Google is just an amoral menace

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy

by raju • 17 years ago

38 62 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

slavox• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Newspaper journalist complains about Internet. Who would have thought?

febeling• 17 years ago

I was happy to see that other commenters where very little impressed with this article either, with the one above probably most to the point.

People don't see yet how instable these monopolies really are in the age of the internet. Once Google would really corrupt it's core product, search, someone could just go, download the clones of Googles software over at the apache foundation and upload it into a little EC2 cloud at Amazon. There is not even this network effect which allows Ebay to run successfully despite looking quite dated nowadays, because people feel they have to stick with them because eveybody else does.

_cbsz3• 17 years ago

Do you really think that the OSS world is on par with Google's army of (paid, full-time) engineers, and that EC2 is as efficient as (or, conceivably, even in the same ballpark as) Google's datacenter infrastructure? (Amazon's private infrastructure might be run as well, although they have very different concerns -- compare GFS (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html) with Dynamo (http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dyn...), for example.)

tomsaffell3• 17 years ago

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..

_cbsz3• 17 years ago

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.

gjm11• 17 years ago

Why on earth are you linking to encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com instead of wikipedia.com? By doing so you give people following your link staler content, a bunch of ads, worse formatting, and no ability to fix errors they find.

(For those who don't know: e.t.c is one of many sites that just scrape the entirety of Wikipedia -- er, I think they omit some bits, mostly in the hope of making the true origin of the material less obvious -- and re-present its content as if it's theirs, adding a bunch of paid advertisements, with just a bit of teeny-tiny small print crediting Wikipedia. This doesn't seem to me like behaviour we should be encouraging.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

From the site guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

drewcrawford• 17 years ago

Why are you being downvoted? This story is incredibly poorly-reasoned (as almost all the comments here have pointed out). Why is this even worthy of our discussion?

zcrar70• 17 years ago

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.

umbra2• 17 years ago

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...

zandorg2• 17 years ago

Don't cloud the issue by juggling words to say it's not a menace. It says amoral menace, which means regardless of morals, is a menace.

umbra2• 17 years ago

Clouding the issue?

I think there are two separate issues.

1.) Amoral: clearly; they are a corporate entity, not a human being

2.) Menace: who or what are they menacing? If you feel threatened, don't use their products.

kragen5• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

kiba• 17 years ago

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?

dawson• 17 years ago

Pirates often signal something is wrong in the market, this much I agree with you.

vorador• 17 years ago

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

aceofspades19• 17 years ago

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

medearis• 17 years ago

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.

zandorg2• 17 years ago

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.

dinkumthinkum2• 17 years ago

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.

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

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.

Silhouette4• 17 years ago

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.

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

You're right, it would not cease to be useful. But it would cease to be dominant because less people would find it accessible. Search engines allow the average user to orient themselves in the world wide web. It is a large part of why people leave the ordered safety of other mediums for the web. Without organization data is meaningless. And while you and I may be adept at navigating the web without the Google and Yahoos most people would be utterly lost and drown in a vast sea of information.

kragen5• 17 years ago

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

ilkhd2• 17 years ago

When something has been proved useful, it will reapear. The very day of disappearance of search engines, will be the day when new ones would start popping up.

tomsaffell3• 17 years ago

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.

dinkumthinkum2• 17 years ago

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.

tm• 17 years ago

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.

r7000• 17 years ago

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

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

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.

pg3• 17 years ago

"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.

breck• 17 years ago

I agree. How does this article have so many points? It took me 3 seconds to realize " how little this guy understands the Internet".

It seems like there is a rising trend that anything "anti-google" gets upvotes.

pg3• 17 years ago

The bigger you get, the quicker people will be to suspect you. It's the flip side of "Everyone loves an underdog." Everyone hates an overdog.

This story and that recent one about Google Checkout

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533849

are like a controlled experiment to measure how much of this dislike is rational. Google did behave badly in the first case. Here they've merely been attacked by an idiot.

dasil003• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

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...

Scriptor• 17 years ago

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.

_pius2• 17 years ago

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.

Google is just an amoral menace

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