The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center in Washington that focuses on privacy and civil liberties issues, demanded that Gmail be shut down, declaring that it was “an unprecedented invasion into the sanctity of private communications.” Of course, a computer, not a human, was scanning the e-mail, as most e-mail providers do to prevent spam. At first, the founders and Schmidt tried to defend the no-delete button and the advertising feature of Gmail, believing the small tempest would pass. It did not, and Google was forced to add a delete button. For Winograd this was an early sign of troubles to come. He has enormous respect for his former students (and gratitude for the Google stock grants that made him a rich man), but what he saw in the Gmail debate was that Google relied so much on science, on data and mathematical algorithms, that it was insensitive to legitimate privacy fears-and, later, to fears they would dominate the search market. Winograd describes his two former students as impatient: “Larry and Sergey believe that if you try to get everybody on board, it will prevent things from happening. If you just do it, others will come around to realize they were attached to old ways that were not as good.” The attitude, he said, “is a form of arrogance: ‘We know better.’ The idea that somebody at Google could know better than the consumer what’s good for the consumer is not forbidden.”
Only die-hard Google bashers, however, would deny the idealism that drives many of the decisions Brin and Page have made at Google. In the wake of 9/11, Krishna Bharat, an Indian-born engineer who joined Google in 1999 and today has the title principal scientist, was moved by the awful events of that day to ponder its lessons. One lesson, he believed, is that Americans were largely ignorant of other peoples and creeds, including radical Islam. There was too little international news in print or on television. Bharat said he wanted to “broaden horizons, allowing people to see other perspectives, to see what the Arab street is saying today. It is hard for the New York Times to do justice to that.” Devoting his 20 percent time to this project, Bharat devised a program that would be known as Google News, initially offering free access to almost five thousand worldwide news links. The placement and selection of stories is made, Google announced, by “computer algorithms, without human intervention.” Google News would be ad-free, meaning Google would lose money from this effort. Like digitized books, Google News was advanced as a promotional and sales vehicle. It would, Google said, broaden newspaper readership, and allow newspapers to sell advertising once a user clicked on the newspaper’s link. “We send traffic to newspapers,” Bharat said. However, newspapers didn’t all jump up and down with glee.
One of the major dissenters was the Associated Press. Founded in 1846 to provide news stories to newspapers in exchange for annual fees, the AP had begun to extend this franchise online, selling national and international news to portals like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. But as Jim Kennedy, the AP’s vice president of strategic planning, described it, Google News was sifting news stories, “making copies and taking pieces of this content and posting it as if it were their own news.” Google claimed it was fair use, said Kennedy, since it was posting only part of the article and providing a link. Google said it was both creating reader traffic and promotional value for the news sites. The AP, which is a wholesaler of news, claimed Google was commoditizing their content and insisted on a license agreement. Google resisted, and the AP considered bringing a lawsuit.
Did Tom Curley, the CEO of the AP, think Google was naive? “No, there is nothing naive about these guys,” he said. “They have a very, very aggressive legal view. They have pushed the envelope… They know exactly what they’re doing. They have the greatest business ever invented. They are taking everybody else’s work and they are figuring out how to do a deal with most other people in which heads, they win, and tails, most everyone else loses.” He cited the 80 or so percent Google said it pays its large content partners in the AdSense program. Since Google sells the ads, he said, it charges a commission of about 15 percent off the top, leaving about two-thirds-not 80 percent-for the content creators. “That’s not enough.”
Eric Schmidt disputes this portrayal. “This is a company that [at the time] had only three or four business development people,” he said. Those people alerted Schmidt that the AP felt Google was stealing their content, he said, but “we had a lawyer at the time who advised that this was fair use.” Google refused to pay. The AP claimed that for news Google was becoming “an end user,” not a search site that sent people elsewhere. The idea, Schmidt said, had “never occurred to us.”
Reeling from shrinking revenues, newspapers fretted that Google was depriving them of compensation for their content. They feared Google was expanding from search to the news business. And they were offended that Google thought an algorithm could perform the work of an editor. “Google is driven by engineers who believe that what is most popular is most valuable,” said L. Gordon Crovitz, then the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated, killing its crew of seven, the Google algorithm allowed the story to rank low and thus disappear from Google News. “Their presentation of news devalues brands. Unlike traditional journalism, it does not communicate to readers the level of authority or authenticity of information.” Over time, he said, Google would blur an understanding of which journalism was most reliable, making news more of an undifferentiated commodity. But the wails from newspapers and publishers were fairly muted throughout 2002 and 2003. The anxiety Mel Karmazin felt after his 2003 visit had not yet gripped the old media.
Nor was Google focused on extinguishing external fires: it had its own internal flare-ups to douse. The founders continued to be uncomfortable with Eric Schmidt’s efforts to impose streamlined management, fearful it would squelch Google’s entrepreneurial spirit. Google was a company rocketing to financial success on the brilliance of its founders and engineers, yet hobbled by them as well. “Larry and Sergey didn’t like management,” Schmidt said, and they let the new managers know this. They were, he said, “unduly harsh.”
In early 2003, Google had four product managers: Salar Kamangar, Marissa Mayer, George Harik, and Susan Wojcicki. To oversee them as senior vice president, product management, Schmidt recruited Jonathan Rosenberg, who had been a senior manager at Apple and other tech companies. Page and Brin were restive with still more managers being added, and Schmidt was caught in the middle. A series of summit meetings was held, with no resolution. Schmidt was not then convinced that relying on four product managers was the best approach. But, he said, “at the time, Larry was having a relationship with Marissa. It was a very complicated set of issues. Eventually, Marissa announced that we should rank all our projects. A great idea. Unfortunately, the top one hundred on the list had three hundred things on it.” And then “there was this huge to-do because Larry doesn’t agree with the list, and the engineers are not working on what they’re claiming to be working on, and the management, which he doesn’t like anyway, is getting away-getting too bureaucratic.” Page asked everyone to prepare a list of exactly what he or she was working on and insisted on getting the reports directly, said Schmidt, in order “to completely avoid being filtered by all these management types, which includes me!”
This was round two of the founders’ unease with Schmidt. Page and Brin would whisper to other Google executives, said one recipient of these whispers, “What does Eric do?” This executive believes Page wanted to reclaim his CEO title. Sometime in the summer of 2002, Coach Campbell again intervened. With the fervent support of John Doerr, the coach set out to make the marriage work. Before 2003 was very old, the three men achieved harmony. Asked in 2008 to describe the most important milestones in Google’s success, Doerr does not cite the myriad deals with Yahoo, AOL, or revenue gushers like AdWords or AdSense. Instead, he said, “The biggest milestone was for Larry and Sergey and Eric to conclude they were going to work together. It did not happen overnight. They learned to adapt. Bill was very helpful in that, and I was too, in a less key way.”