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.

Let’s put aside for a moment the China experience, where Google – with the full blessing of the major labels – launched a free MP3 download service, entirely supported by ads. This was a very unusual situation, where China’s dominant search portal Baidu was serving up MP3s without a license, hosted on an ever-changing network of obscure domains that nobody else could reach. Rights holders aren’t about to repeat the experience here – and with a market of willing buyers, there’s no reason why they should. So disregard it as a precedent.

The reason for Google’s reluctance to sell digital bits is pretty obvious: its market dominance as a search engine puts it directly into competition with online retailers, and puts them at a potentially crippling disadvantage. If Google is the first port of calling for getting to stuff on the web, why would anyone find a second? Google takes you directly to the checkout. It spells the end for any online retailer without massive scale, and the brand and resources to match.

But you can see the thinking, here, even if you don’t approve. For some time Google has eyed the rise of price comparison sites with some irritation. What value do they add, a Googler might ask? Most are little more than crummy pseudo-editorial sites, in the pocket of the largest vendors. Surely a classic case for intervention by algorithm. Well those price comparison sites are already earmarked for extinction and few will mourn their passing – they don’t really add much value. But then again, that doesn’t mean Google will be pushing out the bits itself. It may simply subsume price comparison into its existing apparatus.

And once again, a Googler might ask – why on earth go the extra step? It’s not as if the Chocolate Factory wants to sell you lawnmowers or TVs, the high-margin end of Amazon’s business. It’s only an MP3. In terms of scale, the world’s music is somewhere between 25 million and 35 million MP3s, but then only a small proportion of that really matters to a mass market retailer – you’ll recall the study that showed that of 12 million songs in (what we assume to be) the iTunes catalog only 3 million sold a copy in one year. Google has plenty of capacity and bandwidth – why not remove the extra step and sell it directly?

It has demonstrated how. Three weeks ago Google unveiled a section of the Android Market that sells music. (Yes, the Android store is Google’s only example of selling bits itself.) From the China experiment, Google knows who to call. Whether it wants to is another thing. For any global operator acquiring rights is a world of pain – the music business is still territorial, and the fragmentation of music publishing rights means it can take weeks or even months of work simply to find who owns what. This is not a problem an algorithm can answer.

Google is now so large it could probably buy the entire sound recording industry for small change – certainly less than a quarter’s revenue. Even if it does, the licensing headache doesn’t go away. So it will certainly be more effective for Google to employ an intermediary to sort this out.

If Google were to employ the same ruthless approach to music as it did with books, Google Music could be a serious challenger not just to every music retailer on the planet, but every producer and rights owner too. We’ll have to see if the company has been chastised by the experience, in which governments eventually turned against the landgrab. I suspect it hasn’t.

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

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.

Now GOP Congressman Darrell Issa, a ranking member of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked why the Deputy CTO is prattling away on Google’s email service. Issa wants to know whether private, non-governmental emails are archived, as they should be.

He also wants to know what the retention policy is for information posted on Twitter and Facebook, who decides these things (pdf). Issa wants answers by 22 April.

As I noted last June, there are interesting parallels with the influence of think tank RAND on US policy in the 1960s – and some interesting differences. RAND was also a Church of the Algorithm, it took mathematical ideas and applied them to social and political problems. RAND’s most famous contribution was developing a nuclear policy based on game theory, developed by Robert McNamara, who went on to apply RAND analysis (disastrously) first to escalate, then to prolong the Vietnam war.

Google is merely a corporation, I noted. Then, the following month, Obama tapped the Berkman Centre, a pretty New Age techno-utopian think tank attached to Harvard Law School, to conduct an “independent” review of broadband deployment and usage. Like Obama, McLaughlin is himself a graduate of Harvard Law – the class of 94. McLaughlin had two senior stints at Berkman, from 1998 to 1999, and once again before joining Google.

Google is a Berkman sponsor.

There’s a broader issue than archiving emails here, and it’s eloquently illustrated by Andrew McLaughlin’s Gmail Buzz contact list. It’s that the range of ideas that Obama can draw upon, via his Googlers, is extremely narrow and ideologically rigid.

The boundaries of what he’s permitted to think are defined by Google. And that’s isn’t really in the best interest of either the President, or the US public.

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 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.

How noise defeated the cleverest engineers on Earth

Since 2005 Google has relied heavily on Wikipedia to mask the flaws introduced by its inability to deal with noise. The thinking behind this is that the typical punter just wants to know something quickly, and Wikipedia will give them a rough and ready answer, and links for further reading. It may as well have hardwired Wikipedia to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

But the onslaught of Web2.0rhea – the relentless real-time noise exemplified by Twitter – appears to be the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. This is really quite something. Twitter remains a fairly minor social network, with only half as many active users as the most popular Facebook application, and it wouldn’t get into a Facebook App Top 10 – yet it was enough to prompt Google to inject a live self-updating feed of real-time garbage into its once-hallowed SERPS.

(The No.1 Facebook App is Farmville, if you’re interested, with 69 million active users a month. No, I didn’t know that either.)

It’s no coincidence, and you couldn’t really get a clearer expression of “We’ve Given Up”.

Years ago we mused that it was the lack of specificity that would ultimately doom Google. It had set itself a mission to collect and organise the world’s information. But most of this wasn’t worth collecting – and Google just wasn’t clever enough to differentiate between good and bad, and so was unable to organise it. This was not an original thought – it just seems like it today.

So Google is dead. It has no more magic at its disposal than a Balfour Beatty or a Saatchi and Saatchi, and no more moral authority. Could someone please inform President Obama, and the Conservative Party?

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

One strategy is to drive down the value of copyright material on the internet to zero. Google has a ruthless and calculating view of the real value of stuff. It reasons that if all we do on the net is talk to each other, then it’s merely fulfilling the role of a switchboard operator at a Soviet-era state monopoly telco – connecting us, while listening in. That’s a pretty unglamorous business, it doesn’t save the world… and hey, where’s the money?

The YouTube experience has taught Google that the value of “user generated content”, of the “new era of creativity” is as close to zero as a rounding error – while quite irrationally we continue to throw money at DVDs, CD box sets of stuff we already have, Susan Boyle, and even ringtones. That’s all copyright stuff. They are clever people, and this hasn’t escaped their notice.

The other strategy is to drive down the value of the “access networks” to zero. Unable to offer innovative value-add services of their own, the ISPs and mobile networks become interchangeble suppliers, merely undifferentiated suppliers of bits. Hence the “Net Neutrality” scare. Google didn’t invent “net neutrality”, but it lost little time in taking advantage of it, to its own ends. No company in the 25-year history of the net had ever dared propose a technical rulebook for what the net’s operators could and couldn’t do – until Google started to write legislation.

In both cases the entertainment and network “industries” have been the timid architects of their own demise. The networks well may be becoming commoditised bit pipes without Google’s assistance, and the content businesses – by refusing to take elementary steps such as synchronising releases across markets, and monetising P2P file sharing – may too see the value of their assets disappear. But it doesn’t harm Google to speed things along a bit.

Take the two together and you’ll start to see why Google is building those vast power-guzzling data centers. With copyright holders and last-mile service providers unable to realise value, those data centres aggregate all that’s left. Google becomes the internet company by default.

…Read more at The Register

Let’s contrast how each of them addressed the crisis.

Meyer said Google’s policy “first and foremost” was to respect the wishes of content producers, but offered nothing in the way of new business partnerships. Instead, she gave them a short but haughty lecture on how they should present their stories – they should become more like Wikipedia:

“Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity,” she said in her statement. “We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.”

So instead of publishing 50 stories a day, the implication is that publications should only publish 50 a year – tweaking those 50 constantly, in the hope they wriggle up through the Google search results. Yes, that’ll fix things.

She also said they should offer more scope for mash-ups. At both ends of the news chain, then, you have people fiddling – instead of writing (at one end) and reading (at the other). That’s very Web 2.0, and you couldn’t get a clearer statement that Google doesn’t really understand what news is for. (It’s merely the stuff that goes between the BODY tags, silly.)

The creator of The Wire and former reporter David Simon said he found the phrase “citizen journalism” Orwellian. He added:

“A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor – he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to social workers and firefighters.”

Simon also lambasted the newspaper industry’s cry of “it’s not our fault”. Newspapers had gone from privately-owned family firms to publicly-traded stocks, he said, and many of the cuts in the 1990s were against the background of bumper (35 per cent) profits. Families were content with 10 to 15 per cent annual profit.

“How anyone can believe that industry can fund [editors and investigative reporters] by giving away its product away online to aggregators and bloggers is a source of endless fascination to me.”

The solution proposed in some US cities, and backed by the editor of the UK Guardian newspaper (which has never turned a profit), is public funding. Simon said he was dead against this.

“High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously.”

His solution?

“An industry-wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base”,

… allied to relaxing anti-trust laws and help with enforcing copyright. Which sounds like a blanket licence, of sorts, to me: one likely to be carved up between the New York Times and the Washington Post. But it was more of a plan than Google’s Meyer had to offer.

The gossip blog Valleywag used to wonder if Marissa Meyer was an android, or merely a remote hologram projection – the gag being that she’s merely a local representation of the Google Hive Mind. Well, judge for yourself by reading her fantastically inappropriate testimony, and Simon’s statement too – here.