
Google is just an amoral menace - raju
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy
======
pg
"Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely
offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated
by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

This sentence makes it clear (if it wasn't already) how little this guy
understands the Internet. The "ordering of information" is not something that
can reasonably have "mere" put in front of it. It is a very hard problem to
solve, and the importance of solving it is reflected in Google's reach
numbers.

Maybe if he thought about the thousands of programmers who work full time on
this problem and the server rooms full of millions of computers Google needs
to provide this service, he'd realize there is actually something to it.

~~~
dasil003
Or how about this little gem about Scribd:

"That's like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he's covered by the
best insurance company."

Wait, what? If a pirate is a drunk driver, then Scribd is a car manufacturer.
Does it make sense to sue Ford for drunk driving incidents in their vehicles?

~~~
zepolen
Does it make sense to sue a gun manufacturer because someone used their guns
in a shooting rampage?

~~~
ewjordan
The crucial difference being, of course, that the intended use of a car is not
to kill people in a drunk driving accident, whereas the primary purpose of a
gun _is_ to kill people by shooting them.

Not saying it's necessarily right to sue the manufacturer based on the crimes
of the users, but let's not pretend there's no difference.

------
kwamenum86
Anyone who calls a search engine a parasite does not understand how the
Internet works. A parasite attaches to a host and extracts whatever it needs
without giving anything in return. Google and other search engines organize
information on the Internet. Having a world wide web of information without a
search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?

Since they are the organizers of information they are also the de facto
gatekeepers for users who do not know how to discover knew content without
them.

~~~
Silhouette
_Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make
sense. How would you discover new nodes?_

The same way we did before search engines worked very well: via the network
effect, by following hyperlinks from interesting articles, from discussion
forums like this one, from human-generated links pages, and so on.

The WWW would not cease to be useful if search engines disappeared tomorrow,
it would just adapt as it always has, and not necessarily for the worse.

~~~
kragen
The WWW was a lot less useful back then, because linking doesn't actually work
very well.

~~~
axod
Yeah please lets not go back to webrings, banner exchanges etc

~~~
Silhouette
The thing is, we would never go back to just those things. You're ignoring all
the other, much more significant developments that have taken place since.

For example, today we have social networking sites, blogs, and services like
Twitter and StumbleUpon. All of these allow huge numbers of _human-
recommended_ links to be passed around very quickly.

I'm not saying that search engines aren't useful; in fact, I'm not really sure
how we've jumped from the kind of Google services that were being criticised
in the original article to attacking their search engine specifically. I'm
just saying that if search engines went away, it's reasonable to assume that
the web-surfing world would adapt, and that new and improved ways to find
useful content have been invented and will continue to be developed whether or
not search engines are around in their current form.

------
umbra
Dunno about the menace, but perhaps "amoral" is exactly the right word: "being
neither moral nor immoral; specifically: lying outside the sphere to which
moral judgments apply <science as such is completely amoral, W. S. Thompson>
(From the online Merriam Webster Dictionary)

I used to work for a very large vendor of ICs and one of its erstwhile CEO's
famously said: "With respect to technology, if it can be done, it will be
done."

I agree and so given that, I think any discussion of morals is only applicable
to the person who has to decide whether to associate with the company or
project in question for paid labor or in the use of their product(s).

It's not whether the bomb, say, is moral or not as an abstract concept, but
instead, given all the information available on the impact of nuclear weapons,
whether _you_ decide to design the beryllium reflector for the secondary or
not...

~~~
kragen
Google is not amoral in that sense; it's an ideologically-driven organization
consisting of people, led by leaders who are also people. Those people make
moral judgments, and, contrary to the claims in the article, a great deal of
Google's path has been shaped by those moral decisions, including the decision
to engage in China. (I think they made the wrong decision there, but I might
be wrong, and in any case the moral calculus figured quite explicitly in their
discussions.)

~~~
derefr
You forgot one of the major parties to the organization--the shareholders, who
are, as far as I understand economics, incapable for some reason of being
"ideologically driven." The shareholders pushed for China. I'm not sure Google
could have said no.

~~~
kragen
You may not be familiar with Google's unusual share class structure, but it
insulates them from pressure from outside shareholders to a very unusual
extent.

------
slavox
This article completely missed the point, Youtube has been the subject of
fights for years, But Google bought it knowing it wouldn't survive without
their power.

Google makes statements, They make browsers just to push the industry, Bid on
the wireless frequencies to make them open to other devices.

Google is not amoral, they simply are easily spun out of context.

------
dejb
Newspaper journalist complains about Internet. Who would have thought?

~~~
tomsaffell
_Guardian_ journalist complains about someone _making money_. Who would have
thought?

FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in
sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political
spectrum" (<http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian>). UK print
media has ~10 _national_ newspapers, which are _politically segmented_ (and
income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly
political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its
political views, and different to the national average in its political views.
Tribalism..

~~~
swolchok
This and its parent are ad hominem attacks (DH1 -- see
<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>) -- it may be in the writer's
interest to complain about the Internet, but that does not mean that the
writer's points are incorrect.

~~~
russell
"..ad hominem attacks", are you kidding? They are questioning the writer's
objectivity, as do it. The writer's points/ conclusions are incorrect. The
solution is not to constrain or eliminate Google, it's for the Guardian and
the other content providers to adapt to be relevant.

~~~
kragen
Questioning the writer's objectivity rather than rebutting their points is an
ad hominem attack. I'm not kidding. If you think the writer's points and
conclusions are incorrect (I do) you should write a rebuttal, rather than
pointing out that the writer isn't disinterested. Interested parties can still
make valid arguments!

~~~
benmathes
The ad-hominem fallacy fallacy: <http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html>

A critique is not ad-hominem if the target is a character trait relevant to
the speaker's point.

~~~
mstoehr
How do you think that the character traits of the writer are relevant to his
case against Google?

~~~
benmathes
Claiming that the author was not objective is relevant to his argument.

------
medearis
His primary example of how Google is big and evil is actually an industry-wide
problem, The issue of internet royalties for musicians has been contentions,
largely because most internet radio sites aren't making very much money in the
first place. Pandora, for instance, has revenues of only about 25 million, 75%
of which is going to music labels. An increase in royalty fees would put most
companies with a similar business model out of business. Just because Google
makes a lot of money on search doesn't mean that they should have to pay above
market royalty fees for youtube plays. The real issue is that music just isn't
worth all that much to internet consumers at the moment. The days of paying 20
bucks for a CD are over. So, until someone comes up with a better monetization
model for online music, I don't see the royalty fees going up.

------
tomsaffell
From the article:

"...Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely
offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated
by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

This journalist appears to know little about the WWW. He's writing for an
audience that (mainly) know equally little, but who care passionately about
other things (artists' rights, privacy, etc), which are inevitably affected by
the WWW. So they only see the bad side of the coin.

------
zcrar70
I actually thought that the article made a couple of interesting points (e.g.
the dangers of monopolies), but then undermined them completely by launching
into a biased and almost hysterical rant (e.g. associating the problems caused
by newspapers losing readership and Google, even when admitting in the article
that Google can't be blamed for that.) Shame.

------
r7000
That was an amazing almost-submarine promo for scribd. They probably just
reached a whole new audience.

------
tm
This guy is an idiot. Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who says google has done
nothing is clearly delusional. Frankly I'm surprised that this even hit the
presses.

------
byrneseyeview
_In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking
publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become
aware of a breach._

This is what the DMCA did, not what Scribd did.

------
Scriptor
I've noticed that it's very easy for writers nowadays to just throw in a
modifier in front of something objective, and immediately, subtly alter
people's perceptions. Many people simply read by skimming and don't always
stop to think about every point. Instead, they simply read while the back of
their minds associates the huge task of sorting and processing data as
insignificant.

Take the following, which is a slightly edited version of the quote: "offering
aggregation, lists and the ordering of all the information generated by people
who have invested their capital, skill and time."

I took out "little" and added "all the". The whole connotation changes. But
the change is so subtle that people don't notice the blatant lack of citation.
Can Google really index _all_ information? No, only what is available in
formats it can read on the Internet, and it doesn't even have all of that. In
the same way, the author doesn't explain _why_ aggregation, listing, and
ordering can be termed "mere". There is no solid evidence presented to back up
the idea that what Google does is insignificant. A counter-argument is that,
despite the presence of competitors in the search field, Google maintains a
lead.

------
dinkumthinkum
This is just a bunch of jibber jabber. Boo hoo piracy happens on the Internet.
It happened long before Scribd and long before the Internet became popular.
Newspapers are going out of business because of the Web ... Boohoo. So because
of all this Google is an amoral menace? Give me a break.

------
zandorg
What confuses me about YouTube is... The Web was designed to be hosted
anarchically, by anyone.

What is needed is a standardised video tag like HTML, ported to all browsers,
so people can host _their own videos_.

See a video as a HTML document or a GIF image.

I look forward to a W3C video standard crushing YouTube.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
You can already do that thought not with a "Video tag." You can put videos on
your server and have a Flash/Silverlight/Whatever player embedded in your web
pages, It just happens that YouTube made this process very easy and became
popular, in the beginning many people didn't even know you could watch videos
on the web.

Anyway, I am waiting for the focus to get off of YouTube and for people to
start realizing videos can be posted to many places, not just those that only
allow 10 minutes and so forth.

------
kiba
I got in only the first 2-3 paragraph before being turned off by the "piracy"
rant.

Anybody who have have huge comtempts for pirates do not understand the
pirates' role in society. Unlike drunk drivers, pirates are the forces of
great upheaval, of social changes. Pirates often signal something is wrong in
the market. It may be the companies themsleves or the profliberation of DRMs.

If he doesn't understand that, how can I expect him to understand the
implication of google?

~~~
vorador
I don't understand you. Do you mean that music ought to be free because the
paying music is wrong ?

~~~
aceofspades19
No, he is saying that the way people sell music now is not right, not that
paying for music is wrong.

------
_pius
Wow, this article isn't very well thought out at all. In trying to rebut it,
I'm literally overwhelmed by the sheer ignorance of it.

------
sfphotoarts
making order from chaos seems like a real tangible creation to me. Typical
grauniad (see google for explanation, for those that didn't grow up on
Private-Eye) reporting...

------
TweedHeads
News for hackers?

I don't find this interesting at all (besides its propaganda value) and I
doubt few in this community will find this kind of news worth debating.

~~~
queensnake
From the site guidelines: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. "

