Tag: google

This Bud’s for You, ISIS?

On Monday, Google was granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit aimed to stop the investigation of the search giant by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood.  Thanks in part to leaked information from the computer hacking of Sony Pictures late last year, Google has attempted in the court of public opinion to portray Hood’s investigation as a movie-industry-backed witch hunt, despite the fact that the scope of Hood’s investigation is neither unprecedented nor lists copyright infringement anywhere near the top of the AG’s concerns.

In fact, at the very top of that list is whether or not Google is complying with a legally-binding, non-prosecution settlement entered into with the federal government in 2011 regarding the company’s knowingly advertising against traffic driven by illegal pharmaceutical transactions.  Settled for a whopping half-billion dollars to keep executives from facing possible criminal charges in that case, the question of whether or not Google has been complying with the terms of the settlement (i.e. has stopped profiting from illegal pharmaceutical traffic) sounds to me like a matter that’s in the public interest; and this type of due-diligence by AG Hood is in no way unprecedented. This is not to say that copyright holders do not have an interest in Hood’s investigation given that copyright infringement by Google is part of the scope.

Of course, in the court of law (not public opinion), Google’s suit aimed at stopping Hood’s investigation is predicated on safe harbors provided for website owners in the Communications Decency Act of 1996. In this post, I suggested that the over-broad application of safe harbors becomes a hyperextension of the “I didn’t know” defense, and is particularly bizarre when applied to companies that own technology designed specifically to know a great deal.  If the court finds that the AG’s investigation cannot move forward based on safe harbors in the 1996 law, this will further congeal both a legal and cultural bias that anything goes as long as it happens online.  That would certainly be a win for the major Internet companies, but in case after case, we see evidence as to why it would not be a win for the public.

By way of example of the world in which we now live, Silk Road founder and owner Ross Ulbricht was convicted in early February, though his defense was in part based on safe harbors in the the Communications Decency Act. But, do a Google search for “Silk Road” right now, and Item #3 will be a link to silkroaddrugs.org, which ostensibly provides guidance to new anonymous marketplaces for illegal narcotics.  In fact, the entire first page doesn’t even list one recent article reporting on the outcome of the case against Ulbricht.  Y’know, because the Internet is all about the most useful and most relevant information — that is if you go hunting for it behind whatever manipulated algorithmic logic a search company has decided to prioritize.

Note:  Silk Road’s market trafficked in illegal narcotics while Google’s settlement was regarding illegal transactions for prescription pharmaceuticals.

A story reported yesterday on CNN Money reveals a new perspective on the whole “Aw shucks, we didn’t know” defense by companies like Google — and it’s the B2B perspective.  Because when money comes into the equation between advertiser and media company, bullshit doesn’t work quite so well. Imagine you’re Anheuser-Busch, one of the most American of all brands, the company whose iconic Budweiser Clydesdales were filmed standing in Liberty State Park bowing their heads at the empty patch of Manhattan skyline where the Twin Towers once stood.  Now, imagine your brand is being advertised on YouTube against ISIS recruiting videos.  Do you see a problem?  Set aside public opinion and the courts for a moment, because when major advertisers say, “You better be able to control where our ads appear,” Google will suddenly find it within its power to know far more than it often pretends it can know.  The CNN article quotes a Google spokesperson thus:  “We also have stringent advertising guidelines, and work to prevent ads appearing against any video, channel or page once we determine that the content is not appropriate for our advertising partner.”  And that’s great, but then if Google can actually achieve this goal, can the company not reasonably know other things, like whether or not it is engaged in any of the illegal activities being investigated by an attorney general?

Orlowski Details Google’s Silencing Miss. AG

As a follow-up to my last post about Google churning the Sony hack into SOPA suds, I wanted to call attention to this detailed article by Andrew Orlowski in The Register.  In that last piece, I refrained from enumerating Google’s conflicts with the laws of several countries, including our own.  I am not an investigative journalist and don’t maintain a detailed diary of those accounts, though I certainly read about many of them.  I also refrained from speculation as to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s rationale for “taking a break” in his investigation since Google has filed suit against his office; but as Orlowski points out, we should not overlook the fact that the search giant is worth more than Hood’s entire state or that the suit itself looks like a neatly-coordinated PR move.

“The innuendo this time was clear: state AGs were colluding to “break the internet” all over again. It ignited the same persecution fantasy that had fuelled [sic] the SOPA protests (“Let’s get rid of this legislation so we can start enjoying culture again,” wrote one Berkman scholar during the anti-SOPA campaign, somehow implying he couldn’t play music, go to the theatre or watch a movie).

Then, after the stories had circulated, quite coincidentally Google dug into its pockets and launched a highly unusual lawsuit against the attorney general of America’s poorest state.”

Most importantly, Orlowski emphasizes that Hood’s interest in Google hardly begins or ends with the company’s role in copyright infringement of properties belonging to Hollywood studios.

“What Hood wants to know is how Google is complying with a legally-binding settlement. And he’s curious to know whether advertisers are being skimmed – as whistleblowers have long alleged. This is certainly of interest to small businesses, typically “mom and pop” shops, that use Google’s Adsense. That’s the only area where one can argue Hood “opens up a new front” against Google – and he’s seeking more than compliance. And, given the economic interests of poor Missippians and the fact the USA is reluctant to apply fraud or consumer protection laws against Google, it’s hard to see why he shouldn’t.”

If anything, the copyright holders’ interests are among the lower priority concerns for authorities that have been investigating Google, appropriately taking a back seat to fraud, illegal drug trafficking, and human trafficking.

“Have a look how, and where, copyright figures in his 79-page Google subpoena. Just three press releases, none of which relate to copyright infringements, are on the Mississippi website. It’s the very last item on the list. It’s a sub point.”

And in case you don’t read the article, I have to quote Orlowski’s summation in which he makes the most important point:

“My puzzle is, why do intelligent progressives unthinkingly sign up to this agenda? The consequences of Google’s success in silencing Jim Hood are that corporate power cannot be restricted by one of democracy’s main mechanisms for reining it in. Google and Facebook are increasingly resembling “suprastates” to whom national – and perhaps international – law doesn’t apply. But if you think that replacing laws with a free-for-all leads to anything other than the strong crushing the weak, then I have a bridge to sell you.”

See Andrew Orlowski’s full article here.

Vicious Cycle – Speech Now Rewards the Oligarchs

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, about the challenges and the opportunities facing the next generation — those millennials about whom everyone has a theory and whose attention everybody wants.  They are, after all, the next big generation, equalling the boomers at about eighty million with us Xers weighing in at a paltry fifty million.  But as the father of three of these so-called millennials, I’m not so much interested in them as a demographic, trying to understand their habits and tastes so I can figure out what to sell them and how to package it.  And I certainly worry about their entry into cyberspace, sharing information about themselves with Zuckerberg’s data mining organization before they reach adulthood.  But above all, I wonder whether or not millennials are up for the big social and political challenge of their age and whether or not us Xers are able to lead the charge. At the moment I’m not so hopeful in light of this report from Public Citizen entitled Mission Creep-y, explaining how Google is becoming an ultra-powerful political force and continuing to expand its “information collection empire.” Just the first few lines of the introduction reads as follows:

“Google may possess more information about more people than any entity in the history of the world. Its business model and its ability to execute it demonstrate that it will continue to collect personal information about the public at a galloping pace. Meanwhile Google is becoming the most prolific political spender among corporations in the United States, while providing less transparency about its activities than many other of its politically active peers. Despite its mantra – “Don’t be evil” – Google’s ever- growing power calls for keeping a close eye on the company, just as it is keeping a close eye on us.”

I do think the challenge of this half of this century is whether or not we’re going to allow the unfettered power of a new oligarchy to flourish.  Plutocrats have risen before in American history, but what is unique this time is that the means by which we perceive we can combat unchecked power actually waters the seeds of that power itself. To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to Occupy Wall Street.  Remember Occupy?  It was trending not that long ago.  In my opinion, this series of protests was borne of anger and frustration with exactly the right problem — wealth consolidation.  For more than a half century now, Americans have fostered both policy and business culture that has resulted in a tiny fraction of society holding the greatest percentage of wealth.  Meanwhile, opportunity continues to shrink for everyone else — the 99% championed by OWS.  Thus, the targets of Occupy were the financial industry and the government that failed first to regulate and then to punish those who practiced predatory and fraudulent schemes that led to near economic collapse five years ago.  This particular rage aimed at those particular institutions was a reasonable start, but the narrative written by OWS actually contains an ironic twist I doubt many of its founders or followers ever considered before, during, or since those days in Zuccotti Park.

If we’re going to be honest, OWS produced nothing tangible to address the fundamental problem of wealth consolidation in the U.S.  No serious grassroots political force was founded, no OWS-backed candidates were elected to office, no dialogue has even really changed much as a result of those protests.  Instead, what OWS produced was a great deal of theater. And that’s normal.  Protests always produce some measure of theater that doesn’t translate into progress, which doesn’t mean protests don’t serve a purpose.  The irony, however, with this particular spectacle in the age of social media, this free show comprised of shared photos, videos, tweets, and updates about kids tussling with city police, was that it could not exist without putting money into the pockets of the wealthiest one percent of the one percent. For every one of us who watched a video of Officer Bologna pepper spray a young woman and thought, “that’s wrong” and then went about our day, the Internet billionaires made money. The top search result of that video alone has just under a million views on YouTube, and there are I don’t know how many related videos representing how many thousands of views.  But suffice to say that long after the goals of Occupy have been swept up with the detritus from the park, Silicon Valley’s elite few continue to make money from the from the free media circus performed in the name of restoring power to the many.  This Catch-22 scenario applies to just about any cause, any protest, any movement around the world.

I wrote broadly on this theme after supposed co-founder of OWS, now Google employee (yep), Justine Tunney called for a libertarian’s coup that would install Google chairman Eric Schmidt as chief executive of America. I really don’t think it’s alarmist to say that we are spawning a new generation of Vanderbilts with a social agenda that goes beyond mere greed, and that in the end, we won’t even get a railroad out of the deal.  But what is truly different about this era’s breed of Robber Baron is that this time he owns the medium through which we naively imagine we can protect our civil liberties against his caprice and callousness.  With every tweet, status update, an even blog post just like this one, we are feeding the very monster we think we’re fighting.  This is the real conundrum of our times and for the next generation to solve:  How do we speak truth to power when that power is made stronger by every word we say?