How much is too much?

Hello, this is Google. Friends tend to call us Big G.

It is the company which motto is: “Don’t be evil” and it is the most famous search engine in the world.

It processes a billion queries a day, using 450,000 servers which are switched on 24 hours a day. But Mountain View’s colossus is much more than a simple, powerful, effective search engine. Andy Grove, previous number one of the giant Intel, knows this well: “It’s a company which has grown up on steroids, and which is spread in every industry sector.”

 

From software to renewable energy

In the last nine years, Big G has bought 187 patents and more than 30 companies among which DoubleClick, YouTube and Blogger. In 2009, it launched an 100 million dollar venture fund to invest in sectors such as: software, renewable energies, biotechnologies, genetics, space and health systems. Google is also the main news (Google News) and video (YouTube) distribution channel.

At the same time, Google is seeking to build the biggest virtual library of all times (Google Books). For this reason, the company signs agreement with institutions from all over the world. A few weeks ago it signed an agreement with the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage.  Google has been sued many times by publishers and newspapers for copyright violation both for Google Books and for Google News.

Google manages an unimaginable volume of “data”: web surfing/browsing, e-mails, documents of who uses the tools offered online for free by Big G. Google elaborates very sophisticated analyses on this data – analyses that it can naturally sell.

But being the ultimate search engine is not enough and Google is looking to enter people’s lives further. It is inside the mobile telephone system market (it launched its smartphone “Nexus One” and its own operational system “Android”); it offers free software such as Gmail (Google e-mail); an operational system and a browser (Chrome); chats or voip services for online phone calls (Wave, Google Talk and Google Voice).

Together with a series of applications for the most varied needs of the average user: Picasa to manage online pictures; an Office package to write or make presentations (Google Docs); a platform to create blogs (Blogger); YouTube for films (over 25 hours of videos loaded every minute); the social network Orkut and the new system Buzz to stay connected with friends (this last one has been the object of a class action in the US for privacy violation).

Google wants to be the platform for us to do all the things we want to do online. For this reason, the company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin wants to know where everything is: from where we live (Google Maps and Google Earth) to where we will live one day (Google Moon and Google Mars). In this case too Big G was brought to court for having shown online images of minors and people in embarrassing situations without authorisation, being accused of having violated users’ privacy.

Google wants to know everything about us and keeps track of where we have been surfing and what we have been browsing for eighteen months. It also wanted to have access to our health data (Google Health) and manage the data of our DNA for which it has invested into two genetics companies: Navigenics and 23andMe, this last one founded by Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin’s wife.

Google needs electricity to make its servers work and exchange an enormous quantity of data via Internet at the minimum cost. This is why Mountain View’s colossus intends to “build and test its own high speed broadband network”, as announced last February 2010 on the company’s official blog.

The list goes on. Google has also planned its entrance into the electricity and renewable energies’ markets with which it wanted to increase its structure and above all be self sufficient energy wise.

 

From champion to threat

From champion of digital freedoms and friend of open source communities, the company that today has a stock market value of about 180 billion dollars and that allows its employees to attend to personal projects during working hours, is at the centre of a series of investigations all over the world for privacy violation or abuse of market dominance.

In 2006 three Google managers were found guilty of putting a video onto YouTube which showed abuse towards a disabled child, the so said “Vivi-Down” case.

A European Commission’s survey is about to study the behaviour of the company, accused of penalizing competing companies when it comes to web search results.  

In Latin America, the Brazilian Superior Tribunal de Justica has ruled that Google is responsible for the contents published on its social network Orkut, declaring that two teenagers who described themselves “offended” by heavy-going jokes put up on the web were right to be so.

In the United States, a possible antitrust exam has been announced in advance on the purchase of AdMob, a company specialised in advertising on mobile phones.

 

Follow the money

In the background the mother of all accusations: the absence of transparency. What we just know about Google, is what Google itself is letting us know. This despite the fact that it wants to know everything about us: our habits, our tastes, our inclinations.

It is simple: Big G has an annual turnover of more than 20 billion dollars.

97% of this comes from online advertising, a sector of which Google holds over 70% of the market share. In other words, Google is the undoubted number one when it comes to volume of business and efficiency.

It is able to orientate advertising according to sectors, age, social groups, geographical position, tastes, and everything else Google may want to invent.

And in order to do so it needs us, in exchange for which it offers us free services.

Being number one is not easy, the volume of data that it processes allows it to be there. Although this is also down to its number of contacts and its platforms such as Adsense and Adwords which manage advertising campaigns – the functioning of which is not really known by anyone.

These substitute classical advertising agencies: the advertiser chooses what, where, to whom, for how long and for how much money he wants to show his online advertisement, in full autonomy, and hey presto, an ad is up. It’s a walk in the park.

Here is Google: it knows who you are, where you are, what you want and who your friends are. But it is precisely thanks to this, that wherever you are, it can always give you useful suggestions on what to buy or where to go on holiday.

Evil? You can decide.

Original article by Riccardo Bagnato written for Vita magazine, translated from Italian by Cristina Barbetta.