We human beings are so gosh-darned adaptive; no one can really say when the Internet morphed from a novelty with some convenient functions into a permanent element of our society that has replaced virtually all information technology. It just kind of appeared, and we happily went along with it and embraced its power. Our ability to adapt and learn has taken us from munching on twigs and dying at 20 to working and playing in an infinite cyber realm, but a few days ago our collective complacency about this phenomenon may have led to some rather unwelcome, sudden changes for us all, the outcome of which even those responsible cannot possibly predict.
In case you haven’t been following, Google and Verizon made an unprecedented deal earlier this month that will allow them to take full advantage of each other’s infrastructure: Google’s search and data gathering monopoly and array of promoted information services (for starters) and Verizon’s global wireless broadband.
A year or so ago, Verizon criticized Google and Skype for freeloading on infrastructure telecoms that were responsible for researching and developing. But we all comprehend the omnipresence of Google; in a very short time, Google has turned what’s going on behind the search box into a multinational corporation with a business model. With its arbitration over search queues and massive data-gathering techniques that facilitate activities like net-wide targeted ads, Google has become more of a de facto Internet gatekeeper than the service providers themselves. Verizon apparently knows this, but what Google knows better than anyone is that wireless broadband is the future of everything.
Google also knows that exploding demand for increasingly mobile wireless broadband can only be met by monetizing it in a way other than targeted ads, which is where this starts affecting Google’s stance on “net neutrality,” the principal behind how you’ve known the Internet since AOL. Net neutrality is an attitude about overall Internet “management,” basically stating that Internet carriers and providers, like Comcast or AT&T, cannot discriminate or otherwise alter their services (i.e. speed) toward any specific content or types of traffic for any reason. It’s a rule that’s been backed by the Federal Communications Commission, Washington and Google, effectively keeping the telecoms’ mitts off the Internet, leaving them only as providers and content creators solely responsible for their content.
Didn’t think it could be any different? Now that Google is playing provider with Verizon, it advocates “limited neutrality,” a laughably transparent effort to stay consistent with the rhetoric people are comfortable with, while conveniently claiming that wireless Internet providers should be able to do things like charge content creators, which could be any site on the web not directly affiliated with Google, for extra speed. Or establish a two-laned road, the faster one costing extra. To hear Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, talk about it: “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy ... and that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.” Oh, the two kinds of Internet are just so confusing.
However, there’s really nothing special about a company with shareholders acting in its own selfinterest. What’s different is the FCC has failed to decisively define any boundaries in light of these events, forcing us to embrace however the profit motive manifests itself for our benefit.
Yet, if you listen to Schmidt, it is quite clear that Google doesn’t think of itself as a regular business. Schmidt knows exactly the kind of society-altering influence his company wields.
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he said. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Regarding the data Google has stored on you, Schmidt said, “ ... we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.”
Condensing people into pools of trite data, are we? Though famously the slogan of the pathetic Bing, it’s scary to think what an actual free-will-skewing “decision engine,” the future of search, might be like, where Google tries to anticipate what you want, based on the methods it already uses to send you targeted ads on things like Facebook. And those are, of course, super accurate. By now, Schmidt has quite a collection of overtly dystopian quotes. Look them up. And start using Scroogle.org, a website that uses Google’s search engine while suppressing their data gathering cookies. These kinds of corporate ultimatums should not be taken lying down.
Feeling apprehension around these events is more than fear of the unknown; it’s an awareness that Google competition is shrinking across the board, its services are becoming nearly impossible to avoid, and its grasp of the monolithic new technology we’ve all grown cripplingly dependent on has happened so fast that nothing has the precedent of authority to even remotely check them.
— Wiley Robinson is an undecided sophomore. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu