[iDC] Are We Google's Paint?

[Frank Pasquale]

Hi list,

Over the past few days I've been dipping into Cory Doctorow's *Content*,
David Weinberger's *Everything is Miscellaneous*, and Larry Lessig's *Remix*.
I like them all for different reasons; Doctorow is an irrepressible
enthusiast for online openness, Weinberger connects that openness to older
patterns of information storage and retrieval, and Lessig sings of the
creativity it can unleash.

Anyone thinking deeply about the new relationships between art and commerce
created by the internet should consult Lessig's book; it's beautifully
written and animated by a strong moral vision of what the net can be.
However, this quote from Lessig provoked me:

"Some draw a downright foolish conclusion from the fact that Google's value
gets built upon other people's content. Andrew Keen, for example . . .
writes 'Google is a parasite: it creates no content of its own.' But in the
same sense you could say that all of the value in the Mona Lisa comes from
the paint, that Leonardo da Vinci was just a 'parasite' upon the hard work
of the paint makers. That statement is true in the sense that but for the
paint, there would be no Mona Lisa. But it is false if it suggests that da
Vinci wasn't responsible for the great value the Mona Lisa is. . . "

"The complete range of Google products is vast. But . . . practically
everything Google offers helps Google build an extraordinary database of
knowledge about what people want, and how those wants relate to the web.
Every click you make in the Google universe adds to that database. With each
click, Google gets smarter." (127-128)

The picture/paint metaphor is a provocative one. Is Lessig vividly
illustrating the new economy mantra that information is rapidly being
commoditized? I've always thought of Google as an aid to helping me find
things--a utility that mixes elements of a telecom carrier and a card
catalog index. Does Google's supervenient value of organizing the web by
query really make it as much more meaningful, more expressive, than the
content it indexes, as the Mona Lisa is more meaningful than paint? I know
few people searching for search results, so I'll conclude that's not a good
interpretation.

Another way of glossing the metaphor is to deem Google the "Lord of the
Memes," because, as David Brooks wryly observes, "prestige has shifted from
the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser." I like this
interpretation because it complements Lessig's characterization of Google as
"getting smarter" with every click.

Indeed it is--but it's also getting more powerful, more capable of framing
your window on the world. We may celebrate a world where we can all
personalize our search results, and where each of us has a chance to fight
for salience in Google results on a topic (rather than pray for a New York
Times editor to pull our editorial out of the slushpile). But do we really
understand how that salience is determined? Is there any objective answer to
how it should be done? And as in so much of our weightless economy online,
isn't the perception of relevance really the reality?

To his credit, Lessig has been more frank than most fans of Silicon Valley
about the dangers this power poses (as this Jeffrey Rosen
article<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30google-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print>notes):

"During the heyday of Microsoft, people feared that the owners of the
operating systems could leverage their monopolies to protect their own
products against competitors," says the Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of
Stanford Law School. "That dynamic is tiny compared to what people fear
about Google. They have enormous control over a platform of all the world's
data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the
underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it's hard
to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or
that might help repressive governments to block controversial content."

So perhaps we are left with the idea that Google does some good things, and
some bad things--and that Lessig's new cause of anti-corruption activism is
designed to produce a government capable of promoting the former and curbing
the latter.
Anyway, I'm just wondering what types more creative than myself think of
this implicit ordering of creative work and the technology that makes it
accessible.

--Frank

Frank Pasquale <http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/FPasquale.htm>
Visiting Professor of Law, Yale Law School




PS: I have links and a bit more analysis of the issue here:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/01/the_picture_and.html#more


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