To most consumers, Google remained an iconic brand, a force for good, a company that made search easy and fast and free; a company that retained its bold, entrepreneurial spirit and was both a beneficent employer and a benefactor to shareholders.
To most media industries, Google was becoming a dreaded disrupter. The engineering efficiencies touted by Google were also perceived as threats to the sales forces of the television and radio and print industies. Weeks after the DoubleClick purchase, Beth Comstock, then the president, integrated media, for NBC Universal, and now the chief marketing officer for its parent, General Electric, said, “If Google could introduce us to tens of thousands or even a thousand advertisers we currently can’t have, that would be a great thing. But when they start moving up the pyramid and they think you can put a self-serve model to what we know of as a very highly customized, high touch, more intuitive kind of business-it’s a content co-creation in some cases-you can’t do that with self-service and algorithms.” In her dealings with Google, she said, “There is this undertone of: Is that all they’re looking for? Why are they into television advertising?” Are they intent on replacing NBC’s sales force? She would have gladly outsourced the selling of remnant advertising to Google; what she wanted to retain control of was the selling of premium advertising. Like Karmazin, she wanted her salesperson in on the process, persuading clients to spend more.
Days after the DoubleClick transaction, Microsoft and AT amp;T publicly called on federal regulators to block the deal, saying it would reduce competition and give Google access to too much private data. Sorrell called on regulators to review the acquisition, declaring, “It raises issues as to whether we are happy to let Google have our clients’ data and our own data, which Google could use for its own purposes.” A senior executive at Time Warner, who did not want to be identified because its AOL division is a Google partner, told me at the time, “You always have to worry when someone gets so much more powerful than all the competition out there. This is why I come down to this: I hope the government starts understanding this power sooner rather than later.”
Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University and a former Supreme Court clerk, looks at the issue from a different angle. He said he’s not “worried about Google becoming large.” One can make the argument, for example, that size brings standardization, he said. “I’m less concerned how they’re behaving in their own market than what a company does to other markets.” Will Google use its power to unfairly dominate other markets, as Microsoft used its operating system dominance to cripple the Netscape browser? “If Google remains true to its mission of being an ‘honest broker,’ I’m pleased. If they have an agenda, that’s when I become fearful.” He wasn’t sure Google had an agenda, but was plainly worried: “If they’re willing to block sites to placate China, are they willing to block sites to placate powerful advertisers?”
Here the issue of privacy becomes entwined with the issue of power. Together, Google and DoubleClick amass a mountain of consumer data. The more “personalized” this data, as Eric Schmidt said, the better the search answers. “When I decide to go to the movies,” said Schmidt, “I’d like to rely on the recommendations of friends. How do we capture that? The more we know who you are, the more we can tailor the search results.”
Of course, when a company retains as much data as Google does and also proclaims, “We are in the advertising business,” as Eric Schmidt does, this arouses more privacy concerns. And since Google believes advertising is information users want if it is“relevant,” it follows that sharing data serves users, which exacerbates these fears. Or as Sergey Brin told Wall Street analysts during Google’s third-quarter conference call in October 2007, “I am really excited to tell you today what we have done over the past quarter in ads and apps. As you all know, for advertising our real philosophy is to create a win-win between advertisers and customers by presenting users with really relevant information which is interesting to them, but is likely to cause a transaction to commence.” With technology making inroads toward improving how users’ real desires are gauged and finding patterns of behavior, the data-mining discipline Sergey Brin studied at Stanford enters a new age. The pressures on Google-and all sellers of advertising-to share more data will intensify.
Privacy fears escalate when Google executives express peculiar ideas about privacy-ideas that suggest they don’t grasp the reasons people are fearful. Each fall, Google hosts a two-day Zeitgeist Conference on its Mountain View campus, inviting a cross section of people from various fields. Much of the conference is moderated by journalist James Fallows, and a cavalcade of prominent scientists, musicians, artists, public officials, and others make presentations or appear on panels. The last event of Google’s Zeitgeist is when Brin and Page come on stage-in jeans, of course-to answer Fallows’s and the audience’s questions. At the 2007 conference, Randall Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau rose to ask Brin to access the importance of privacy.
Brin declared that “the number one” privacy issue was “stuff that is untrue about people on the Web.” Because information “travels so fast” online, and because “anyone can publish anything,” these untruths gain currency. The number two privacy issue, he said, was the “hijacking of credit cards.” He dismissed concern about the information collected on cookies “as more of the Big Brother type”-in other words, fantasies. “Do they [users] trust what you’re doing? That’s not so much a privacy issue.” By this logic, if we trust Google, there is little reason to fear they will misuse our data. Afterward, at a small press lunch with the founders and Schmidt, Page signaled his agreement with Brin. “Sergey is just saying there are practical privacy issues that are different than the ones debated.” As was true when the founders pushed to add a delete button and allow Google’s Gmail scanning technology to more aggressively deliver ads when users typed certain keywords and to forgo a delete button-a mistake Brin told me showed “we just weren’t good” at anticipating fears, but “I think we’ve now learned”-once again, Brin and Page displayed an inability to imagine why anyone would question their motives and a deafness to fears that can’t easily be quantified.
CHAPTER TEN. Waking the Government Bear
While a full chorus of incensed media-advertising agencies, publishers, newspapers, television and telephone companies, and tech companies like Microsoft-complained about the growing power of Google, the Bush administration, steadfast in its belief that a free market provides its own regulation, was silent. Stepping into this breach was Brooklyn-born public interest advocate Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, D.C. Chester founded this two-person organization with an annual budget of two hundred thousand dollars in 2001. He has mounted a ferocious campaign to induce the world’s governments to handcuff Google. Its first petition was filed before the FTC in the fall of 2006, prodding them to investigate how online marketing encroaches on privacy. In the spring of 2007, Chester, then sixty-two, began to press for an antitrust investigation of the rapid consolidation of the online advertising sector, and urged the FTC to reject Google’s proposed merger with DoubleClick. He petitioned the European Commission to do the same.