When asked why consumers should trust that Google would not abuse the private data it collects, Sergey Brin in 2007 told me that the fears people have are tied to a distaste for advertising and to a fear of Big Brother, which is sometimes “irrational.” He wondered: “How many people yesterday do you think had embarrassing information about them exposed as the result of some cookie? Zero. It never happens. Yet I’m sure thousands of people had their mail stolen yesterday… I do think it boils down to irrational fears that all of a sudden we’d do evil things.”
Irrational or not, Google was assailed from many sides and compelled to play an unaccustomed role: defense. Nick Grouf, CEO of Spot Runner, an advertising/marketing agency that counted among its investors Martin Sorrell’s WPP Group, believed Google was engaged in too many battles. He said that traditional media woke up to the Google threat not when the company did its IPO or was sued by book publishers, but when it bought YouTube. “When you pay $1.6 billion for a site that is on the cover of every newspaper and magazine, and is the centerpiece of the zeitgeist as the future of media”-suddenly Google was widely perceived as a media company. By 2006 and into 2007, Grouf said, Google was battling with television and newspapers and book publishers and Microsoft and eBay and advertising agencies. “It’s hard to compete on all fronts. And people start to whisper: ‘These guys have gargantuan ambitions.’”
IN NOVEMBER, the FTC held a two-day town hall meeting on privacy, a series of tame panel discussions that became more a seminar than an inquisition, disappointing Jeff Chester. The commission decided that the often-baffling issue of privacy would be excluded from the decision of whether to approve Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick. The focus, instead, was on whether the marriage was anticompetitive. It was difficult to argue that the merger harmed competition when, within months, companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL and the WPP all acquired digital advertising companies of their own. The FTC prefers “to wait for a violation before we act,” an agency official said on the eve of the approval of the merger. The EU did compel Google to make concessions and to tighten its privacy policies, but it, too, would approve the merger.
By mid 2007, Google was worried about the many restive bears it had provoked. It began to reach out to Washington. To allay privacy concerns, the company announced that it would reduce from two years to eighteen months the information it keeps in its database about the Web search histories of its users. Claiming that privacy laws were out of date, Google put out a press release proposing uniform international privacy rules and perhaps laws that recognized how the Internet and technology posed new privacy challenges. Instead of one “uber cookie” that permanently tracks a user, Google said it was experimenting with “crumbled cookies” that would disappear over time.
The public battles probably made Google’s executives somewhat wiser. Google was only guilty, they believed, of naivete, not arrogance. “The product brand was very strong,” said Alan Davidson, Google’s senior director of government relations and public policy, who is a computer scientist as well as a lawyer and who oversees Google’s Washington office. “The political brand was very weak. Because we were not here to define it, it was being defined by our enemies.” He paused a moment, and added, “Enemy is a strong word. It was being defined by our competitors.” Gigi Sohn, the president and cofounder of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for both an open Internet and more balanced copyright laws, said that like many Silicon Valley companies, Google chose to have a smaller presence in the nation’s capital. But Google was more extreme, she said. “They were almost alone among Silicon Valley companies in failing to recognize that you have to play in the sandbox. If you want progressive spectrum policies, the free market does not ensure that.”
Google’s one-man operation in Washington expanded in 2007 to include twenty-two staffers. Among them were Jane Horvath, a former senior privacy attorney in the Bush administration’s Justice Department; Johanna Shelton, former senior counsel to Democrat John Dingell, then chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; Robert Boorstin, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton; and Pablo Chavez, former chief counsel to Republican senator John McCain. To advance its Washington agenda, Google had established its own PAC (NETPAC), and soon hired three outside firms to lobby on its behalf: the mostly Democratic Podesta Group; King amp; Spalding, where Google relied on former Republican senators Connie Mack and Dan Coats; and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which had recently hired Makan Delrahim, a former deputy assistant attorney general who’d been in charge of the Antitrust Division in the administration of George W Bush. “We’ve been under the radar, if you will, with government and certain industries,” observed David Drummond, the Google senior vice president who oversees all of the company’s legal affairs and policy interaction with governments. “As we’ve grown, we’re engaging a lot more.”
The most immediate concerns of Google’s Washington office were the privacy issues raised by the acquisition of DoubleClick. By the end of 2007, Google was battling the image that it was the Microsoft of 2000. “No question that people here regularly discuss Microsoft’s experience and use that as a cautionary tale,” said Elliot Schrage, the vice president of global communications and public affairs. On the subject of Microsoft, Brin said, “Microsoft is a bit of an unusual company. They don’t seem to like any of us being successful in the technology space.”
So Google sought to demonstrate that it was reaching out to media companies as well as to Washington. To preserve copyrights, YouTube announced that it was testing new antipiracy software to block unauthorized content from being uploaded and viewed. In an ecumenical spirit, the word partnership was constantly invoked by Google executives. Repeatedly, they celebrated its “more than 100,000 partners,” the more than three billion dollars it then distributed annually to Web sites and mostly small business partners in its AdSense program. As 2007 progressed, said General Electric’s Beth Comstock, relations with Google thawed and by summer, G.E.’s NBC negotiated for Google to sell some of the network’s remnant ads. “In the end, I was less concerned that Google was out to replace our entire sales force,” she said.
Google, however, was still clear-eyed about the inevitable gap between its engineers and traditional media. Google’s engineering prowess would, inevitably, make the consumption of media and the selling of advertising more efficient, Larry Page told me one afternoon as we sat in the small, bare-walled conference room steps from his office. So was it inevitable, I asked, that “Google would sometimes bump into traditional media?”
Without hesitation, he corrected me. “I would say, always,” he said in his deep baritone, emitting a subdued chuckle. His was not a boast; rather, it was a candid recognition of reality. He believes Google’s engineers can eradicate most inefficiencies if given the time and resources.