I appeared on BBC World Service’s Newshour to discuss Eric Schmidt’s advice to erase your digital identity every few years. Click here to listen.

Original story

By the mid 1990s it had become pointless to compete with Microsoft in operating systems and office software – and investment in potential competitors dried up. The best you could hope for as a software company was to carve out a niche as part of the Windows Office system; this was a very small niche indeed.

The same thing is happening today with web services. But what Google and other web giants are doing goes largely unnoticed, even by analysts, pundits and Presidential advisors. What they are able to do is use their scale, and clever and cynical politics to obscure how they’re solidifying their competitive advantage. In particular, they’re swearing allegiance to (and lobbying for) an idea which doesn’t apply to their operations, but which will keep smaller competitors out of the market. A Zoho, for example – or the next new YouTube.

To understand this, you have to keep in mind that there isn’t really such a thing as ‘The Internet’, which may sound strange. It might be even stranger to consider that the internet was never designed as a masterplan to be ‘The Internet’, thankfully, as it turned out.

Instead of one network, picture lots of private networks. The internetworking protocols (the clue’s in the name) provide guidelines for some lowest common denominators by which these private networks can cooperate.

The good thing is that the architects’ more modest ambition of "internetworking" succeeded where many grand plans had failed. It explains why the internet is so resilient, and why it’s so hard to regulate, or control. The downside is that it’s hard to improve upon today’s internet, either, since innovation chugs along at the pace of the slowest significant network.

But one way around the bottlenecks is permissible. Deliverers of content and services can climb off the public internet, and do deals directly with the customer-facing networks to which you or I subscribe. Instead of making a journey of two dozen hops around the world, the material need only take two or three.

This is what Google, Amazon and others do. They operate private internets of their own, and peer with the largest ISPs.

Read more at The Register…

Google has traditionally charged into other business areas with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. This isn’t always a bad thing: there are plenty of cosy industries that are ripe for a shake-up, and advertising is one of the cosiest. But there’s one area that’s been strictly taboo.

Google has always linked to other people’s stuff, and stayed out of retailing bits itself. Over time it’s blurred that line, without ever really crossing it. This was a line that Microsoft never really crossed either, although Windows Marketplaces were announced, then came and went phut, as regularly as Service Packs.

Now we can confirm that Google is gearing up for a Music Store – CNet’s Greg Sandoval hears this could be upon us as soon as the autumn, it may decide this high-minded distinction is no longer one worth preserving. The rumours strongly suggest Google will be integrating music into search – no surprise, there – but there’s plenty of speculation that it will go the final step, and retail the music directly.
(more…)

Google’s roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it’s got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users’ unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.

Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he’s "horrified" by the discovery.

"I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View," according to German broadcaster ARD.

Spooks have long desired the ability to cross reference the Mac address of a user’s connection with their real identity and virtual identity, such as their Gmail or Facebook account.

Read more at The Register

Obama has created an exquisite problem by hiring so many senior executives from Google – some of the Oompa Loompas don’t seem to realise they no longer work for the company. Now a Congressman has called for an enquiry.

The issue was made apparent when a trail of correspondence by administration official Andrew McLaughlin was exposed recently. McLaughlin is Obama’s deputy CTO – a freshly minted post, with CTO meaning either Citizens Twitter Overlord, or Chief Technology Officer – we believe it’s the latter. He was previously Google’s chief lobbyist, or ‘Head of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs’.

McLaughlin’s contacts were also exposed. In an irony to savour, the exposure was by Google itself, as it introduced its privacy-busting Buzz feature in February. As our Cade pointed out, it would be hard to imagine a better Google story.
(more…)

Do no evil? Google execs knew YouTube was in the wrong, but swallowed hard and bought it anyway, emails disclosed to a US court show. In 2006 execs at the Chocolate Factory were aware that the startup was less than wholesome, describing it as a “rogue enabler of content theft” whose “business model is completely sustained by pirated content” – in emails now made public. They acknowledged it would raise ethical questions.

In October the same year, Google acquired the video site for $1.65bn. The cynical calculation meant swallowing a few principles.

Google Video business product manager Ethan Anderson wrote to Patrick Walker, a senior Google executive:

“I can’t believe your [sic] recommending buying YouTube. Besides the ridiculous valuation they think they’re entitled to, they’re 80% illegal pirated content.”

To complete the purchase, Google’s definition of evil needed to become as flexible as The Invincibles’ Elastic Girl. David Eun, content manager at Google wrote:

“As Sergey [Brin] pointed out, is changing a policy to increase traffic knowing beforehand that we’ll profit from illegal downloads how we want to conduct our business? Is this Googley?”

In other documents, YouTube’s co-founder Steve Chen declared that YouTube should

“concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil”.

And so Google rewarded evil: Chen received Google stock worth $310m from the acquisition. It has since increased in value. YouTube investor Sequoia Capital realised over $500m from a mere $9m investment. If you’re wondering just what technological innovation or original idea Google was supporting – you’ll be scratching your head for a long time. The value of YouTube was its collection of other’s people’s stuff.

The emails are a devastating indictment of Google’s ethics – and the Chocolate Factory must have anticipated the damage the disclosures would cause. Overnight Google launched a spoiler, leaking a batch of emails alleging that Viacom uploaded its own material to the site. It’s embarrassing, for sure, but not in the same ballpark – Viacom’s property is Viacom’s property to do what it likes with.

"It’s Google’s autistic approach to relationships," one senior phone exec told me this week. "They don’t know what hurt they’re doing, and they don’t care."

It’s nothing personal, guys. Today, some of the biggest tech companies in the world, who thought they were Google’s closest partners, will begin to understand how, say, copyright holders have felt for some time now. For the first time, I suspect, they’ll be enjoying that recurring tingle of amazement and disbelief that (as Chris Castle explained here), Google would even try and pull off such a stunt. It took EMI Publishing six months to realise that Google had claimed digital rights to its songs, for example. But even if the decision to shaft its closest Android partners and biggest customers is an aberration, a one-off, a fling that Google will later regret – then the size of the parties involved means it’s going to have lasting repercussions.

Even before Google started competing with it head on this week, the mobile industry was already wary of the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, and its inclination to hoover up every morsel of service revenue. Now complaining about that may be a bit hypocritical, you might think, if you look at how much of a transaction operators such as Docomo have traditionally retained, and how much they want to keep now. But look at the alternative, Google told the networks and device makers. That Mr Jobs doesn’t leave anything on the table. And besides, we Do No Evil.

Read more at The Register.

It’s hard to explain to people new to the web since 2004 – the Digg kids – the effect that Google had on the internet at the turn of the decade. They can’t conceive the Before and the After. Google was miraculous, and so much better than the competition that they effectively gave up trying to compete with it. But Google’s PageRank also unleashed social and political fads which reverberate right through to this day.

Much of the junk science of the web comes from Googlemania of this period. New institutes and venerable academic departments today all drink from the seemingly bottomless well. It permeates into Birtspeak 2.0, and you can see it in the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down you see in Comments, for example. The mini-industry called “Social media marketing” wouldn’t really exist without it, either.

Google kindled the idea that the Web was a democracy, a great big voting machine. But only Google was uniquely qualified to divine these intentions – only Google had the capability and know-how to discern the ‘Hive Mind’. Google said so itself; its PR blurb explicitly made the connection between a New Form of Democracy and its own innovation, the “uniquely democratic nature of the web”.

For a couple of years, PageRank™ worked wonders. Then reality began to mess things up. What had worked well for conferring authority to peer-reviewed academic papers didn’t work quite so well in the wild. As Google grew, the importance of appearing in its rankings also grew. SEO and dirty tricks became big business. (See Meet the Jefferson of Web 2.0.)

This was first pointed out by your reporter in 2003, and it was manifest in two ways. Firstly, via the ease with which a small group of motivated people could hijack search terms, thanks to the dense interlinking nature of blogs. (A more perfect machine for rigging PageRank has yet to be invented). This was Googlewashing. And secondly, the ease with which spammers could clog the system with noise. The period also saw the migration of large amounts of information to the web in a searchable format. The real-time chatter from protocols that had previously been beyond the reach of search engines – such as AOL chatrooms – found its way into its Google. The result, by mid-2003, was a system that was broken.

You may recall that it was heresy at the time to doubt the quite magical technical ability of Google to get it ‘right’. The bandwagon of Web 2.0 had barely started to roll – it wasn’t christened until the following year – but there was already serious money on riding on it. But it was an even greater heresy to question the moral authority that the technology utopians had by then conferred on Google.

For Google wasn’t just ranking web pages, but adding to the human epistemological cannon – it was telling us what was wrong and right – filtered and legitimised through the people-powered Hive Mind. Thanks to the now-burdensome “Don’t Be Evil”, it constantly reminded us of its impeccable moral credentials.

Well, as you may have seen, PageRank™ is now dead. Google has given up on the job of ranking pages – it can’t cope any more – and outsourced the task of evaluating the job to the user. Needs must, and so it will make a virtue of the very feature that helped destroy the index – real-time noise. As Danny Sullivan points out, this is very big news indeed. I think it’s even bigger than Danny thinks it is – with an extra penthouse layer of bigness on top – for all the social and political implications mentioned above.

By outsourcing the ranking of pages to the hoi polloi, Google is saying that is no longer in the business of ‘arbitrating’ democracy. This is now the job of hordes of roaming single issue fanatics, voting pages up and down. You could say the internet has returned to its primordial soup.

(more…)

No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google’s vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently in trouble with antitrust regulators – they’re at different stages of IBM-style thirty years legal epics – that’s just the ticket for them both.

Google’s failure to dent the Microsoft monopoly will simply notch up another failure for Linux (whose fans are quite happy to work for The Man, as long as it’s not the Man from Redmond) – and it’ll do nothing for consumers. How so? Because the computing problems we’ll have tomorrow will still be the same ones we have today.

…Read more at The Register