Σε διάφορες συζητήσεις
τους τελευταίους μήνες, έχω παρατηρήσει ότι πολλοί δεν καταλαβαίνουν τη
διαφορά μεταξύ της γενικής (ή οριζόντιας) αναζήτησης και της
εξειδικευμένης (ή κάθετης, όπως λέγεται) αναζήτησης.
Σε μια από αυτές τις συζητήσεις, με έναν ηλικιωμένο κύριο, ο οποίος στα
80 του έχει καταφέρει να ενσωματώσει τη Google και το Facebook στην
καθημερινότητά του μέσω κινητού και tablet, η απάντηση που έπρεπε να
δώσω στην ερώτηση «μα καλά, βρε παιδάκι, από που βγάζουν τόσα πολλά
λεφτά αυτές οι εταιρείες αφού οι υπηρεσίες τους είναι δωρεάν;», μου
φαινόταν λίγο δύσκολη.
Ωστόσο, προσπάθησα να του απαντήσω όσο πιο απλά μπορούσα. «Από τη
διαφήμιση, φυσικά», του είπα.
Ήθελα να του πω επίσης ότι το μεγαλύτερο προϊόν αυτών των επιχειρήσεων
είναι ο ίδιος, ο οποίος εν μέσω εκδρομών του ΚΑΠΗ και όλων των
αναμνηστικών φωτογραφιών, που δεν ξεχνάει να ανεβάζει στο κοινωνικό
δίκτυο, αποτελεί ως χρήστης το μεγαλύτερο πλεονέκτημα των νέων
τεχνολογικών μέσων. Δεν το έκανα για να μην του χαλάσω τη χαρά να
περνάει το χρόνο με τα νέα του παιχνίδια.
Κάθε μέρα η μηχανή αναζήτησης της Google επιστρέφει πάνω από 5
δισεκατομμύρια αποτελέσματα σε αναζητήσεις παγκοσμίως. Το μυστικό της
επιτυχίας της βρίσκεται εκεί, στην κλίμακα της λειτουργίας αυτής της
μηχανής. Και για να καταλάβουμε αυτήν την επιτυχία, πρέπει να
καταλάβουμε και τη διαφορά ανάμεσα στην οριζόντια και την κάθετη, την
πιο σύνθετη, και άρα πιο αποτελεσματική αναζήτηση.
Η κατανόηση των διαφορών ανάμεσα στους δύο τρόπους αναζήτησης είναι
ζωτικής σημασίας για να κατανοήσει ένας απλός χρήστης τους τρόπους με
τον οποίους η Google καταχράται τη δεσπόζουσα θέση της.
Για τον απλούστατο λόγο ότι η μηχανή της Google συχνά εμφανίζεται ως ένα
εύχρηστο εργαλείο στο αχανές του κυβερνοχώρου, τις περισσότερες φορές
δεν χρειάζεται να εξηγήσει στο χρήστη πώς πραγματικά λειτουργεί.
Συστηματικά, λοιπόν, η Google αρνείται τυχόν διαφορές στον τρόπο που φέρνει τα πιο δημοφιλή αποτελέσματα στην επιφάνεια των αποτελεσμάτων της - πάντα βγαίνουν στην κορυφή εκείνα που διαφημίζονται στο διαδίκτυο.
Oι γίγαντες της τεχνολογίας πάντοτε επωφελούνταν από τα αποτελέσματα
του Internet: όσο περισσότεροι χρήστες συνδέονται στο Facebook, τόσο
πιο ελκυστική είναι η εγγραφή για όλους τους υπόλοιπους.
Όσο τρομακτικό κι εάν ακούγεται, το κύριο προϊόν της Google, είναι η
τεράστια ομάδα χρηστών και τα δεδομένα τους, σχετικά με τον τρόπο που
συμπεριφέρονται στο διαδίκτυο.
Αυτά τα δεδομένα χρησιμοποιούνται για να ταιριάζουν εταιρείες με
πιθανούς πελάτες, σερβίροντας τους διαφημίσεις που πιθανότατα θα
κλικάρουν πάνω σε αυτές.
Στην καθημερινή χρήση, αυτή η πρακτική, είναι κάτι που ξεχνάμε όλοι μας.
Όμως, οι συνήθειες μας, οι προτιμήσεις μας στο YouTube, οι αναζητήσεις
μας ή τα κλικς μέσα στο Gmail, όλα χρησιμοποιούνται με σκοπό να
σκιαγραφήσουν τη συμπεριφορά μας.
Επιπλέον, η Google ακολουθεί όλες τις συνήθειες περιήγησής μας μέσω των
κωδικών του Analytics και του Adsense, (ενσωματωμένων σε ιστοσελίδες),
για να παρακολουθεί τα ενδιαφέροντά μας εκτός της μηχανής αναζήτησης.
Όλα αυτά είναι λίγο πολύ γνωστά. Κάποιοι τα γνωρίζουν, άλλους δεν τους
νοιάζει, οι πιο υποψιασμένοι χρησιμοποιούν άλλες, πιο αθώες μηχανές
αναζήτησης.
Παράλληλα, όμως, με την κυριαρχία της Google στον ιστό, η επανάσταση των
έξυπνων κινητών πολλαπλασίασε τα υπερπολύτιμα δεδομένα.
Είτε βρισκόμαστε στο λεωφορείο και χαζεύουμε το κινητό είτε βλέπουμε
τηλεόραση και ταυτόχρονα θέλουμε να βρούμε μια πληροφορία στο Google,
σχεδόν κάθε δραστηριότητα μας δημιουργεί ένα εικονικό ίχνος.
Αυτή είναι η πρώτη ύλη για τα αποστακτήρια δεδομένων της Google. Και
καθώς όλες οι συσκευές γίνονται πιο έξυπνες, δηλαδή όλες συνδέονται στο
διαδίκτυο, ο όγκος αυτός γιγαντώνεται.
Αυτή η αφθονία των δεδομένων έχει αλλάξει τη φύση του ανταγωνισμού. Οι
γίγαντες της τεχνολογίας πάντοτε επωφελούνταν από τα αποτελέσματα του
Internet: όσο περισσότεροι χρήστες συνδέονται στο Facebook, τόσο πιο
ελκυστική είναι η εγγραφή για όλους τους υπόλοιπους.
Ακόμη και για τους συνταξιούχους και τους ηλικιωμένους. Με όλο και
περισσότερα δεδομένα δημιουργούνται επιπλέον πεδία δράσης.
Έτσι, με τη συλλογή περισσότερων δεδομένων, μια επιχείρηση έχει
περισσότερα περιθώρια βελτίωσης των προϊόντων της, τα οποία προσελκύουν
περισσότερους αγοραστές, οι οποίοι με τη σειρά τους δημιουργούν ακόμα
περισσότερα δεδομένα και ο κύκλος δεν τελειώνει ποτέ.
Τα συστήματα επίβλεψης και επιτήρησης των μεγάλων κολοσσών καλύπτουν
πλέον ολόκληρη την οικονομία: η Google μπορεί να δει τι ψάχνουν οι
χρήστες, το Facebook γνωρίζει τι κοινοποιούν 2 δισεκατομμύρια άνθρωποι
αυτού του πλανήτη, η Amazon ξέρει τι αγοράζουν.
Αυτή η «πανοραμική» θέα του κόσμου και των δραστηριοτήτων, αυτές οι
τεράστιες βάσεις δεδομένων είναι το πιο πολύτιμο αγαθό των ημερών μας.
Και αυτό το νέο προϊόν που ηγείται μια συνεχώς αναπτυσσόμενης
βιομηχανίας, προκαλεί όλο και περισσότερο τις αντιμονοπωλιακές
ρυθμιστικές αρχές να βγουν μπροστά για να θέσουν όρια σε όσους
γιγαντώνουν την επιρροή του.
Πριν από έναν αιώνα, αυτή τη θέση κατείχε το πετρέλαιο.
Σε ένα πρόσφατο, και πολύ σημαντικό για την εποχή μας, άρθρο των New
York Times, o δημοσιογράφος Charles Duhigg, κάνει μια συνταρακτική
έρευνα για το φαινόμενο της μονοπωλιακής κυριαρχίας της Google.
Οι βασικοί πρωταγωνιστές της ιστορίας του η Shivaun Moeran και ο Adam
Raff, ηλικίας 51 και 49 ετών, το ζευγάρι από τη Μεγάλη Βρετανία, που
εγκατέλειψε τις δουλειές του για να ξεκινήσουν μια ιστοσελίδα σύγκρισης
τιμών το 2005. Το Foundem βγήκε online το 2006.
Μετά από ένα 48ωρο λειτουργίας του ένιωσαν να τους χτυπάει αλύπητα η
οργή της Google. Ενώ τις δύο πρώτες ημέρες τα αποτελέσματα το έφερναν
στην κορυφή των αναζητήσεων, ξαφνικά το είδαν να πέφτει στο βυθό των
αποτελεσμάτων.
Παρά τις προσπάθειές τους να έρθουν σε επαφή με την εταιρεία και τους
ρυθμιστές της, το Foundem δεν κατάφερε ποτέ να σηκωθεί από τα έγκατα των
αναζητήσεων της Google.
To Foundem ξεκίνησε σαν ένα εξελιγμένο site, ειδικά σχεδιασμένο για να
μπορεί να κάνει εξειδικευμένη, δηλαδή κάθετη αναζήτηση στις τιμές
προϊόντων που μπορεί να έψαχνε κάποιος στο Internet.
Από αεροπορικά εισιτήρια μέχρι φωτογραφικές μηχανές και από ξενοδοχεία
μέχρι κράνη για μηχανές.
Στην πραγματικότητα ήταν μια μηχανή αναζήτησης για εκείνα τα κομμάτια
του Internet στα οποία η Google δεν έφτανε, μέχρι τότε. Όμως, λίγες
μέρες από την έναρξη του Foundem, άρχιαν τα προβλήματα τους με την
Google, στις 26 Ιουνίου του 2006.
Ο υπαίτιος του μεγάλου προβλήματος ήταν μια ενημέρωση σε έναν αλγόριθμο
της μηχανής αναζήτησης, φαινομενικά σχεδιασμένο να διαγράφει spam, ο
οποίος όμως ουσιαστικά στόχευε σε χαρακτηριστικά όπως η έλλειψη
αυθεντικού περιεχομένου.
Άρα, εφόσον το Foundem μπορούσε να σε οδηγήσει σε ξένα sites ή υπηρεσίες
τρίτων, η μηχανή αναζήτησης της Google υποβάθμιζε όλο και περισσότερο
τη λειτουργία του.
Το τελικό χτύπημα ήρθε ως ποινή για το Foundem σε όλο το εύρος της
μηχανής της Google, η οποία απέκλειε κάθε αναζήτηση του Foundem, πέρα
από το ίδιο του το όνομα.
Από τη μια στιγμή στην άλλη, από τη δεύτερη ή τρίτη θέση των
αποτελεσμάτων (την οποία διατήρησε στο Yahoo! και στο Bing της
Microsoft) το Foundem βρέθηκε στη θέση 80 ή 90 της Google, δηλαδή
ουσιαστικά «εξαφανίστηκε» από το internet.
Τα επόμενα δύο χρόνια οι Raffs προσπάθησαν με κάθε τρόπο να έρθουν σε
επικοινωνία με τον «γίγαντα».
Δεν έχει σημασία τι προσπάθησαν, σημασία έχει ότι δεν κατάφεραν να
βγάλουν άκρη ή να πάρουν έστω μια σαφή απάντηση.
Η μοναδική επιλογή τους ήταν να βρουν εναλλακτικές πηγές εσόδων,
εξουσιοδοτώντας το λογισμικό του Foundem σε τρίτους εκδότες όπως η Bauer
και η IPC Media.
Κι ενώ όλα έμοιαζαν να έχουν χαθεί, μια μέρα άκουσαν τα κινητά τους να
χτυπούν ταυτόχρονα. Τα είχαν προγραμματίσει να ειδοποιούν σε στιγμές που
η κίνηση του site ήταν αργή λόγω αυξημένης κυκλοφορίας.
To The Gadget Show του Channel 5 τους είχε ανακηρύξει ως κορυφαίο
βρετανικό site σύγκρισης τιμών του 2008.
Σε όλη τη διάρκεια της επικοινωνίας τους με τον μεγάλο τεχνολογικό
γίγαντα, οι Raffs προσπαθούσαν να συλλέξουν στοιχεία για να αποδείξουν
την νομιμότητά τους.
Τώρα είχαν στα χέρια τους μια αναμφισβήτητη επικύρωση. Στράφηκαν πάλι
προς την Google, αλλά και πάλι, το μόνο που έλαβαν ως απάντηση ήταν μια
απρόσωπη απάντηση «δεν είμαστε σε θέση να προσφέρουμε ιδιωτική
υποστήριξη».
Κάτι που δεν έδειχνε καμία πρόθεση της Google να άρει την ποινή της.
Αλλά, και πάλι, το ζευγάρι δεν σταμάτησε τους αγώνες του.
Μετά από αγώνες και πίεση, στο τέλος του 2009 η Google αποφάσισε να
βάλει στην «λευκή λίστα» το Foundem, το οποίο ξαφνικά άρχισε να ξαναζεί,
σημειώνοντας μια τρομακτική άνοδο 10.000 τοις εκατό.
Γεγονός που έφερε τους Raffs αντιμέτωπους με ένα δίλημμα: αφού είναι
πλέον φανερό ότι ο γίγαντας στραγγαλίζει κάθε ανταγωνισμό, πώς θα
συνέχιζαν σαν να μην είχε συμβεί τίποτα;
Το ερώτημα έπρεπε να απαντηθεί άμεσα, επειδή το παιχνίδι της Google με
την κατάταξη των αποτελεσμάτων άρχισε να εξαπλώνεται όλο και πιο
επικίνδυνα και σε άλλες περιπτώσεις.
Το επίκεντρο του προβλήματος ήταν η υπηρεσία σύγκρισης προϊόντων της
ίδιας της Google, η οποία αρχικά πήρε το όνομα «Froogle».
Η υπηρεσία αυτή κάθε άλλο παρά δημοφιλής αποδείχθηκε. Μάλιστα, ένα
εσωτερικό έγγραφο του 2006, το οποίο αποκαλύφθηκε από την Επιτροπή
Ανταγωνισμού, παραδεχόταν ότι «το Froogle απλά δεν δουλεύει».
Έτσι, το 2008, η Google άλλαξε το όνομά της υπηρεσίας σε «Google Product
Search» και άρχισε να το σπρώχνει στην κορυφή των αποτελεσμάτων
αναζήτησης, ενισχύοντας έτσι μια εσωτερική (εξελιγμένη) έκδοση του δικού
της SEO.
Ταυτόχρονα, αντίπαλες τοποθεσίες υποβιβάστηκαν με τον ίδιο τρόπο όπως
και η Foundem: κάτω από αυτές τις συνθήκες, η Επιτροπή Ανταγωνισμού
διαπίστωσε ότι τουλάχιστον τέσσερις ιστοσελίδες (μεταξύ αυτών και η
Foundem) είδαν πτώση της κυκλοφορίας τους κατά 90%.
Όταν οι Raffs υπέβαλλαν την τελική τους καταγγελία στην Επιτροπή
Ανταγωνισμού, το Φεβρουάριο του 2010, επικεφαλής ήταν ο Ισπανός
πολιτικός Joaquín Almunia.
Την εποχή εκείνη, πριν ακόμη σκάσουν οι αποκαλύψεις του Snowden, η
εικόνα της Google στην Ευρώπη έλαμπε!
Ο Almunia αποφάσισε, λοιπόν, ότι αντί να ασκήσει δίωξη στην επιχείρηση,
θα ήταν καλύτερο να της προσφέρει μια ευκαιρία να έρθει σε συμβιβασμό,
αφού βέβαια τροποποιούσε τον τρόπο που έδειχνε τα προϊόντα.
Έτσι, όμως, αντί να φέρει μια γρήγορη λύση, έστησε το σκηνικό για μια
συγκλονιστική μάχη.
To 2013 η Google συμφώνησε να δώσει περισσότερο χώρο στους ανταγωνιστές
στο ιστότοπό της, αυξάνοντας τις πιθανότητες μιας συμφωνίας με τις
ευρωπαϊκές αρχές και απομακρύνοντας τον κίνδυνο μιας μεγάλης ποινής.
Η Ευρωπαϊκή Επιτροπή ανακοίνωσε ότι δέχεται τις αναθεωρημένες προτάσεις
της Google για τον τρόπο εμφάνισης των αποτελεσμάτων αναζήτησης μετά από
μια μακρά έρευνα, η οποία είχε αποκαλύψει ότι η εταιρεία λειτουργούσε
παραβιάζοντας τις ευρωπαϊκές νομοθεσίες για τον ανταγωνισμό.
Σύμφωνα με εκείνη τη νέα πρόταση, τα αποτελέσματα αναζήτησης θα έπρεπε
να παραθέτουν συνδέσμους σε ανταγωνιστικούς ιστότοπους, υπηρεσίες και
μηχανές αναζήτησης με πολύ πιο εμφανή τρόπο.
Οι ανταγωνιστές θα μπορούσαν να εμφανίζουν τα λογότυπά τους δίπλα στους
δεσμούς και να υπάρχει δυναμικό κείμενο που θα περιγράφει το περιεχόμενό
τους.
«Μεγαλύτερος χώρος στα αποτελέσματα αναζήτησης της Google διατίθεται
στους ανταγωνιστές», είχε πει τότε ο Almunia, χαρακτηρίζοντας τις
εξελίξεις ως ένα «κομβικό σημείο» σε μια τριετή διαμάχη, που ξεκίνησε
ύστερα από καταγγελίες ανταγωνιστών όπως η Microsoft, η TripAdvisor και η
Expedia.
Η συμφωνία που είχε κλείσει ο Almunia με τον τότε CEO της Google, Eric
Schmidt, στο Παγκόσμιο Οικονομικό Φόρουμ στο Νταβός, κάθε άλλο παρά
ανακούφιση μπορούσε να φέρει σε όσους πάλευαν εναντίον του γίγαντα.
Γιατί; Γιατί η μηχανή αναζήτησης πάλι τα δικά της αποτελέσματα θα
έσπρωχνε, απλά τώρα θα έφερνε και τρία ανταγωνιστικά sites στην κορυφή
των αποτελεσμάτων.
Και το μόνο που είχαν στα χέρια τους οι δεκάδες καταγγέλοντες τώρα ήταν η
επίσημη «προ-απόρριψη» της υπόθεσής τους, υπογεγραμμένη από τον Ισπανό
Επίτροπο.
Το κλίμα, όμως, άλλαζε και ειδικά στις Βρυξέλλες η πολιτική διάθεση δεν
συμφωνούσε με το «κλείσιμο» του Almunia.
Οι συνεχείς καταγγελίες εναντίον των Google Shopping, Google Flights και
του Google Local στον Ευρωπαϊκό Οργανισμό Καταναλωτών (BEUC) από
ονόματα όπως η Deutsche Telekom και οι εκδοτικοί Axel Springer and
Lagardère, ανάγκασαν τους υπουργούς οικονομικών Sigmar Gabriel και
Arnaud Montebourg να στείλουν επιστολή στον Επίτροπο, απαιτώντας από
αυτόν να αλλάξει χειρισμό της υπόθεσης.
Γιατί, όπως, πολύ σωστά έθεσαν «Δεν πρέπει τα αποτελέσματα αναζήτησης να
βασίζονται στην αξία και τη χρησιμότητα, παρά σε ποιον μπορεί να
πληρώσει περισσότερο;».
Λίγες μέρες αργότερα, σε μια σαστισμένη συνάντηση με δημοσιογράφους, ο
Επίτροπος Almunia υπαινίχθηκε ότι προετοιμάζεται να επιστρέψει στη
συμφωνία της Google.
Ο λόγος: ανησυχίες που εγείρονται από τους καταγγέλλοντες, ιδίως όσον
αφορά τον σχεδιασμό των δημοπρασιών που είχε προτείνει ο τεχνολογικός.
Με το ρόλο του Almunia να παίζει σε ένα ατυχές τέλος της ιστορίας, η
υπόθεση της Google θα έπεφτε σε λίγο στα χέρια μιας νέας επιτρόπου.
Από την πρώτη στιγμή που η Margrethe Vestager ανέλαβε την θέση της
Επιτρόπου Ανταγωνισμού στην ΕΕ ήξερε ότι την περίμενε μια μεγάλη
πρόκληση που ακούει στο όνομα Google.
Με καταγωγή από τη Δανία και πτυχιούχος οικονομικών, ασχολήθηκε ενεργά
από τα 33 της χρόνια με το κόμμα των Σοσιαλφιλελευθέρων.
Οι Raffs συναντήθηκαν με την Vestager τον Ιανουάριο του 2015. Από την
πρώτη στιγμή που την είδαν μπορούσαν να δουν ότι το καθεστώς της θα ήταν
διαφορετικό.
Αλλά παρόλο που τους παρέλαβε η ίδια από την αίθουσα αναμονής για να
τους πάει στο γραφείο της και όλη την ώρα άκουγε προσεκτικά τις θέσεις
τους, δεν τους έδωσε κανένα σημάδι ελπίδας.
Αυτός ήταν ο τρόπος της, μέχρι το κατηγορητήριο τρεις μήνες αργότερα που
προετοίμασε το δρόμο για την εκπληκτική ετυμηγορία της τον Ιούνιο του
2017.
Το προηγούμενο καλοκαίρι η Επιτροπή Ανταγωνισμού της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης
επέβαλε πρόστιμο ύψους 2,4 δισεκατομμυρίων ευρώ στην Alphabet, μητρική
εταιρεία της Google, εκτιμώντας πως η εταιρεία κάνει κατάχρηση της
κυριαρχίας της στην online αναζήτηση, στρέφοντας τους χρήστες στη δική
της υπηρεσία αγορών, το Google Shopping.
Κρίνοντας ότι με αυτήν την τακτική δημιουργείται ένα αθέμιτο περιβάλλον
σε βάρος ανταγωνιστικών υπηρεσιών της Google, οι αρμόδιες ευρωπαϊκές
Αρχές κάλεσαν την υπηρεσία να συμμορφωθεί σε διάστημα 90 ημερών.
Φυσικά, με απόλυτο σεβασμό, η Google εξέφρασε την διαφωνία της προς την
απόφαση της επιτρόπου.
Και φυσικά, άσκησε έφεση. Οπότε και η αστική αγωγή των Raffs, η οποία
κρέμεται από την τελική ετυμηγορία, μπορεί να πάρει πολλά χρόνια μέχρι
να επιλυθεί.
Αλλά, ακόμη κι αν κερδίσουν – στο άρθρο των New York Times φαίνονται
αποφασισμένοι να φτάσουν στα άκρα, αλλά δεν ακούγονται ιδιαίτερα
φιλόδοξοι – η υπόθεσή τους, όπως και η υπόθεση της Microsoft για το Bing
(την οποία κάποτε η Αμερικανική Κυβερνήση την κυνηγούσε ανελέητα για
τις μονοπωλιακές της στρατηγικές, δίνοντας έτσι έδαφος σε πιτσιρικάδες
όπως o Larry Page και ο Serget Brin να χτίσουν αυτοκρατορίες όπως η
Google), γεννούν το ερώτημα: είναι η πληρωμή ένας καλός τρόπος για να
αποφασίζει η Google τι φτάνει στην κορυφή της αναζήτησης;
Η Google και το Facebook ευθύνονται σχεδόν για ολόκληρη την τρομακτική
αύξηση των εσόδων στην ψηφιακή διαφήμιση της τελευταίας δεκαετίας.
Η παντοδυναμία των εν λόγω τεχνολογικών κολοσσών έχει προκαλέσει έντονες
ανησυχίες, όπως κάποτε είχε προκαλέσει και η Standard Oil του
Rockefeller στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα.
Αλλά, όχι δεν είναι το μέγεθος αυτών των εταιρειών που είναι τρομακτικό.
Εξάλλου, η φύση των δεδομένων είναι τέτοια που καθιστά τις
αντιμονοπωλιακές ρυθμίσεις του παρελθόντος λιγότερο χρήσιμες.
Η διάσπαση μιας επιχείρησης όπως η Google σε πέντε, δέκα Googlets, δεν
θα άλλαζε τίποτα στο σημερινό περιβάλλον.
Αντίθετα, πιο πολλά λεφτά θα έφερναν στην μητρική Alphabet, όπως έκαναν
και οι διάσημοι «απόγονοι» της Standard Oil, Mobil, BP και Arco.
Το μόνο σίγουρο είναι ότι η αναδόμηση των αντιμονοπωλιακών αρχών στην
εποχή της τεχνολογίας που διανύουμε δεν θα είναι εύκολη.
Όλοι, φοβόμαστε, πιθανούς νέους κινδύνους. Μια ξαφνική έλλειψη της
καθημερινής ψηφιακής δόσης.
Μια μέρα, μια εβδομάδα, ένα μήνα χωρίς κοινωνική δικτύωση, χωρίς
αυτόματη ενημέρωση, χωρίς άμεση πρόσβαση στην πληροφορία του διπλανού
μας.
Δυστυχώς, όμως, αυτό σημαίνει ότι πάντα θα ανοίγουμε το στόμα για να
μεταλάβουμε την θεία Πληροφορία χωρίς να έχουμε νηστέψει ούτε μια μέρα
από τα κοινά.
Όχι, κανένας δεν θέλει να κλείσει ούτε η Google, oύτε το Facebook, ούτε
το Twitter όπως κανένας δεν ήθελε να κλείσει το MySpace, η ΑΟL και το
ΝetScape κάποτε.
Άλλοι καιροί, άλλα ήθη, άλλα νούμερα, θα μου πείτε. Όχι, δεν θα
συμφωνήσω. Γιατί και τα ατρόμητα τείχη της Ιεριχούς ισοπεδώθηκαν κάποτε
όταν σήμαναν ομόφωνα οι σάλπιγγες και οι φωνές των περιπλανώμενων
κατακτητών της.
The Case Against Google
Critics say the search giant is squelching competition before it begins. Should the government step in?
Shivaun
Moeran and Adam Raff met, married and started a company — thereby
sparking a chain of events that might, ultimately, take down this age of
internet giants as we know it — because they were both huge nerds. In
the late 1980s, Adam was studying programming at the University of
Edinburgh, while Shivaun was focused on physics and computer science at
King’s College London. They had mutual friends who kept insisting they
were perfect for each other. So one weekend, they went on a date and
discovered other similarities: They both loved stand-up comedy. Each had
a science-minded father. They shared a weakness for puns.
In
the years that followed, those overlapping enthusiasms led to
cohabitation, a raucous wedding and parallel careers at big technology
firms. The thing is, though, when you’re young and geeky and fall in
love with someone else young and geeky, all your nerdy friends want you
to set them up on dates as well. So Adam and Shivaun, who took Adam’s
last name after marriage, approached the problem like two good
programmers: They designed a dating app.
The
app was known as MatchMate, and the idea was simple: Rather than just
pairing people with similar interests, their software would put together
potential mates according to an array of parameters, such as which pub
they were currently standing in, and whether they had friends in common,
and what movies they liked or candidates they voted for, and dozens of
other factors that might be important in finding a life partner (or at
least a tonight partner). The magic of MatchMate was that it could allow
a user to mix variables and search for pairings within a specific
group, a trick that computer scientists call parameterization. “It was
like asking your best friend to set you up,” Shivaun told me. “Someone
who says, ‘Well, you probably think you’d like this guy because he’s
handsome, but actually you’d like this other guy because he’s not as
good-looking, but he’s really funny.’ ”
Within
computer science, this kind of algorithmic alchemy is sometimes known
as vertical search, and it’s notoriously hard to master. Even Google,
with its thousands of Ph.D.s, gets spooked by vertical-search problems.
“Google’s built around horizontal search, which means if you type in
‘What’s the population of Myanmar,’ then Google finds websites that
include the words ‘Myanmar’ and ‘population,’ and figures out which ones
are most likely to answer your question,” says Neha Narula, who was a
software engineer at Google before joining the M.I.T. Media Lab. You
don’t really care if Google sends you to Wikipedia or a news article or
some other site, as long as its results are accurate and trustworthy.
But, Narula says, “when you start asking questions with only one correct
answer, like, Which site has the cheapest vacuum cleaner? — that’s
much, much harder.”
For
search engines like Google, finding that one correct answer becomes
particularly difficult when people have numerous parameters they want
satisfied: Which vacuum cleaner is cheapest but also energy-efficient
and good on thick carpets and won’t scare the dog? To balance those
competing preferences, you need a great vertical-search engine, which
was something Adam and Shivaun had thought a lot about.
Soon
the Raffs began daydreaming about turning their idea into a moneymaker.
They didn’t have the funds to compete with huge dating sites like
Match.com, so they applied for a couple of patents and began
brainstorming. They believed that their vertical-search technology was
good — better, in fact, than almost anything they had seen online. Best
of all, it was built to work well on almost any kind of data set. With
just a bit of tinkering, it could search for cheap airline tickets, or
great apartments, or high-paying jobs. It could handle questions with
hard-to-compare variables, like what’s the cheapest flight between
London and Las Vegas if I’m trying to choose between business class or
leaving after 3 p.m.?
As
far as they could tell, their search technology performed better on
such problems than Google did, which Adam discovered when he tried to
buy an iPod online. “I spent half an hour searching Google for the
lowest price, and it drove me completely mad,” he told me. It was
impossible for him to figure out which sites were selling iPods and
which were selling accessories, like headphones or charging cords. Or
Google would show Adam one price, but then the actual price was
completely different. Or there was an extra charge for shipping. It
seemed to Adam his technology would do a much better job.
Google
executives, had they known of Adam’s frustrations, probably wouldn’t
have been surprised. For years, Google had been trying to build a tool
for comparing online prices. “The idea was you should be able to input
any item, and we’d show you the best place to buy it,” says Brian
Larson, a technical lead for what was then named Froogle and today is
called Google Shopping.
Larson’s team was small — just himself and one other programmer at
first, and roughly a dozen people at its height — and Larson would
regularly test how Froogle compared with other online price-comparison
services. “Sometimes we were neck and neck; sometimes, not so much,”
Larson said. “We had a hundred million product listings, which was
better than competitors.” But they were often outperformed by sites like
PriceGrabber.com, which had many more employees devoted to price
comparisons.
Froogle’s
limitations tended to pop up particularly when users included too many
search parameters. For a while, Larson had a specific test search that
Froogle kept failing, something like “white running shoes and cheap and
free shipping.” Inevitably, the first result would be a Christmas elf
wearing running shoes that some guy was selling online. No matter how
Google’s engineers fiddled with their coding, they couldn’t stop the elf
from appearing as the top link. Eventually, a manager bought the elf so
it wouldn’t appear in the search results anymore. “We made elf
T-shirts,” Larson told me. “It became our mascot.”
Adam
and Shivaun’s technology was good enough to tell the difference between
an elf wearing running shoes and an actual pair of running shoes. It
was good enough, in fact, to figure out which websites charged hidden
shipping fees and which offered truly good deals. So the Raffs quit
their jobs, hired a few programmers, spent months perfecting their
technology and, in early 2006, unveiled Foundem.com, a vertical-search
engine for finding cheap online prices, to a small group of friends and
associates. Each time someone used Foundem to buy something, the Raffs
would receive a small payment from the website making the sale. Adam and
Shivaun weren’t sure their company would succeed — there were already a
couple of other big price-comparison search engines, like PriceGrabber,
NexTag and, of course, Google itself — but they figured this was how
the internet was supposed to work: Two people with a new idea can take
on giants and, if their technology is good enough, grow into colossi
themselves.
The
Raffs knew they would have to rely on Google to find customers. For one
thing, as evidenced by the name Foundem, they weren’t marketing
geniuses. (“It’s like we found ’em for you, you know?” Shivaun
explained.) But early tests indicated that Foundem usually came up high
in Google’s search results whenever people submitted queries like
“compare prices xr-1000 motorcycle helmets.” Six months later, they
opened Foundem to the world, and initial traffic was encouraging.
“Search engines liked the site,” Shivaun told me. “That’s supposed to be
the recipe for success.” As long as their vertical-search technology
was strong, the Raffs figured, Google would guide shoppers to their
door.
Google has succeeded
where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates
the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for
an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide. It processes
trillions of queries each year, which works out to at least 5.5 billion a
day, 63,000 a second. So odds are good that sometime in the last week,
or last hour, or last 10 minutes, you’ve used Google to answer a nagging
question or to look up a minor fact, and barely paused to consider how
near-magical it is that almost any bit of knowledge can be delivered to
you faster than you can type the request. If you’re old enough to
remember the internet before 1998, when Google was founded, you’ll
recall what it was like when searching online involved AltaVista or
Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or porn. (Pity
the early web enthusiasts who innocently asked Jeeves about “amateurs”
or “steel.”)
In
other words, it’s very likely you love Google, or are at least fond of
Google, or hardly think about Google, the same way you hardly think
about water systems or traffic lights or any of the other things you
rely on every day. Therefore you might have been surprised when
headlines began appearing last year suggesting that Google and its
fellow tech giants were threatening everything from our economy to
democracy itself. Lawmakers have accused Google of creating an automated
advertising system so vast and subtle that hardly anyone noticed when
Russian saboteurs co-opted it in the last election. Critics say Facebook exploits our addictive impulses and silos us in ideological echo chambers.
Amazon’s reach is blamed for spurring a retail meltdown; Apple’s
economic impact is so profound it can cause market-wide gyrations. These
controversies point to the growing anxiety that a small number of
technology companies are now such powerful entities that they can
destroy entire industries or social norms with just a few lines of
computer code. Those four companies, plus Microsoft, make up America’s
largest sources of aggregated news, advertising, online shopping,
digital entertainment and the tools of business and communication.
They’re also among the world’s most valuable firms, with combined annual
revenues of more than half a trillion dollars.
In
a rare display of bipartisanship, lawmakers from both political parties
have started questioning how these tech giants grew so powerful so
fast. Regulators in Missouri, Utah, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have
called for greater scrutiny of Google and others, citing antitrust
concerns; some critics have suggested that our courts and legislatures
need to go after tech firms in the same way the trustbusters broke up
oil and railroad monopolies a century ago. But others say that Google
and its cohort are guilty only of delighting customers. If these tech
leviathans ever fail to satisfy us, their defenders argue, capitalism
will punish them the same way it once brought down Yahoo, AOL and
Myspace.
At
the core of this debate is a question that is more than a century old:
When does a megacompany’s behavior become so brazen that it violates the
law? In the early 1900s, just after the Industrial Revolution, the
federal government provided an answer by suing one of America’s largest
companies, Standard Oil, on the novel theory that big becomes bad when a
giant uses its dominance not only to defeat its competitors but also to
extinguish the possibility that competition might occur.
In
its technological innovation, Standard Oil was the Google of its day.
The company’s founder, John D. Rockefeller, had become the richest man
in America by spending millions of dollars hiring scientists to
transform how oil was refined and transported. And those innovations
earned the public’s admiration. In 1858, before Standard Oil was
founded, lighting a home required whale oil, which cost up to $3 a
gallon, putting illumination out of reach for all but the wealthiest of
households. By 1885, after Standard Oil figured out how to refine
kerosene, it cost just 8 cents a gallon to brighten the night. “Let the
good work go on,” Rockefeller wrote to a partner. “We must ever remember
we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and
good.”
Standard
Oil’s technological discoveries gave the company huge advantages over
its rivals, and Rockefeller exploited those advantages ruthlessly. He
cut secret deals with railroads so that other firms had to pay more for
transportation. He forced smaller refineries to choose between selling
out to him or facing bankruptcy. “Rockefeller and his associates did not
build the Standard Oil Co. in the boardrooms of Wall Street,” wrote Ida
Tarbell, a muckraking journalist of the day. “They fought their way to
control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price
cutting, and perhaps more important, by ruthless, never slothful
efficiency of organization.”
In
1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered his Justice Department to
sue Standard Oil for antitrust violations. But government lawyers faced a
quandary: It wasn’t illegal for Standard Oil to be a monopoly. It
wasn’t even illegal to compete mercilessly. So government prosecutors
found a new argument: If a firm is more powerful than everyone else,
they said, it can’t simply act like everyone else. Instead, it has to
live by a special set of rules, so that other companies get a fair shot.
“The theory was that competition is good, and if a monopoly
extinguishes competition, that’s bad,” says Herbert Hovenkamp, co-author
of a seminal treatise on antitrust law. “Once you become a monopoly,
you have to start acting differently, and if you don’t, then what you’ve
been doing all along starts breaking the law.”
The
Supreme Court agreed and split Standard Oil into 34 firms. (Rockefeller
received stock in all of them and became even wealthier.) In the
decades following the Standard Oil breakup, antitrust enforcement
generally abided by a core principle: When a company grows so powerful
that it becomes a gatekeeper, and uses that might to undermine
competitors, then the government should intervene. And in the last
century, as courts have censured other monopolies, academics and jurists
have noticed a pattern: Monopolies and technology often seem
intertwined. When a company discovers a technological advantage — like
the innovations of Rockefeller’s scientists — it sometimes makes that
firm so powerful that it becomes a monopoly almost without trying very
hard. Many of the most important antitrust lawsuits in American history —
against IBM, Alcoa, Kodak and others — were rooted in claims that one
company had made technological discoveries that allowed it to outpace
competitors.
For
decades, there seemed to be a consensus among policymakers and business
leaders (though not always among targeted companies) about how the
antitrust laws should be enforced. But around the turn of this century, a
number of tech companies emerged that caused some people to question
whether the antitrust formula made sense anymore. Firms like Google and
Facebook have become increasingly useful as they have grown bigger and
bigger — a characteristic known as network effects. What’s more, some
have argued that the online world is so fast-moving that no antitrust
lawsuit can keep pace. Nowadays even the biggest titan can be defeated
by a tiny start-up, as long as the newcomer has better ideas or faster
tech. Antitrust laws, digital executives said, aren’t needed anymore.
Consider
Microsoft. The government spent most of the 1990s suing Microsoft for
antitrust violations, a prosecution that many now view as a complete
waste of time and money. When Microsoft’s chief executive, Bill Gates,
signed a consent decree to resolve one of its monopoly investigations in
1994, he told a reporter that it was essentially pointless for the
company’s various divisions: “None of the people who run those divisions
are going to change what they do or think.” Even after a federal judge
ordered Microsoft broken into separate companies in 2000, the punishment
didn’t take. Microsoft fought the ruling and won on appeal. The
government then offered a settlement so feeble that nine states begged
the court to reject the proposal. It was approved.
What
eventually humbled Bill Gates and ended Microsoft’s monopoly wasn’t
antitrust prosecutions, observers say, but a more nimble start-up named
Google, a search engine designed by two Stanford Ph.D. dropouts that
outperformed Microsoft’s own forays into search (first MSN Search and
now Bing). Then those two dropouts introduced a series of applications,
like Google Docs and Google Sheets, that eventually began to compete
with almost every aspect of Microsoft’s businesses. And Google did all
that not by relying on government prosecutors but by being smarter. You
don’t need antitrust in the digital marketplace, critics argue. “When
our products don’t work or we make mistakes, it’s easy for users to go
elsewhere because our competition is only a click away,” Google’s
co-founder, Larry Page, said in 2012. Translation: The government ought
to stop worrying, because no online giant will ever survive any longer
than it deserves to.
Once Foundem.com
was available to everyone, the company’s honeymoon lasted precisely two
days. During its first 48 hours, the Raffs saw a rush of traffic from
users typing product queries into Google and other search engines. But
then, suddenly, the traffic stopped. Alarmed, Adam and Shivaun began
running diagnostics. They quickly discovered that their site, which
until then had been appearing near the top of search results, was now
languishing on Google, mired 12 or 15 or 64 or 170 pages down. On other
search engines, like MSN Search and Yahoo, Foundem still ranked high.
But on Google, Foundem had effectively disappeared. And Google, of
course, was where a vast majority of people searched online.
The
Raffs wondered if this could be some kind of technical error, so they
began checking their coding and sending email to Google executives,
begging them to fix whatever was causing Foundem to vanish. Figuring out
whom to write, and how to contact them, was a challenge in itself.
Although Google’s parent company bills itself as a diversified firm with
about 80,000 employees, almost 90 percent of the company’s revenues
derive from advertisements, like the ones that show up in search. As a
result, there are few things more important to Google’s executives than
protecting the firm’s search dominance, particularly among the most
profitable kinds of queries, such as those of users looking to buy
things online. In fact, at about the same time the Raffs were starting
Foundem.com, Google executives were growing increasingly concerned about
the threats that vertical-search engines posed to Google’s business.
“What
is the real threat if we don’t execute on verticals?” one Google
executive emailed his colleagues in 2005, according to internal
documents later shared with the Federal Trade Commission. “Loss of
traffic from Google.com because folks search elsewhere for some
queries,” he wrote, in answer to his own question. “If one of our big
competitors builds a constellation of high-quality verticals, we are
hurt badly,” the internal documents continued. Another executive put it
more bluntly: “Google’s core business is monetizing commercial queries.
If users go to competitors such as Amazon to do product queries,
long-term revenue will suffer.”
Google
executives began holding battle-plan meetings for the vertical war.
Shortly after Foundem.com went online, one executive issued an order:
Henceforth, Google’s own price-comparison results should appear at the
top of many search pages, as quickly as possible, even if that meant
disregarding the natural results of the company’s search algorithm.
“Long term, I think we need to commit to a more aggressive path,” a
high-ranking Google employee wrote to colleagues. Eventually, a mandate
came from the chief executive: “Larry thought product should get more
exposure,” a senior official wrote.
One
way to get that exposure was to influence the rules governing how
Google displayed search results. In 2006, Google instituted a shift in
its search algorithm, known as the Big Daddy update, which penalized
websites with large numbers of subpages but few inbound links. A few
years later, another shift, known as Panda, penalized sites that copied
text from other websites. When adjustments like these occurred, Google
explained to users, they were aimed at combating “individuals or systems
seeking to ‘game’ our systems in order to appear higher in search
results — using low-quality ‘content farms,’ hidden text and other
deceptive practices.”
Left
unsaid was that Google itself generates millions of new subpages
without inbound links each day, a fresh page each time someone performs a
search. And each of those subpages is filled with text copied from
other sites. By programming its search engine to ignore other sites
doing the same thing that Google was doing, critics say, the company had
made it nearly impossible for competing vertical-search engines, like
Foundem, to show up high in Google’s results.
Shivaun
and Adam sent email after email to Google executives, but no one
responded with anything useful. So the Raffs started making phone calls.
Those didn’t help much, either. Adam and Shivaun had worked in
technology for decades. They were well known and had connections to
important people inside Google and at other big firms. But none of that
seemed to matter.
As
the months went by and Foundem’s bank accounts dwindled, the Raffs,
desperate, began approaching other websites, offering to adapt their
technology to power those sites’ internal search engines. Soon they were
providing back-end technology for a popular motorcycle site and a large
magazine publisher. Eventually, about 2.5 million people were seeing
Foundem’s search results each month. Foundem was named one of Britain’s
best travel comparison sites by The Times of London and celebrated on a
popular British gadget show. But without traffic from Google, the Raffs
were barely holding on.
Three years passed this way. Some nights, Shivaun would sit at her computer, exhausted, Googling phrase after phrase — How do you lift a Google website penalty? Who at Google reviews mistakes? Google and deindexed and phone number and help
— hoping that some magic combination of words might yield a new
solution. “It just felt so unfair,” Shivaun told me. “We had great
technology. It was winning awards. But we couldn’t even get an
explanation from Google about why we weren’t showing up.” Eventually,
they sought out a public relations firm, in the hope that a newspaper
article might get Google’s attention. The P.R. firm had an additional
suggestion: Why not file an antitrust complaint? To Adam and Shivaun,
that seemed like a waste of time. If Microsoft had been able to shrug
off the antitrust attacks of the United States government, why would
Google care about a complaint filed by some small firm?
But
they didn’t see many other options. So Adam and Shivaun pulled out
their laptops and began assembling a long document detailing everything
they had experienced. Then they went to Brussels, to the headquarters of
the European Commission, the agency charged with regulating competitive
behavior, and filed a complaint accusing Google of violating
antimonopoly laws.
As the years
passed, Shivaun and Adam got into the habit of visiting message boards
where people obsessively discussed Google’s many peculiarities. They
began to notice an interesting pattern among companies complaining about
the search giant: Often, the aggrieved parties had, in some way, posed
some kind of threat to Google’s business. And they seemed to have
suffered dire consequences.
There
was, for instance, Skyhook Wireless, which had invented a new
navigation system that competed with Google’s location software and had
signed major deals with the cellphone manufacturers Samsung and
Motorola. Skyhook’s accuracy “is better than ours,” one Google manager
speculated in an internal email later revealed in a lawsuit filed by Skyhook against Google.
Not long after that note was written, according to the lawsuit, a
high-ranking Google official pressured Samsung and Motorola to end their
relationships with Skyhook — and implied that if they didn’t, Google
could make it impossible for them to ship their phones on time. (Google
has denied doing anything inappropriate.) Soon, Samsung and Motorola
canceled their Skyhook contracts. Skyhook sued Google, and though one
suit was dismissed, Google ended up paying $90 million to settle a
patent-infringement claim. But by then it was too late. Skyhook’s
founders, bereft of other partnership options, had been forced to sell
their company at a large discount.
Then
there was Yelp, a website with millions of user-generated reviews of
local brewpubs, auto-body shops and other businesses. Yelp grew quickly
as local queries — like “best nearby steakhouse” — became a third of all
online searches. For years, Yelp appeared near or at the top of
millions of Google searches. Google, hoping to capitalize on that
traffic, tried to buy Yelp in 2009, but Yelp’s founders rejected those
advances. Then Google started pulling Yelp’s content into its own
results, which meant many users didn’t have to visit Yelp’s website.
Yelp complained — to Google and later to the F.T.C. — but Google said
the only alternative was for Yelp to remove its content from Google
altogether, according to documents filed with federal regulators. The
same thing happened at other fast-growing review sites like TripAdvisor
and Citysearch, which also complained to the F.T.C. “We still exist,”
says Luther Lowe, a vice president at Yelp, “but Google did everything
it could to ensure that we’d never present a threat to them. It’s
bullying, but they’re the 800-pound gorilla.”
The
more Adam and Shivaun looked, the more examples they found. Getty
Images had created a popular search engine to help users comb through
the firm’s 170 million photographs and other visual art. Then, in 2013,
Google adjusted how it displayed images so that rather than directing
people to Getty’s website, users could easily see and download Getty’s
high-definition images from Google itself. “Our traffic immediately fell
85 percent,” says Yoko Miyashita, Getty’s general counsel. “We wrote to
Google, and said, Hey, this isn’t cool. And their response was, ‘Well,
if you don’t agree to these terms, we’ll just exclude you’ ” — by
letting Getty remove itself from the search engine entirely, Miyashita
said. “That’s not really a choice, because if you aren’t on Google, you
basically don’t exist.”
TradeComet.com,
which operated a vertical-search engine for finding business products,
initially prospered by buying ads on Google, but as the site grew,
Google “raised my prices by 10,000 percent, which strangled our business
virtually overnight,” the company’s C.E.O. at the time, Dan Savage,
said when he filed an antitrust lawsuit in 2009. KinderStart.com, a
vertical-search engine for parents, sued Google after it received a
“PageRank” of zero, making it essentially unfindable. (TradeComet.com’s
suit was dismissed on a technicality; KinderStart.com’s was dismissed
for insufficient evidence.)
Shivaun
and Adam filled notepads with the names of companies that had
complained about Google’s tactics — eJustice, a vertical-search engine
for legal information; NexTag, the fellow price-comparison site; BDZV, a
group of German newspapers. They printed out lawsuits and regulatory
complaints until their living room was a maze of paper.
Eventually
the Raffs reached out to the F.T.C., which, they knew, was the American
equivalent of the European Commission’s antitrust office, and the U.S.
regulators invited them to visit. The F.T.C.’s staff, it turned out, had
been quietly collecting complaints about Google for years. In 2012,
those officials wrote a confidential 160-page report that said Google
had “adopted a strategy of demoting, or refusing to display, links to
certain vertical websites in highly commercial categories.” That memo,
about half of which was accidentally sent to reporters
at The Wall Street Journal after they submitted a Freedom of
Information Act request, said that “Google’s conduct has resulted — and
will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation.”
“Google
has strengthened its monopolies over search and search advertising
through anticompetitive means,” which “will have lasting negative
effects on consumer welfare,” F.T.C. officials wrote. They cited
instances in which Google seemed purposely to be privileging less useful
information, substandard search results and suboptimal links. “Although
it displays its flight search above any natural search results for
flight-booking sites, Google does not provide the most flight options
for travelers,” the regulators wrote. Whereas a decade earlier someone
searching for steakhouses would have seen a long list of websites, now
the most noticeable results pointed to Google’s own listings, including
Google maps, Google local search or advertisers paying Google. Some
F.T.C. staff recommended “that the Commission issue a complaint against
Google” for copying material and certain advertising and contract
practices, though not search-engine bias.
Google
responded to the report’s claims by arguing that the changes it made to
the search engine benefited users. “Our testing has consistently showed
that users want quick answers to their queries,” Google said in a
statement when contacted about this article. “If you are searching for
weather, you probably want a forecast, not just links to weather sites.”
And when it comes to online shopping, the statement read, “if someone
is searching for products, they likely want information about price and
where they can buy it. They probably don’t want to be taken to another
site where they have to enter their search again. . . . We absolutely do
not make changes to our search algorithm to disadvantage competitors.”
Claims to the contrary, like those made by Foundem, are untrue, Google
maintained. “We make hundreds of changes to search every year, all with
the same goal: Delivering users the best, most relevant search results,”
the company continued. “Each change, large and small, affects millions
of sites, some who see their rankings improve, others who drop.” And,
Google concluded, “our ultimate responsibility is to deliver the best
results possible to our users, not specific placements for sites within
our results.”
When
the F.T.C.’s politically appointed leadership considered the staff’s
recommendations, they declined to sue Google, surprising many inside the
agency. “While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance, we
did not believe that the evidence supported an F.T.C. challenge,” the
agency’s chairman at the time, Jon Leibowitz, said when he announced the decision in 2013.
The
F.T.C.’s decision, according to agency insiders, was motivated in part
by a debate that has also sparked battles within antitrust courts over
the last 40 years: Should the law protect consumers or encourage
competition? They’re not always synonymous. “It wasn’t consumers who
were complaining about Standard,” says Hovenkamp, the antitrust scholar.
“It was the other oil companies.” Similarly, few users are kvetching
about Google; it’s primarily other tech firms. United States judges have
increasingly held that the government must show consumer harm to win in
court.
Adam
and Shivaun didn’t have to wait for the official F.T.C. announcement to
know that their case was going nowhere. Meeting with officials in
Washington, they could tell: These people were not going to prosecute.
They had come to the United States at their own expense. They had
written memo after memo arguing that Google was treating them unfairly
and as a result hurting users. They had done everything they were asked.
Standard Oil controlled 64 percent of the market for refined petroleum
when the Supreme Court broke it into dozens of pieces. Google and
Facebook today control an estimated 60 to 70 percent
of the U.S. digital advertising market. And the F.T.C. seemed happy to
let them keep doing it. To the Raffs, it felt as if history was
repeating itself, as if the pointless, ineffectual Microsoft case was
happening all over again. It felt as if nobody cared.
If you are younger than 29 — which just happens to be the average age of a Google employee,
according to a survey done by PayScale — then odds are good you don’t
remember much about the Microsoft antitrust battles of the 1990s. So, a
quick primer: For almost a decade, starting in 1993, federal and state
prosecutors besieged Microsoft in courtrooms across the nation, arguing
that the company had acted in ways that were predatory and dishonest to
preserve its software monopoly. One Microsoft executive was quoted in
court as threatening to “cut off” the “air supply” of a competitor. “Is
Bill Gates the ’90s answer to Don Corleone?” Time magazine asked. “I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed,” a witness told investigators.
Along
the way, Microsoft was accused of widespread bullying, coercion and
general obnoxiousness. And Microsoft basically said: Whatever. “There’s
one guy in charge of licenses,” Bill Gates told reporters after he
signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice in 1994. “He’ll
read the agreement.” Everyone else, the implication was, would ignore
it.
Even
when a judge ruled in 2000 that Microsoft was violating antitrust law,
conventional wisdom held that the victory was largely pyrrhic. Microsoft
successfully appealed, and prosecutors eventually threw in the towel,
agreeing to abandon their attacks and settle if Microsoft agreed to
token reforms, such as making its products more compatible with
competitors’ software and giving three independent observers unfettered
access to the company’s records, employees and source code. Microsoft’s
executives thought that three observers, versus 48,000 employees,
sounded like pretty good odds.
This
was the history the Raffs recalled when they heard the F.T.C. was
abandoning its investigation. But then, they also remembered a
discussion they had once had with a lawyer named Gary Reback, who told
them that everything they’d heard about the Microsoft trials was wrong.
Reback is something of a legend in Silicon Valley, both because of his
accomplishments as an antitrust provocateur and because of his anxious —
some might say paranoid — worldview. Reback has been known to call
other lawyers late at night and leave long, obsessively detailed voice
mail messages about legal arguments and economic theories. He was featured
on a 1997 cover of Wired magazine with the headline “This Lawyer Is
Bill Gates’s Worst Nightmare,” a boast that wasn’t far-off: Working on
behalf of clients like Netscape and Sun Microsystems, Reback had
browbeaten the Department of Justice into suing Microsoft for antitrust.
By
the time Adam and Shivaun started visiting the F.T.C., Reback had
exchanged his antipathy of Microsoft for a disdain of Google and had
accompanied them on their visits with regulators. There’s a loose
coalition of economists and legal theorists who call themselves the New
Brandeis Movement (critics call them “antitrust hipsters”), who believe
that today’s tech giants pose threats as significant as Standard Oil a
century ago. “All of the money spent online is going to just a few
companies now,” says Reback (who disdains the New Brandeis label). “They
don’t need dynamite or Pinkertons to club their competitors anymore.
They just need algorithms and data.”
Reback
had told Adam and Shivaun that it was important for them to keep up
their fight, no matter the setbacks, and as evidence he pointed to the
Microsoft trial. Anyone who said that the 1990s prosecution of Microsoft
didn’t accomplish anything — that it was companies like Google, rather
than government lawyers, that humbled Microsoft — didn’t know what they
were talking about, Reback said. In fact, he argued, the opposite was
true: The antitrust attacks on Microsoft made all the difference.
Condemning Microsoft as a monopoly is why Google exists today, he said.
Surprisingly,
some people who worked at Microsoft in the 1990s and early 2000s agree
with him. In the days when federal prosecutors were attacking Microsoft
day and night, the company might have publicly brushed off the salvos,
insiders say. But within the workplace, the attitude was totally
different. As the government sued, Microsoft executives became so
anxious and gun-shy that they essentially undermined their own monopoly
out of terror they might be pilloried again. It wasn’t the consent
decrees or court decisions that made the difference, according to
multiple current and former Microsoft employees. It was “the constant
scrutiny and being in the newspaper all the time,” said Gene Burrus, a
former Microsoft lawyer. “People started second-guessing themselves. No
one wanted to test the regulators anymore.”
In
public, Bill Gates was declaring victory, but inside Microsoft,
executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials —
the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited
to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by
attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking,
in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a
subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his
office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product
reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive
turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a
capricious Roman emperor.
In
the early 2000s, Microsoft’s top executives told some divisions that
their plans would be proactively shared with competitors — literally
describing what the company intended to create before software was even
built — to make sure it wouldn’t offend anyone who was likely to sue.
Microsoft’s engineers were outraged. But they went along with it.
And
most important, as Microsoft lived under government scrutiny, employees
abandoned what had been nascent internal discussions about crushing a
young, emerging competitor — Google. There had been informal conjectures
about reprogramming Microsoft’s web browser, the popular Internet
Explorer, so that anytime people typed in “Google,” they would be
redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders. Or, perhaps a
warning message might pop up: “Did you know Google uses your data in
ways you can’t control?”
Microsoft
was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could
have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. “But
there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn’t want to get in
trouble again, so nothing happened,” Burrus said. The myth that Google
humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government’s antitrust
lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break
Microsoft’s monopoly.
“If
Microsoft hadn’t been sued, all of technology would be different
today,” Reback told me. We’ve known since Standard Oil that advances in
technology make it easier for monopolies to emerge. But what’s less
recognized is the importance of antitrust in making sure those new
technologies spread to everyone else. In 1969 the Justice Department
started a lawsuit against IBM for antitrust violations that lasted 13
years. The government eventually surrendered, but in an earlier attempt
to mollify prosecutors, IBM eliminated its practice of bundling hardware
and software, a shift that essentially created the software industry.
Suddenly, new start-ups could get a foothold simply by writing programs
rather than building machines. Microsoft was founded a few years later
and soon outpaced IBM.
Or
consider AT&T, which was sued by the government in 1974, fought in
court for eight years and then slyly agreed to divest itself of some
businesses if it could keep its most valuable assets. Critics complained
AT&T was getting the deal of a lifetime. But then start-ups like
Sprint and MCI made millions building on technologies AT&T
championed, and AT&T found itself struggling to compete. It’s
completely wrong to say that antitrust doesn’t matter, Reback argues.
“The internet only exists because we broke up AT&T. The software
industry exists because Johnson sued IBM.”
It
was critical that the Raffs continue fighting, Reback told them. Social
embarrassment and sustained attacks have the power to succeed when
courtrooms or political agencies fail. After their F.T.C.
disappointment, the Raffs flew back to England to consider their
options. And then one night they were at home watching television when
the phone rang. Someone they had met in Brussels was calling to share
some remarkable news. The European Commission had issued a decision on
the complaint they filed six years before.
What changed everything was a middle-aged Danish politician named Margrethe Vestager, who had recently been named
the European Union’s commissioner for competition. Vestager was an
unusual choice for the post. She wasn’t a populist crusader or a
pro-business acolyte; she was, instead, a moderate whose claim to fame,
at that point, was having served as an inspiration for the television
show “Borgen,”
a fictional series about a Danish politician. But Vestager was awarded
the commissioner’s post in 2014 after arguing that European marketplaces
needed to do a better job of giving everyone an equal chance to
succeed. Since assuming her office, Vestager has become, unexpectedly,
the most prominent antitrust official in the world, invited to speak at
conferences and mobbed by autograph seekers.
By
the time Vestager took office, Google had already transitioned its
price-comparison service to its present incarnation, which is
effectively an advertising system that prominently features links only
from companies that pay for the promotion. (Users are notified by a
small logo that says “sponsored.”) After reviewing the complaints
submitted by the Raffs and others, Vestager announced
she intended to formally charge Google with antitrust violations. (She
has also embarked on investigations into the European tax practices of
Starbucks, Amazon and Apple, as well as anticompetitive tactics at
Qualcomm, Facebook and Gazprom.)
Over
the next two years, Vestager’s staff reviewed data from 1.7 billion
Google queries. They scrutinized how people fared when they conducted
searches on topics in which Google had a vested interest, versus those
where the company had nothing to gain. Then, in June of last year, the
commission issued its final verdict:
“What Google has done is illegal under E.U. antitrust rules,” Vestager
said in a statement released at the time. “It denied other companies the
chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most important, it
denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full
benefits of innovation.” Google was ordered to stop giving its own
comparison-shopping service an illegal advantage and was fined an
eye-popping $2.7 billion, the largest such penalty in the European
Commission’s history and more than twice as large as any such fine ever
levied by the United States.
The
verdict rocked Silicon Valley. Some think Europe’s assertiveness makes
it more likely American regulators will act as well. And there’s
evidence that’s already starting. Donald Trump appealed to voters, in
part, by attacking the tech monopolies.
In a case of truly odd bedfellows, that puts him in alignment with
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have long called for greater
scrutiny of technology companies. Last year, a group of Democratic
lawmakers in Congress, led by Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, sponsored legislation to boost antitrust enforcement by forcing companies to assume the burden of showing that a merger won’t hurt the public.
Meanwhile,
a bipartisan assortment of state attorneys general have urged the
F.T.C. to reopen its investigation of Google. Most major antitrust
battles, including the federal suits against Microsoft and Standard Oil,
have begun as state actions. A Missouri investigation is particularly
notable because the state’s Republican attorney general, Josh Hawley,
who is running for the United States Senate, has subpoenaed information
to see if Google has manipulated searches to disadvantage potential
competitors. “The Obama-era F.T.C. did not take any enforcement action
against Google, did not press this forward and has essentially given
them a free pass,” Hawley told reporters after revealing his inquiry in November. “I will not let Missouri consumers and businesses be exploited by industry giants.”
As
attacks against Google have escalated, the company has tried to limit
the damage. After Yelp complained to the F.T.C. about Google’s stealing
its content, Google promised to make it easier for websites to opt out
of automatic copying, a pledge it reaffirmed a few months ago. And
earlier this month, in exchange for Getty Images’ withdrawing its
complaint to the European Commission, Google signed a licensing agreement
with Getty promising to more clearly display images’ copyright
information. Other titans like Facebook are similarly trying to get
ahead of criticisms, voluntarily pledging greater transparency and
promising to work more cooperatively with regulators.
The
implication is clear enough: Google and the other tech titans
understand that the landscape is shifting. They realize that their halos
have become tarnished, that the arguments they once invoked as a
digital exception to American economic history — that the internet
economy is uniquely self-correcting, because competition is only a click
away — no longer hold as much weight. “When you get as big as Google,
you become so powerful that the market bends around you,” Vestager told
me. The notion that antitrust law isn’t needed anymore, that we must
choose between helping consumers or spurring competition, no longer
seems sufficient reason to exempt the tech giants from century-old legal
codes. If anything, Vestager’s verdict and state investigations
indicate that companies like Google may have more in common with the
monopolists of old than most people thought. Silicon Valley’s bigwigs
ought to be scared.
“If
Europe can prosecute Google, then we can as well,” says William
Kovacic, a law professor and former Republican-appointed chairman of the
Federal Trade Commission. “It’s just a question of willingness now.”
If the internet’s
potentates are frightened, however, they’re doing a good job of hiding
it. Google has appealed the European Commission’s decision and has
vigorously defended itself online. The company’s arguments are the same
ones that it was putting forth on company blogs over the course of the
investigation. “We disagree with the European Commission’s argument that
our improved Google Shopping results are harming competition,” Google’s
top lawyer wrote in one post.
The commission “drew such a narrow definition around online shopping
services that it even excluded services like Amazon,” undermining the
contention that Google is dominant. “Google delivered more than 20
billion free clicks to aggregators over the last decade,” he wrote in another post.
Forcing it to “direct more clicks to price-comparison aggregators would
just subsidize sites that have become less useful for consumers.”
Google’s data indicates that users appreciate how the search engine has
shifted over the years. “That’s not ‘favoring’ ” Google’s interests, the
company said. “That’s giving customers and advertisers what they find
most useful.”
Some
legal theorists think that Google might have a point. “To what extent
are consumers, rather than competitors, being harmed by Google?” says
Hovenkamp, the antitrust scholar. “If the answer is ‘not much,’ then I’m
suspicious of an antitrust remedy.” Others say the risks are too high.
“There are very real costs associated with suing a company like Google,”
says Geoffrey Manne, executive director of the International Center for
Law & Economics, a nonpartisan research center. “You’re potentially
impairing a firm that provides vital services to millions of people,
and potentially benefiting competitors who don’t deserve that support.”
Those
are fair arguments. But they are also, in some ways, beside the point.
Antitrust has never been just about costs and benefits or fairness. It’s
never been about whether we love the monopolist. People loved Standard
Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as they love Google
today.
Rather,
antitrust has always been about progress. Antitrust prosecutions are
part of how technology grows. Antitrust laws ultimately aren’t about
justice, as if success were something to be condemned; instead, they are
a tool that society uses to help start-ups build on a monopolist’s
breakthroughs without, in the process, being crushed by the monopolist.
And then, if those start-ups prosper and make discoveries of their own,
they eventually become monopolies themselves, and the cycle starts anew.
If Microsoft had crushed Google two decades ago, no one would have
noticed. Today we would happily be using Bing, unaware that a better
alternative once existed. Instead, we’re lucky a quixotic antitrust
lawsuit helped to stop that from happening. We’re lucky that antitrust
lawyers unintentionally guaranteed that Google would thrive.
Put
differently, if you love technology — if you always buy the latest
gadgets and think scientific advances are powerful forces for good —
then perhaps you ought to cheer on the antitrust prosecutors. Because
there is no better method for keeping the marketplace constructive and
creative than a legal system that intervenes whenever a company, no
matter how beloved, grows so large as to blot out the sun. If you love
Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses —
and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new
creations are waiting patiently in the wings.
For
the Raffs, however, it’s probably too late. By the time Vestager
announced her verdict and record-setting fine last year, it had been 12
years since Adam and Shivaun started Foundem.com. During that time,
their lives slowly but inexorably became devoted to battling Google.
They had spent thousands of hours corresponding with regulatory agencies
across the globe. They had filed a civil suit against Google in British
court, a case that is ongoing. They basically shut down Foundem,
creating more time for them to give advice to other companies and
regulators fighting Google. This consulting work, some of which was
funded by Google’s competitors, has helped to keep the Raffs afloat. And
if the Raffs win their lawsuit against Google, it could be worth
millions. “But it’s a different business model than we expected,” Adam
told me. “It’s also deeply frustrating, because we became technologists
in order to build new technologies. We never intended to be professional
plaintiffs or antitrust crusaders.”
One
of the most difficult things for the Raffs over the past decade has
been figuring out how to explain this journey to themselves and others.
Even friends and family didn’t fully understand what was going on. “It
feels really good to be validated like this, to be told we were right,”
Shivaun told me, referring to Vestager’s verdict. “But that doesn’t turn
back the clock and give us another chance. Even if we win in Brussels,
or win our lawsuit, in some ways, we were still defeated. We were still
beaten by Google.”
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