for everybody, myself included, Steve Levy’s book came out just months after mine and I think filled in all of the gaps.

MICAH SIFRY: Well, and we did a call with Steve Levy last summer, but I would say Steve Levy write much more from the perspective of a fan and thus had access that you couldn’t have gotten --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And I wasn’t so much interested in access. And you know, it’s hard to convince people of this all the time, but you know, I wasn’t trying to write a biography of the company or even an analysis of the company. The company doesn’t interest me nearly as much as how are embrace and trust. That’s the story that I -- you know, back in 2004 when I first started paying attention to Google, I realized, ‘oh my goodness, like this company is not only powerful, destined to be rich, very interesting, full of brilliant people, but it engenders so much trust.’ I mean, people I respect deeply were just unwilling to raise what I thought were really important questions about the company’s behavior, especially in the areas of privacy.

And so for that reason I was fascinated by its role in our culture in our lives and in our minds more than its business activities or its computer science contributions, all of which I think are fascinating in and of themselves. And I’m glad that Steve did so much of what I couldn’t do.

So, this book is supposed to be about us and I hope that even if Google goes away, the themes and issues remain lively; the question of the wool of trust that we put in into corporations, the notion of corporate social responsibility. I mean Google is but one dozens of companies that make corporate social responsibility key to their identities in the world and thus an important part of their public image, their marketing plans, their ability to work their way into our lives.

And to me that is such a burning issue. I have deep concerns about corporate social responsibility in the long run actually de-politicizes us and that’s actually going to be the subject of my next book.

MICAH SIFRY: That’s an interesting thought, too. But the -- well, you know there are a lot of questions that arise for me. I mean the first one which is why don’t we start the conversation with a focus on Google and then sort of pull back to more broadly the implications for the public’s fear in an age when companies like Facebook, who don’t play anywhere near as nicely with the web, as Google tries to are wrapping their arms around more and more peoples’ attention. And then obviously I want to get to the SOPA, PIPA protests with you and your take on all of that.

But just first with Google and I think that’s really true of you to point to the shift under Larry Page and the -- supposedly a memo went around from Page making clear to Google employees that his number one priority is to get the company in a position where they are starting to win on the social graph side of the web and not just in search, and that is raising a question that people like Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch I think is the name of his -- you know, that Google is no longer abiding by its own stated position of search neutrality, we just give you the best results whatever they are. And instead is starting to favor in particular results that have the effect of pulling people into the GooglePlus universe.

Are you seeing that? Do you agree with that?

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SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, I think it’s older than the move to social and the move to include social results in search.

I think Google has tried to play it both ways, has tried -- especially in some high profile cases -- to convince people that “It’s not us, it’s the algorithms,” or “It’s not us, it’s the web.” So, consider the anti-Semitic links that come up when you search for the word “Jew,” this has been a burning issue of Google since 2003, the Anti-Defamation League approached Google about it and so there have been -- as sensitive as anybody in the world to this question -- was able to convince the Anti-Defamation League that Google merely measures the craziness of the web and if the web remains overly represented by people like that, that’s just an unfortunate and hopefully temporary anomaly and that you can’t blame Google because no one at Google’s making that editorial choice.

And that satisfied the Anti-Defamation League at the time but what we’ve seen of course since then has been a number of clear statements by Google that in fact Google does impose editorial decisions upon search results; never directly -- except in one case that I’ll bring up in a moment -- but always at a distance, at a distance of the algorithm. But that’s still question of value choices.

So, when Google decided about year ago that it would alter Google news results, a lot of people were paying attention to the fact that content farms, the sort of high-class content farms like Huffington Post but all the way down to the low-class content farms, they were just linked based. They were dominating GoogleNews by playing search engine optimization games really, really well. And there were a lot of legitimate new services that were losing out in the attention game from GoogleNews and Google put up a blog post describing how both in regular web search and in news, they were going to start favoring what they called, “high quality news sites,” without ever defining what ‘high quality’ means.

Even if they had, we all kind of know it means; it means that main stream American newspapers and television networks are going to get favored treatment by Google, and if -- that’s okay, as -- in some circles, right? If you want to say, “Well, Google thinks this is good for the web and I do, too,” (and I happen to), that’s fine. But to pretend that you can have it both ways, that somehow Google is neutral in search and it’s making editorial decisions like that, that doesn’t cohere.

There was one other troubling case when -- November of 2010, a racist caricature of Michelle Obama rose to be the top Google image search of Michelle Obama and it was up there for a couple of weeks. And it was -- and this was a Google bombing thing, this was a Santorum-esque event. It doesn’t take much, it’s doesn’t take much of an organized effort to move something up in a context like that. And Google removed the image from its database. And then upon being reminded that it had not done the same for (sounds like: JewWatchNews) for instance, the major anti-Semitic site that shows up in many searches, Google replaced the image back into the image search algorithm but significantly -- and no one’s really sure why -- it’s now very low in Google searches.

I did it for a class the other day, I found the image on Page 6 of the results of images for Michelle Obama, so it’s still there, it’s just been downgraded, which is Google’s usual pattern. So, you really have to ask, “Okay, is Google taking on the custodial responsibilities of the web in an overt and clear fashion or is it still retaining that deniability when it needs to when it’s convenient?”

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, but the place where they’ll run into serious trouble is if they start savoring their own products and that’s the accusation that Danny Sullivan was raising that now they’re not -- they link to results that favor YouTube videos over any videos and they link to results that favor GooglePlus pages over any social page. And will the FTC -- is there sort of a Microsoft-like problem here and --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, it’s not quite a Microsoft problem because Google’s not as coercive as Microsoft, but in Europe it’s already the subject of a major investigation, this notion that Google favors

0:15:06

its own products. And that’s -- you know, Google’s lawyers are quite aware of that.

I suspect -- I haven’t written anything about this and I haven’t read any one else writing about it -- but I suspect that this move to sort of federate information gathered by Google’s various products into one single profile for the sake of those advertising placements and search results is in many ways and anti, anti-trust move because there’s a concept of anti-trust that prohibits companies that make a lot of money in -- or are dominant in the marketplace in Practice A, or Market A, from underselling or zeroing out the price in Market B merely to keep people at bay.

So, if Market A, which is web-based advertising is so clearly dominated by Google, to use the surplus from that to -- the term is cross-subsidization - to cross subsidize another area whether that’s email or video or social is potentially illegal. And by combining these fields of information they have a better argument to make that Google is not separate services but is one cohesive way of experiencing internet communication.

That’s just a hunch though, who knows (overlapping remarks).
MICAH SIFRY: That’s interesting. But then how do you -- so, let’s talk about Facebook for a bit because Facebook seems -- I mean, they clearly trying to build a walled garden --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And they’re doing it (laughter).

MICAH SIFRY: -- and in some ways they’re succeeding some very scary ways. I was recently learning a bit about Facebook Zero, which is not something you hear much about in the U.S., but which is a special-mobile version of Facebook that they are rolling out all over the world making deals with mobile carriers to basically put Facebook on people’s phones for free, right? There’s no data charge associated with going to Facebook but then what people then get is the truly walled version of Facebook, they don’t get out to the larger internet from there.

And it’s -- you know, Facebook Zero, the “0” (zero) is we’re not charging you, right? But of course, you know, you’re not really the customer, are you? You’re the product. And if that is indeed how they’re going to vacuum up the next billion people who come online, who will never even know what the internet was because they can’t afford to get to it and instead they’ll be given this sort of cheap inversion, what does that do to Facebook’s overall market power? That’s a very serious question and it’s not even on the table here at all let alone the other moves that they’re making.

But you know, how do you think about Facebook and shouldn’t your book -- I mean, maybe the book should be called “The Facebook-ization of Everything,” and how would you talk about that?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Laughter) I used to like to say that if I had written a book raising concerns about the effect of Facebook on our lives, it would have been way too easy. The reason that Google is a fascinating institution is that it does so much great stuff for us and is impossible to live without and makes our lives better and so to raise concerns and issues about our dependence is not an easy case to make, and I thought that challenge made it like just more meaty and more honest, right? But you know, writing a book about Facebook wouldn’t take as many pages, for one thing.

But now --

MICAH SIFRY: Might still be a useful thing to do.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: -- but I used to think that, now I’ve spent some time at the Facebook offices in New York in January and just talking to some people in their advertising and marketing side just to get a sense of how they see their role in the company because these are people that are kind of doing old media work, they’re hanging out and meeting with the -- (inaudible) meet with Proctor & Gamble and trying to sell them ad space? And at the same time they’re trying to leverage their tremendous wealth of information for the sake of the sort of newer ad placement. And we all know that Facebook’s ad placement is nowhere near as -- and ad program is nowhere near as effective or profitable as Google’s despite Google’s panic about it all. Google has a way of making money and Facebook really hasn’t figured that out.

0:20:00

Now what was fascinating to me was that it was clear that they saw Facebook as an operating system for your life, not as a web thing, not as an internet thing, but as something so deeply embedded in your daily experience that it becomes an operating system for navigating the world. And that’s kind of how Google sees itself, right because Google’s mission statement is to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” There’s not a word in there about the internet, about the web, about the computer, about the mobile phone: it is sort of a technologically agnostic statement about information and the world, and Facebook sees it as organizing your life.

MICAH SIFRY: Well also not just organizing (overlapping comments) -- yeah, there’s a piece there -- you know, I was reading Marc Zuckerberg’s (overlapping remarks) his -- you know, the letter to potential investors and it is riddled with language about making the world a better place by making it more open and transparent, which by the way in principle I agree that more openness and transparency can make the world a better place, but my theory is that you shouldn’t force that onto individuals. Maybe you should force it on powerful institutions that abuse individuals --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Or if you’re going to do that, let’s do it together in collaboration without using this corporate filter that serves its own ends, right? So, the fascinating thing about the idea of becoming the operating system for our lives is again it’s technologically agnostic, it doesn’t have to be something that runs over TCP/IP, it doesn’t have to be something that sits on a computer run by Microsoft Windows.

And in that way -- now of course, that’s the only way they have to sell ads right now, they haven’t sold ads over their phone app and they haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that wouldn’t really anger everybody, no one has -- but the notion of their -- if you boil that down into sort of business terms, their mobile strategy and I think you illustrated it quite well is so that it’s the default operating system when you open up your phone, or if we call them phones, our hand-held devices, right?

And that that’s the place where you would start looking for news in your area and that’s the place you would start figuring out if the weather’s changing and those sorts of things. And for, as you pointed out, if the application is light enough and dependable enough that it can work in Niger and Indonesia as well as it does in Los Angeles. That is a great way to achieve or get close to achieving that notion of being the globe’s personal operating system, right?

So, it’s not about information, it’s about personality and that sense. And so you can start to see, especially in that letter, in Zuckerberg’s letter to investors, a convergence of amazing, almost megala-maniacal vision of these companies, Google and Facebook. So, Facebook resembles Google more than ever before since that letter, since the IPO.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah. You really think so? I have to say I don’t quite see the resemblance at all. I mean that Google’s still -- a very big piece of Google’s DNA is that it needs the open web to succeed. It needs information to be universally accessible in order to organize it for everyone, right? And to the degree that you can’t search Facebook unless Facebook decides to create a search tool someday, Facebook is walling off -- I mean, I always say to my students, “You know, the Facebook’s just a very, very big sophisticated and walled blogging platform.” And you know, unfortunately --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Overlapping remarks) It’s always like -- if you want to do interesting computer science, don’t go working for Facebook (laughter) right?

MICAH SIFRY: Well no, they are probably doing very interesting -- you know, but it is cutting against the entire notion of the open network that made the internet -- you know, makes the internet succeed and you know, that’s a very interesting project --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Overlapping remarks) But those companies -- they operate very differently and they have different investments in the open web. Google is committed to making sure that the web remains vital, open, trustworthy, pleasant, useful in our lives; and Facebook could care less about -- couldn’t care less about the open web, right? Facebook would like us all to write our content within Facebook if it could do it, right? Post our videos within Facebook so they don’t have to link to YouTube, that would be great for Facebook. In the mean time, they’re happy to let us in without letting us out, right?

0:25:16

So, you’re absolutely right about the differences, the differences are crucial. What I’m not buying is the convergence, it’s the convergence of that sort of ostentatious mission, right? That notion that a company will be so crucial to the way that we conduct our lives and that a company is trustworthy enough to claim that and not have people scream or laugh is interesting, too, right?

So, that’s why I say like today I’m starting to think you’re right that Facebook deserves a complex treatment in a way that goes beyond say the Facebook affect, which is an excellent story of Facebook’s rise, but I just think now we are in Facebook 2.0 and we are in a moment where Facebook’s vision for itself goes way beyond what Zuckerberg ever articulated before.

MICAH SIFRY: What do you think of when you see President Obama or some republican house leaders going to Facebook and doing these Town Hall things or to the degree to which Facebook is ingratiating itself with governments around the world?

I mean, how do you think about that subject? I have my thoughts, but I’m curious what --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Well I mean, I can’t blame them for wanting to use a platform that gets a lot of attention. That’s -- I mean, I’m not sure it’s anymore morally repugnant than going to Fox or going to CNN or another commercial outlet to achieve and audience. I think it’s kind of -- I mean, sometimes the tone of it is candoring, right? This is where the young people are, like that kind of stuff really bugs me because it’s where everybody is, not just young people.

I don’t know; it’s -- I mean, in some ways if you don’t engage with YouTube and Facebook you’re a sucker, right? You’re not allowing for whatever limited level of interactivity --

MICAH SIFRY: Let me rephrase the question because obviously if you’re a politician you need to go where the crowds are, but if you go on CNN, ostensibly you’re being questioned by an independent journalist not the CEO of CNN, right?

You know, the business and the editorial sides are somewhat separate and that part of the credibility of big media has been that they do keep those things somewhat separate or completely separate. But here we’ve got Obama or Beihner being questioned by Marc Zuckerberg, this is not a real Town Hall Meeting, it’s not a news conference. That’s what I’m asking about.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Ah, yes, yes. Well yeah, I’m sure I have the same sort of reservations about that as well.

If it were a true interactivity, right, if it were something like you know, a Twitter conversation. I mean, we’ve seen celebrities do these sort of marathon conversations with people. I saw (sounds like: Louie C Kay) do a couple of them and that seems to me like a real interaction, limited of course by the medium, but something that can perhaps teach the politician about a concern or an issue in an unfiltered way, in a way that might surprise him or her.

That to me has great potential whereas you’re right, to take that star turn with Zuckerberg, that bugs me tremendously. Like --

MICAH SIFRY: Well given the work you’ve done on -- you know, where is the public interest here or what’s happening to public space and public discourse. And so, to me -- I mean, every time I see kind of the White House fires up a live event on the White House homepage and alongside it they’re running the same book on Facebook and showing the Facebook chat. And it’s sort of like, “What?”

When did that become the norm? Should it be the norm? And if it is -- and by the way, if Facebook is this public utility or de facto, right, the place where everybody is gathering, should we start talking about regulating it as some kind of public utility with public responsibilities instead of a company that now is about to be privately -- I mean, you know it’s going to be on the stock market and all the pressures that come with that?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So, for one -- we do actually heavily regulate Facebook more today -- more once it actually is traded publicly than before. And once it’s a publicly traded company it does have fiduciary responsibilities and responsibilities to disclose and that’s actually going to make things a lot better for all of us.

0:30:09

We’ll have a much more realistic sense of what it’s worth as a business and then in some ways what it’s worth in our lives. But that said, this is the real question: what spaces should we be building to enhance democracy? Like that’s the question we should be starting with. And not, “How can we leverage this awesomely popular platform for x, y or z?” That’s facing it backwards, right?

I think that you and I would both like to see people -- and there are people doing this, right? We know them, a lot of them are clustered at (sounds like: Berkman) Center who are trying to build or enhance experiments around the world to connect citizens to governments to make government information more visible and useful, to map problems in ways that governments forget to, to be able to correct for public failures, those sorts of things in a non-commercial way. And those sorts of experiments, that’s where the action is, that’s where the creativity is, that’s where the really awesome potential of digital networks lie.

And yes, I do wish that the people in the White House -- and we know people who have worked in the White House recently who understand exactly what we’re talking about. I wish that they would do a better job of putting the President in a position to say, “Let’s have a different kind of forum. Let’s host the forum ourselves right here on WhiteHouse.gov that allows for fuller interactivity,” and doesn’t necessarily being a stunt.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. Right, but again with an exception of a handful of people, our media don’t even know to ask these questions.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Laughter) That’s right, but we’re working on it, right?

MICAH SIFRY: We’re working on it. I’m going to pause here since we’re at the half way point and see if anybody who’s listening wants to unmute their phone and jump in with a question. The way to do that is just *6 and I will see you here on my dashboard and we’ll just pause to allow that to take place if anyone wants to. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

So, just to continue -- so something else just happened which I think -- actually, I’m going to pause it. I see somebody does have a question.

Go ahead, just introduce yourself and ask your question.

PARTICIPANT 1: My name is Steven (sounds like: Halexer), I’ve commented before on one of these previous programs.

Before I ask my question I’d like to compliment this series, it’s very, very interesting. I regret I can’t -- I haven’t been able to go to more of them but I’m going to try to attend as many as I can. It’s very interesting and I encourage your efforts.

I have a blog that’s called Digital Governing and on that blog I’ve been posting recently about “big data.” And you were commenting on the issue of regulating Facebook like a public utility, and I wonder if you would sort of think about or comment about the issue of this huge amount of data that’s being accumulated by private companies from mobile phones, from all kinds of censors, automobiles, you know. It’s a deluge of data and it’s all proprietary and yet data is becoming the thing that really drives our economies and societies.

Shouldn’t there be in relation to these huge -- you know, data conglomeration enterprises as public utilities?

MICAH SIFRY: That’s a great question.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So, I don’t think we need to go to the public utility model quite so quickly, but I do think that we’re dealing with a phenomenon that you’ve identified exactly correctly. That data is a raw material these days, a raw material that companies and governments and increasingly individuals rely on in sets never before imagined and that’s because everything’s cheaper to move and accumulate and mine and etcetera.

But this is all so new to us that we haven’t figured out the etiquette, we haven’t figured out the ethics and we haven’t figured out the laws that would be appropriate to making sure that there’s not abuse, to making sure there’s not a fundamental mis-reading of big data.

And I think what we actually need are a series of really sort of high-level examinations and open examinations, the National Academies would be a great place to start this conversations but by all means not end them just to say, “Okay, when you’re dealing with big data in the sciences, what are the best practices? And what are the problems? What do we miss with the current techniques?”

When you’re talking about big data in the commercial world, data that Walmart collects; data that Food Lion collects; data that Safeway collects; data that Barnes & Noble collects. Let’s think about best practices in terms of security, in terms of use and abuse, in terms of profiling, in terms of the sale, the market for those data sets. Often those data sets get sold to law enforcement creating this amazingly powerful and yet probably inaccurate surveillance state that we don’t even get to watch, right?

Those sorts of things are happening and I think we need to make them clear, we need to make the ramifications clear and we have to come up with a really strong set of recommendations that pay attention to simultaneously, a) not quashing creativity within the corporate world, that would be a bad externality; but we also want to make sure that individuals and groups are protected because we are you know -- for the last 10 years we’ve been sort of re-invigorating the surveillance techniques that we saw the Nixon Administration get in so much trouble for. It’s just for some reason people aren’t getting angry about it this time.

It’s like the -- you know, the Nixon Administration -- and the Johnson Administration before it -- did so much to abuse citizen’s rights by creating surveillance and spying programs domestically and Americans of all kinds were so upset in the early 70s when this got revealed that Congress easily passed a series of fairly strong laws that President Ford and Carter quickly signed, even though President Ford’s Chief of Staff, a gentleman named Richard Cheney, immediately started undermining them.

And that was a high point in so many ways. That was a moment at which we said, “Okay, the government has to play fair. We need to know as much about the government as the government knows about us, you know?” And we took that -- we got so comfortable in the wake of that that we’ve just let the last 10 years roll by without any real anger, any real examination and any response.

MICAH SIFRY: Or it sort of crept in in ways that were invisible and because of that people don’t feel victimized in the sense --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It’s always invisible at first, right? So, you know the efforts to spy on anti-war protestors in the early 60s was invisible for a while even though it was always the crew cut guy at the STS meeting, right? (Laughter)

But you know look, in 2005 when The New York Times finally revealed, after sitting on the story for a year, that the Bush Administration had been breaking the law and listening in on phone calls of American citizens. The outrage was against The New York Times (laughter) either for reporting it or as I’ve just pointed out, reporting it a year too late to have kicked Busy out of office. And at no point was there a criminal investigation with the Bush Administration. That was -- and at no point was there citizen uproar over this.

MICAH SIFRY: But let’s talk about this -- because I think that to some degree it may be that you’re right and it’s kind of too late, people have just gotten so used to this it’s -- or they support us because they think it’s making them safer or something.

But there is -- even right now, I mean literally, as we speak -- there’s this big backlash in the tech press that’s reached the point that Congress is pushing on Apple and Apple is responding on this issue of how much data these apps are collecting and feeding back to the company servers without peoples’ knowledge.

This question of, “How much do they know about me?” is still up for grabs. That’s one, and then I think something also change and I really do want to get your point of view on what just happened with the fight over the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act and the sort of sudden shock wave of public opposition that crested on January 18. And we saw a bill that was seemingly passing through the bowels of Congress like a dose of salt as you might put it -- was suddenly reversed and members from both parties who thought this one was greased and good to go suddenly saying “Wait a second, we need to take another look.”

So, is it possible that -- and obviously companies like Google were important to helping marshal that opposition though in many ways they came late to the parade and you know, I think there was a lot of genuine grassroots or netroots-type organizing happening across the political spectrum from the non-commercial part of the web, if you will, the public part of the web.

So, does this give you hope and do you think there’s something --

0:40:43

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Laughter) I have so much hope. You know I never thought of myself as jaded or cynical until I stumbled upon my own jadedness, and that was the day before Wikipedia went dark, I Tweeted that this protest wasn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference because no one in Congress cares what Wikipedia does and no one in Congress cares what some element of the public, which tends to be curious about these sorts of issues, would think.

I was in such despair about how corrupt Congress is that I just thought that this was going to be another empty internet protest. And I’m so happy that I was wrong. Within a day, I Tweeted that I was wrong. And I’m so happy that I was wrong, right because --

MICAH SIFRY: Shall we just pause here for a second, folks and note how refreshing it is to hear someone just say, “Yeah, I got it wrong,” and good. I mean -- okay, Siva, go back --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Laughter) Of course, it’s so much better to be wrong about something where the result is something you wanted (laughter). So that helps (overlapping remarks) --

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) we know too many of those people.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: So, you know here was the thing; I mean, as I said earlier I’m a cynic about corporate social responsibility and what we see here in the case of Google especially but is that obviously the public interests coincide with Google’s interest, as it does fairly frequently. But I just think it’s important that we not conflate the two and not assume that Google speaks for the public interest, it just happens to be that fighting these two bills was in our interest as well as Google’s. And that’s great and I’m glad to have allies.
So I thought that Congress was insulated from geek protests. I thought that this issue, having lived in the copyright issues and these tech issues for 12 years now, 13 years now, since the Digital (inaudible) Copyright Act -- we can call them ‘debates’ of 1998 -- I was fairly convinced that while awareness about copyright, excessive copyright protection was high, while interest was high, I just didn’t think we had reached critical mass yet. I thought it was too early in the movement.

You know, back in 1998 when the only people raising these issues were a handful of law professors and librarians, it was tough going and the Clinton Administration just did allow for debate or descent on copyright issues. This was one of these consensus issues and all Americans are for Hollywood triumphing in the world, etcetera.

And those of us who said, “But wait a minute, results of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are likely to be worse than the problems it’s trying to solve,” and besides this, I have to solve the problems. And we just got no play at all. The New York Times didn’t care about our argument.

And I remember those arguments and then I was happy to see that groups like Public Knowledge, groups like EFF were able to play defense through most of the last decade and knock down some really onerous proposals.

But these two bills were the worst of all of them and had the best chance of going through and you know, I just was in despair about it, but it worked. And it was stunning to me and it was partially that Google and Wikipedia raised awareness. I remember the day of the Wikipedia blackout; three people who -- three of my friends who were not real tech people, not copyright people came up to ask me about these bills. This was the first they had heard about them and it was because they had a habit of going to Wikipedia and they happened to have said, “Hey, wait a minute, here’s something I need to ask Siva about.”

And I thought, “Okay, if these three people are coming up to me randomly saying, ‘tell me about this SOPA thing,’ then something is happening here.

MICAH SIFRY: Something deep, yeah.

0:45:04

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: And man -- so that’s when I realized I was wrong. So, okay -- Wikipedia is imbedded in our lives to such a degree that it has the ability to get people to at least be curious. And that’s such a victory.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, and they claimed they had something like 167 million page views of their SOPA / PIPA page and that they generated several million phone calls -- you know, 8 million look ups of member contact information on their site, don’t know how many people actually called.

But there is one other piece, I mean I think what Wikipedia did was significant but was most interesting to me in this was how Tumbler kind of crossed the line that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a for-profit techh company do up to this point and they weren’t the only ones but they happened to be first, which was back in November when they were getting concerned about the way these bills were starting to sail through Congress. They decided for one day to interrupt their users and they didn’t just send an email to all their users, they made it so that if you tried to go to your dashboard in Tumbler, you saw all this blacked-out text and basically a big warning that this is the possible effect of this law passing. And they generated about 90,000 phone calls in one day.

But they took a huge risk, right? I mean, all Google did was block out their logo, you could still use Google whereas Tumbler was saying, “No, this is so important and critical to our ability to be what we are as a company and also to you, our users to do what you’re doing with us that we’ll risk driving you away,” right, competitive market place, it isn’t like Tumbler has a monopoly.

You know, we had this conversation here at Harvard last week at the Kennedy School on Power Politics and the Age of Google and one of the premises of this was did Google kind of abuse its power? After all, it is one of the top two or three most visited sited on the web, obviously that means a lot if they change their logo for the day.

And Alexis O’Hanian from Reddit was on the panel and he pointed out that --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: (Overlapping remarks) At University of Virginia alone --

MICAH SIFRY: Oh, really, oh well, there you go. He pointed out that he had little fear that Google would abuse this power and bully people and say “Go dark for a week,” or something because if they did, we’d just go elsewhere.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, I don’t buy that. I would say though that let’s worry about that when that happens, right?

This was not an abuse of power. Google still has the power to abuse it’s power, lots of companies do and if that happens, let’s deal with it right. So, then either we go elsewhere or else we come up with some other way of reacting. But really --

MICAH SIFRY: But the point is is that it’s a more competitive marketplace online than say your favorite TV station that is the only place where you can get your favorite TV show.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think that’s true of Tumbler, I don’t think that’s true of Google. I think competition is not a real factor in search right now for a couple of reasons: 1) to do search well, you need more than code. You can have brilliant code, you can have brilliant coders, remember Cool? How many times you searched things on Cool? (Laughter)

Cool was started by a bunch of ex-Googlers who thought they had a better idea, a better algorithm and they thought they had a better message because it was going to make sure not to retain private data and it was going to respect our privacy and do all the things Google wasn’t doing. And it started with great fanfare and it has a big press release and hired a PR firm and the result was, of course, it didn’t have the infrastructure to support a big launch and crashed within five minutes of launching. And the first day was such a disaster that nobody ever went back and we’ll never know if Cool had the better search engine.

But that’s just one example. But here’s the thing; to do search right, you need what Google has, which is billions of dollars of sunken infrastructure, field fiber optic cable, aluminum air conditioners, everything --

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, so the entry costs are really high.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That’s one thing. And then you need the dozen years of data. The reason Google reads our minds so well is it has such a great and rich record of the things we say we want. And that is something you can’t just start fresh with.

0:50:03

Now Microsoft has access to some of that if Amazon wanted to get into that business strong, it probably could build a database that could do search in a creative way. But neither one of them really takes it that seriously. You know, Google’s biggest competitor is Bing and Bing is really all about shopping, it’s really all about airplane tickets and hotel reservations. It’s not a general purpose information tool the way that Google is and doesn’t depend to be.

So, I don’t think that competition is realistic thing for either Facebook or Google, which is why they’re still in a position to abuse their power. The question is in this particular protest, was it an abuse of anything? I don’t think so. I think corporations always have and always will and probably should express their opinions about matters of public importance. I think it’s different, by the way, from electioneering which is the question in Citizen’s United but --

MICAH SIFRY: Well if Google you know pointed its home page to Barack Obama or something that would be electioneering, wouldn’t it?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Pointing, maybe. That would be an interesting (inaudible) discussion whether pointing is electioneering, but --

MICAH SIFRY: Is it endorsement or not, yeah, obviously not an endorsement but yes, in their case we’d be quite valuable. I mean, look we raised the question as few years ago when Facebook gave early preferential access to the Obama campaign to develop a Facebook platform before it was open to all developers, so that -- and that sure looked like an in-kind contribution from Facebook.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think so. I mean, I think Free Citizens United that was a big problem. These days anything goes which is

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, well obviously anything goes now. We’re almost --

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, I’m leery about the close relationship between the Obama Administration and both those companies. I think it’s something we should be paying more attention to.

MICAH SIFRY: I agree. Well we’re almost out of time. I just want to make sure if anybody listening wants to jump in with a question, give you folks one last opportunity, just hit *6 on your phone. And you get a chance to chime in with your thoughts, comments or questions.

If not, Siva I do want to ask you given that you did write a book about Copyrights and Copywrongs, is there a positive agenda here on the copyright front and let me just -- I do see a question here so you’ll take that and -- go ahead, a call from the 301 area code.

PARTICIPANT 2: Hi, my name is Michael (inaudible) Bianco, I’m with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

I wanted to ask Siva about his feelings about how the Google books’ lawsuit is going. (Overlapping remarks) and Google Books just filed its opposition to certification of the class and I find it very interesting reading, I don’t know if you’ve seen that or not yet.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I have not read that filing, but -- so the Google Books Project, the scanning project that began in late 2004, or at least we learned about it in late 2004 is the reason I decided to write this book, it’s what sparked my interest because that was such an amazing move for a six-year-old company to make. A six-year-old company, which at that point had been around for less time than Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had been married.

And here was the major university libraries of the world saying, “Yes, please six-year-old, be the custodian of our hundreds of years and billions of dollars worth of resources.” To me it struck me as corporate welfare, it struck me as incredibly weird and upside down.

So, there also were some other copyright issues that were weird about it -- and privacy issues that were troubling about it, but to me that was the fascinating case study that launched me into my curiosity about the company, and that’s when I came across that mission statement, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,” to which my first reaction was, “Who asked you guys to do that?”

So, my reaction to that audacity was really important. Now what’s happened -- so one of the things that held this book up for a long time, one of the reasons why it didn’t come out until February, 2011 is that I kept waiting for Judge Chin to rule in the Google Book settlement so that I could conclude that chapter well, and I had two chapters in my hard drive; one he approves it, and one he rejects it and I going to fill in some details at the top. And he just wasn’t ruling on it, he was kind of busy.

So, ultimately I had to throw out those two chapters and write a fresh one analyzing essentially both possibilities. And then that delayed everything and the book comes out in February of 2011 and two weeks later Judge Chin rules in the suit and this rendered my book’s chapter somewhat irrelevant or at least out of date immediately, but it did give me a great subject to talk about at that moment.

And so now we’re in the situation where nobody really knows what is viable or possible with the settlement, with any future settlements, what’s going to happen in terms of whether authors shall be a class, and so I’ve -- I really am sort of at a loss about what might happen next. I think it’s still a fascinating question and I think we really should be focusing on again is the bigger question: If we want a globally accessible digital library or digital collection is the better word, is this the best way to do it?

I mean, I happen to think, “No,” maybe other people can say, “Yes,” but let’s have that argument. And if we actually think that it’s a good idea to have that how shall we do it? Shall we do it in a way that includes or runs against the short or long term interests of authors and publishers, there may be times you want to push them out of the way for the sake of the public or sometimes include them in the conversation.

What are the changes to copyright that we need to make to make this totally legal? That gets to your question, a positive agenda for copyright. There is a positive agenda for copyright that the free culture movement has been trying to get people to pay attention to, we don’t have the lobbyists that the RAA has or the MBA has.

But really, a couple of things: 1) re-introduce what are known as formalities into copyright so that things aren’t automatically protected for the life of the user plus seven years; but only if you care, only if you think that your work has a market. Do you grant it the powers of copyright, which are pretty serious.

And so if you do think it’s valuable, then you get great protection for a while and then it expires, but if you want to protect it longer like Disney would want to with all of its films, pay $1 and get it for another 100 years.

But if you don’t, like Microsoft -- Windows 97 is protected for 95 years. That’s crazy, you know? Why not have that go into public domain, open up the code, have people have fun with it.

So, those are the sorts of things we should be talking about just as one example.

MICAH SIFRY: Wow, that’s great. Thank you, that’s very good food for thought and it’s certainly a topic we’ll come back to. Maybe I’ll have (inaudible) Benkler on because I know he is pondering this very question of what a positive agenda might be for people after the sort of short term victory on the SOPA / PIPA issue.

(END OF AUDIO)