<<'Just remember not to use a commercial entity as your index into reality.' Google itself capitalized on what was in the late 90's horribly unfriendly search technology. The commercial entities of the day (e.g. Yahoo and Lycos) seemed to have no interest in better search.>>

As always, what was the socioeconomic context of that sequence of events?

* No means for the citizens to express to the Government what they want or get what they want from the Government.

* It's left to a profit-seeking entity to do the work, and then they feel entitled to control the results as well as merely offer it to the public. So my professor friend with a bulletin about FCC politics is UNLISTED and my anti-Iraq-War site is UNLISTED. Curious: I thought we existed, but in Google's world, evidently not. What kind of SEARCH ENGINE IS IT?

Well, it's not one (or company that runs one) that I wish to see permitted to control all advertising - or control, in fact, anything at all. I live here and see no point in allowing anyone to disenfranchise anyone else.

I boycott them for cause. 

It doesn't feel this way but IBM's monopoly was more powerful than Microsoft's in many ways. Imagine a company with $500B in revenues in the technology industry today...that's about what IBM looked like in the wayback machine.

Your point is an interesting one: 'Just remember not to use a commercial entity as your index into reality.' Google itself capitalized on what was in the late 90's horribly unfriendly search technology. The commercial entities of the day (e.g. Yahoo and Lycos) seemed to have no interest in better search. Rather they wanted to build massive content sites out of search engines to attract 'eyeballs.' AOL as you recall had millions of early 'social networking' interactions through its chat rooms and other media and Facebook and Myspace have turned that into huge franchises. 

I always say, don't compete, create. 

What I meant about the numbers was that they might indicate IBM had been a worse monopoly (in a certain numerical sense) whereas Microsoft has a 90-95% lock on the desktop, something IBM never reached in the same sense. When IBM had come out with their PC, there was not a shelf-ful of IBM-branded applications immediately available. There were hardly applications at all! (circa 1984.) The hard numbers might show one thing by percentage market revenue but MS is a lot more a threat according to penetration.

The one mystery to my mind (apropos of nothing much) was why IBM never fielded "guys" who were crackerjack microprocessor programmers, although I'm glad we don't have IBM-styled code of that kind from them (I don't think they stopped using all-caps in their code until after OS/2 went away.) I don't think the MS boys had the faintest idea how to handle 386 protected mode and they weren't about to license Intel tools, so we the users got to live with the defective 286 architecture for another 3-4 years at least.

==

I scanned the blog-death article. There is the "entropic death" syndrome, mentioned only rarely. {I think Andrew Keen wrote a book about it, can't find it to name it, sorry.} Once, we used to have "stars" (specific individual well-known people), but once everyone's online, it becomes very difficult to identify "stars" and thus the original stars lose authority. Destroying the old structure stirred everything up into a big inchoate mass (the death phase) and we'll need a new means of assigning authority. In the old days, papers had a reputation and they chose reporters to maintain that reputation. Now, the job of vetting the competence of the reporter is left to the reader (to begin with) - therefore against a not-so-good background of general education in the public, Bertrand Russell will be on a par with Larry the Cable Guy for some period of time until the public figures it out for themself that they need meaningful measures of content and quality. Then how will we know, where will we go to find out that one source is better than another ... it hasn't been invented/created yet. Just remember not to use a commercial entity as your index into reality ...

Again ecsd - your points are very good. Google's power as you point out is somewhat illusury driven by the power of 'the herd.' I assure you the numbers I quote from Moschella are accurate (or at least close enough for the point). He outlines this very well in his book "Waves of Power: The Dynamics of Global Technology Leadership."

http://www.amazon.com/Waves-Power-Technology-Leadership-1964-2010/dp/0814403794

It's dated (he wrote it in 1997) but it's a fascinating discussion of the sources of historical power in the technology industry. He wrote the book before Google was founded and accurately predicted the end of Microsoft's dominant power.

Your points on journalism expose another interesting topical vector. Did you see Nick Carr's recent post on "Who killed the blogoshpere?" Worth a read and maybe a topic for another post.

 http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/who_killed_the.php

The simplest thing to explain the absurdity of treating Google's output (in every space not actually their own) as glamorous or interesting

is to note that despite our knowing the famous domain that offers the glamor directly (google.com), when we access (going on) almost any site with an ad, we are still expected by suggestion and researched pyschological methods to interact with that company (google) as well as or even instead of the site we're visiting, when in fact we ought only to have to interact with google when we're within google's own site.

I note another universal service with its attendant affliction: email and SPAM. We beat our brains bloody trying to combat it; we pay money and sometimes serious money to get rid of it. We do so because it is intrusive, uninvited, and usually goes for our crotch and our credulousness. We object to it because it interferes in our attention. And we are desperate to stop it.

There is no particular difference between an uninvited still or moving image in an email and one plastered prominently on a web page in such a way that I must see it to some extent even if only to avoid it. Either one is SPAM. They are the very same thing, one of the few differences being the respect and acceptance accorded them only by virtue of whether the aesthetic offense was committed to secure profits by means of "advertising revenue" as opposed to "returns from scams."

The structure of our economic system is rewarding the enforcement upon us of feudal taxes (intervention by external third-parties, a.k.a. 'investors'.) If a site needs cash to operate then it needs an income. People have been led to expect advertising (as necessary), but that is socioeconomic propaganda. The people using the site are expressing the site's value by consuming it. Suppose you could reward the site for its visits in a direct way: let's suppose the government handed you a check, or paid your ISP fee directly, based on your hits. It doesn't matter if you think this particular example would work well or be desirable; it shows there is nothing fixed about the way things are done at present and there is no inherent necessity to retain much of its form or current rules. In the first place, we can "virtualize" the ''internet economy'' by abstracting it from the rest of the economy and then allocating a legislatively determined annual budget for the whole sector. You can then socialize the system by allowing all output to be consumed for 'free', with the proviso that all consumption is counted. At the end of the cycle, you split up the budget proportional to the number of 'consumption units' per artist/producer. You then decide if you wish in fact to collect from the consumers, and you can do this in any number of ways (expressing any number of social policies), remembering to count the annual base budget in the calculations. The prediction is this is unnecessary: typically you wish to punish "hogs". Once people understand that they can get as much as they like for free at any time, I think the "download frenzy" will abate and consumption patterns will reflect an accurate norm, and the law of large numbers will fix the rest.

Just an idea.

One extension that comes to mind is that the same model can be applied to Journalism as well: that costs a lot more hard money to produce, but it is easily paid for through an expression of interest, using the mechanism described above (or in our current system, posting a returnable "bond" against a stated need, and then paying as much as required of the bond based on the final audience numbers.) So instead of watching news crews disappear, our mere desire to see them do a story about a thing X can have the system produce the money needed within moments of reaching critical audience mass and the news crew is on its way to report on X. I can see a 'whole new industry' and a revival of (good and objective) news for consumption using this approach. Ya hoid it heer folks, (C) 2008 ecsd for what it's worth.

"Never again has the industry seen such power concentrated in the hands of one vendor."

I leave it to you to know the actual numbers, but what about Microsoft? A worse monopoly than IBM, no? And their software is HORRID ... elsewhere I have lambasted MSware as being THE REASON we have a global SPAM epidemic. I'm an ISP and at one point we (the community) were making decent headway against the spammers - and then the spammers developed BOT-nets, and now to track down the sources of spam you could open random doors in any building in the world - thanks to MICROSOFT.

So why do people still use MSware? Lack of information. There's no profit to be made by anyone to go on TV and convince people to get rid of their Microsoft software, although that's what all of us should do. Nor is our Government socially or technologically conscious enough to run Public Service ads to tell us to abandon MSware (if you have an EPIDEMIC, you WARN people and explain how they can PROTECT themselves. The problem of course is that your abandonment of MSware is only a protection for YOU and of others FROM you (your PC.) The "treatment" must be applied worldwide in parallel, as with Polio.)

Google's "power" is IMO vaporware (powerful tho.) Why do so many people use it? Because so many people use it. As with the WORD xerox, the WORD google was adopted by people to refer to their doing a search on Google, though I never heard of anybody "Yahooing" anything. But people adopted 'google' as a fad at just the time it was Peter Principling itself into a cash vulture resting on its laurels. Are they still "the best search engine"? I doubt it, for several reasons. So their day was passing even as the public was adopting their name as a common verb.

Elsewhere I've said that "any jackass with enough money" can appear to be clever, the point being that the "genius" of Google is not the genius of Page or Brin, but people that Page and Brin have HIRED, and that brilliance follows THEM. So if I won the trillion dollar lottery, I "Daffy Snagglepuss Duck" could offer pentupled salaries to all the Google developers and then claim their output as the "genius" of MY company. But if I don't win the lottery, who will finance my takeover of Google's staff? Only someone who KNEW that my takeover would bring EVEN MORE PROFITS. So what we have is the putting of GENIUS to work for ACCUMULATING PROFITS, and all that Page and Brin had done was to concentrate that potential into a point worth BUYING OUT (called Public Offering.) Once incorporated, their marching orders were: make money, make more money, make as much money as you can. Had nothing to do with what people WANTED or NEEDED, instead it was (a) manipulation of search results for cash (I call that LYING FOR MONEY, insofar as Joe the Rich Dufus can pay to come above the most popular and well-known competition, no SKILL needed); and (b) deciding FOR US that Google would begin to expropriate every square micrometer of advertising space everywhere and then fill it with jiggling moving images that cannot be stopped, while using its momentum to convince people that only Google could provide "clickthrough returns".

When I CANNOT GO TO VARIOUS WEBSITES WITHOUT SEEING A GOOGLE AD, then I want Google to be NATIONALIZED and DEBRANDED. I am an American Citizen and I do not read in the Constitution that I am REQUIRED to live in a brand-X world because people whose God is money have constructed my society for me (against my will) such that I HAVE NO CHOICE.

We can just turn the channel, sure. But we need REMINDERS and ENCOURAGEMENT, and we're not going to get them from people who (a) don't pay attention or (b) have a VESTED INTEREST in the way the system works. You haven't quit using Google yet, have you? See? :)

One moral is: if darling company C begins discussing their plans for world domination (phrased as "market share") and if company C appears to be able to at least start to pull it off - then that's the time to pull the plug on company C. The stuff that moneylovers call "capitalism" I call "authoritarian monopoly capitalism" and a little inspection reveals it to be simply economic totalitarianism. Oddly enough, a real follower of Adam Smith would never dream of dominating his market, because that's CONTRARY TO THE PRINCIPLES OF CAPITALISM. Capitalism FAILS if you do that, but as we all sorely know, no so-called capitalist entity in THIS country has a desire to do ANYTHING except dominate its market 100%. And in fact REAL capitalism in this country is being extinguished by the Wal*Marts, the Dells, the Trader Joes, and so forth. {And Telcos are killing ISPs. We were a computer and parts store and an ISP. Ingram allowed "buycomp.com" to SELL TO THE PUBLIC AT BENEATH OUR WHOLESALE RATES from Ingram and so that killed (1) the parts business. Then Dell decided that only he should be allowed to manufacture PCs and that killed (2) our computer sales business. Then SBC (please call it SOUTHWEST BELL - AT&T no longer EXISTS) got their friends at the FCC to stop the unbundling rules, allowing SBC to retract DSL and T1 services into their pockets EXCLUSIVELY, thus killing (3) most of the revenues that ISPs need. My response to their trying to destroy my livelihood entirely is found at http://communityfiber.org.}

I want access to an Internet that carries NO ADS on ANY SITE I VISIT. I am willing to PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE. But that is NOT OFFERED because those who have designs on my pocketbook and attention span REFUSE TO ALLOW IT. I would be in favor of passing a law that greatly restricts what can be offered "for free", because that is a primary source of audience capture. In 50 reformed years our children will grow up learning to avoid commercials and the companies that run them. In the meantime, we have the task of defilming people's vision so they grasp what it means to passively accept "free" services from a company rich enough to pour money on the street to lure futher victims. They're paying you to eliminate their competition. So shame on them for offering such and shame on us for accepting it.

Hi David,

I thought it was an excellent post! Great suggestions. 

Interesting topic monopoly power in the technology industry. According to noted author David Moschella, at one point IBM could claim 50% of the industry's total revenue and 2/3rds of its profit. That is remarkable. Never again has the industry seen such power concentrated in the hands of one vendor. Switching costs were enormous for customers. IBM then handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft. Welcome to forced migrations to bloated software like Vista. 

Google's power doesn't stem from binary compatibility and proprietary lock-in. For a user, what are the costs of switching search engines? Virtually zero.

In theory, the power is with the users. 

Fascinating posts ecsd...

Imagine having a 'direct' hand in choosing the (use of the) technologies you're discussing. But, we don't get to vote on these things, do we? And if we "have to live with what we get", it doesn't feel very good if we don't like what we're getting, thus your lament. If the revolution isn't televised, still it should be pursued by interested parties. If you agree that you'd like to have an input into such technological processes, then you are, or at least could be, a revolutionary. Instead of "dealing with" and only offering commentary on things Google does, adopt the point of view that what we all (globally) get out of these companies can NOT be left to these companies. Are they smarter than you? Evidently not, because you'd like to correct their behavior. So wouldn't it be nice if you COULD?

Our system says that you can. All you have to do is raise enough money to buy 50.1% of Google stock and you'll get your say. All you have to do to have a voice at Google is buy, oh, 5% to 15% of their stock, enough to notice and care about votes from.

Too bad the common man and woman have no means whatsoever to do that, so I guess the major shareholders of Google are the ones whose intentions we will all have to live by, like it or not.

Except that Google is not ENTITLED to decide for the rest of us "how the Internet shall work" or "what paradigms drive it." They're not allowed to become the "muscle and sinew" of the way the Internet operates (cash cow, in their intention) because THEY WISH TO, but try to stop them ...

So maybe the Need for a revolution should be televised. The notion that anything is really "free" is false and the notion that everything will be paid for by advertising is the notion of SOME people but by no means ALL people. I think those people are wrong and I think they don't care how they despoil our mental, emotional and psychological environments, just as long as it rakes in revenues. I don't think the primary or even secondary goal of life is to pursue exponentially increasing profits or wealth and I think "most of us" would rather not live in a world controlled by people who do. I'm not much worried about Microsoft's intentions because they're highly incompetent, but Google really is in the business of exporting their economic philosophy onto the world, and the answer to that should be that the public puts them out of business.

I will write a note to the Oxford English Dictionary asking them to add the note "Deprecated" in their entry defining "Google" as a verb meaning "web search". When I want to search the web, I search the web. Google is not invited into my life as a company or a word.