Tag Archives: Google

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Google for President? Nations, corporations and the future of politics

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(Thinking out loud here, folks, so do feel free to chip in and tell me why I’m completely wrong on any or all points raised… :))

The guys at TechDirt pointed toward a wryly tongue-in-cheek piece at Bloomberg that attempts to nominate Google, Inc as a presidential candidate. Obviously enough, it’s a response to the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations should have the same “freedom of speech” as a person, something of a reductio ad absurdum… but it throws a light onto the increasing political clout of corporations in the States and elsewhere. A company running for political office is ridiculous (at least on the face of it), but a suite of corporate political rights and powers isn’t quite such an inconceivable idea.

After all, we’re already witnessing the decline in power of the nation-state as a political player, and there are numerous corporations whose yearly accounts eclipse the GDP of many countries. In some respects, it’s bizarre that corporate political power isn’t already enshrined in written legislation… if only because to legislate it would be a tacit admission that it exists, and that its boundaries need defining. As geography becomes anathema thanks to communications networks and climate change migration, the comparative security and reliability of the corporation as sovereign will start to make more sense to populations of rootless, landless and unrepresented people. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some corporations represented in the United Nations within my lifetime… assuming that the UN lasts long enough, that is.

Of course, the potential for corporations to abuse the trust placed in them by their citizen/employees will be immense… but will it be any more so than the potential for nation-states to do the same? Profit is just another ideology, after all… and much as the corporate mindset tends to set my teeth on edge, it’s an ideology with coherent logical underpinnings, which is more than I can say for most of my current political options here in the UK.

And don’t forget the point made by Jason Stoddard, namely that a profit-focussed corporation has no reason to enslave the population and make their lives miserable. Quite the opposite, in fact – corporations want happy people with expendable money in their pockets, and given that those two things are becoming very difficult for governments to provide in some parts of the world, the corporation as focus of political allegiance doesn’t seem as insane as it might at first glance. There’s precedent, too – East India Company, anyone? Hudson’s Bay Company?

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Google threatens to pull out of China over hacking allegations

Well, this story’s everywhere this morning. After allegedly uncovering a “sophisticated and targeted” hacking attack, Google are now “reviewing the feasibility of their business operations in China”, which includes the controversial censorship systems they applied to Google.cn; here’s the official announcement, which is a beautiful example of legalese that says one thing, implies many others and leaves a lot of spaces uncharted. Chinese citizens are laying flowers outside Google’s Beijing office [via Jan Chipchase].

Beyond the glossy surface of the public announcements, however, we can’t be entirely sure what’s going on. The Wikileaks crew have tweeted a few revealing points:

gossip inside google China is gov hackers found infiltrating google source code repository; gmail attacks an old issue. #

Gossip from within google.cn is Shanghai office used as CN gov attack stage in US source code network. #

China has been quietly asking for the same access to google logfiles as US intelligence for 2-3 years now. #

Should be noted that Google keeps secret how many user’s records are disclosed to US intelligence, others. #

correction: the time of the Chinese requests/demands are not exactly known and are possibly in the last 12 months. #

Regardless of the exact causes and motivations behind Google’s threats to withdraw, it highlights the incredible bargaining power that a company of that size and influence has on the same stage as nation-states. It’s not entirely unimaginable to think that Google suspected something like this might have happened all along, and they were just waiting for the right moment to bring their leverage to bear – after all, China’s a big old market, and they’d probably far rather its citizens had full unfettered access to the web, if only so as to advertise to them more effectively. So why not agree to initial compromises, let the people get a taste for what they have to offer, and then threaten to take the toys home when the government makes an institutionally inevitable blunder?

It remains to be seen how seriously the Chinese government will take this threat – it’s not been a good few months for them as far as international publicity is concerned, and Google is a big economic player whose favour I suspect they’d rather not lose. But China’s people will be seriously miffed about it, and I that’s what makes me think that Google are far more cunning than they’re letting on. I’m not under the illusion that they’re interested in anything more than running a profitable business (though that whole “don’t be evil” thing is a pretty effective rule-of-thumb for achieving such), and bringing down totalitarian governments isn’t in their regular remit. But look at it this way: if you were running a business of that size and looking at a potential market that lucrative, and you saw a way to potentially open up the laws that currently restrict your business in that market by playing off the market’s citizens (and international public opinion) against the government, and you reckoned you could pull it off…

OK, so I’m hypothesising wildly here, but my point is that it’s by no means completely implausible. I’m reminded of Jason Stoddard’s points about the mythical bugbear of evil corporate hegemony:

A corporation doesn’t care if you’re living in a 300 square foot studio apartment or a 6000 square foot McMansion. They don’t want to wipe out the McMansion dwellers, or elevate the studio apartment owners. They only care about one thing: that you buy their stuff.

For everything they do, they’ll have justification. There’s no hidden business plan with a top-line mission statement of “Destroying Civilization As We Know It.”

But there will be hundreds or thousands of decisions, all based on maximizing profit. Substituting cheaper ingredients: maximize profit. Use low-income countries for labor: maximizing profit. Driving smaller competitors out of business: ensuring growth, which maximizes profit. Extending credit to anyone: maximizes profit.

If they can make a bigger profit selling you a “green” condo and a Prius rather than a McMansion and an Escalade, that’s exactly what they’ll do. If they think they’ll make an even larger profit renting you an apartment and leasing you a bike, that’s what they’ll do.

Google stand to make a lot of money if they can loosen the government leash in China, right? Right… so keep your eyes on the dollar signs. This story isn’t over yet, I suspect.

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Google as energy trader

All the media fuss and furore over the Nexus 1 phone from Google has (whether deliberately or not) diverted attention from a more interesting development from everybody’s favourite nominal monopoly: they’ve started a new subsidiary company and applied to the FTC for Google Energy to become an energy trader, able to buy and sell energy in the wholesale supplier-level markets.

This isn’t Google’s first foray into the energy business, and it’s not exactly surprising that a company which depends on electricity to keep its services up and running should be looking at ways of cutting costs – not to mention potentially selling back their own excess production onto the grid, should they find themselves with watts to spare. The Big G claims that it has no interest in becoming the next Enron, however; their broker status would enable them to pick and choose from renewable energy sources rather than the fossil-based stuff that most regular businesses have to buy, and that’s their main motivation. [all links via SlashDot]

Even so, one can’t help but think that the energy market is going to become very competitive and dynamic in the next few decades, and that having one’s toe in the door from the outset would be a sensible move for a company with long vision…

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Google’s Building Maker: crowdsourcing the world’s architecture

Valencia, Spain as seen in Google EarthIs there anything that can’t be crowdsourced? Google sure don’t think so, as they’ve just announced another new project for Joe Public to muck in on. Google Building Maker will be used to populate Google Earth with 3D models of major buildings:

We like to think of Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide. When you’re done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn’t already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.

It’s entirely browser-based, too, so no compatibility problems. Of course, you don’t get the freedom of Second Life, where you can build any damned building you feel like… but then learning how to build well in SL can take weeks of practice, whereas Google have aimed to make it as easy as possible. Which is a sensible move if you want people to do work for free, I guess… [image by Visentico/Sento]

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How to download whole books from Google

Just in case it isn’t obvious: the following is not an incitement to (or endorsement of) copyright infringement; I have decided to publish this link because I know a number of readers here are interested in the legal and commercial future of books in a digital age (as am I), and because the Author’s Guild settlement is a current topic on which it has bearing… and because few things give me more satisfaction than pointing out that Everything Can And Will Be Hacked.

To reiterate: this link is for information purposes only, folks.

How to download full books from Google Books and save them as PDF files