Google’s good deed can’t hide its US loyalties

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/06/google-app-interstitials-us-soft-power

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You know the problem: you’re on a train and suddenly realise you need some information that is available on the net. So you pull out your smartphone and type a web address into the search box. The server responds, the page you want begins to load and then suddenly there’s a big box obscuring the content. The box tells you that you’d be much better off downloading the company’s app. Inducements include the possibility that you might get a better rate by booking via the app than via the boring old website. Sometimes the “close” button that will enable you to get rid of this intrusion is obvious, but sometimes it’s hard to find on a small screen. In the meantime, the train has just gone into a tunnel and you’ve lost your internet connection.

Welcome to the world of “app-install interstitials”. They are, IMHO, a pain in the butt. On the scale of web annoyances, they rate just below pop-up ads and those display ads placed by companies that covertly monitor your browsing. But now it transpires that Google doesn’t like these interstitials either and has announced that henceforth it will be downgrading in its search results any mobile-oriented web pages that produce interstitials. “Our analysis shows,” the company says, “that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page.” Right on. “Starting today, we’ll be updating the mobile-friendly test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app-install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page.”

Stand by for howls of protest and headlines such as “Search giant abuses its power by clobbering apps”. Such contrived outrage should be taken with large pinches of salt. The truth is that most companies – and all big media companies – loathe and detest the open web. Why? Because they cannot control it. Web users, fickle creatures at the best of times, can go anywhere with the click of a mouse, which means that corporations cannot corral them into areas where their behaviour (and shopping habits) can be managed in an orderly fashion. This is why companies are addicted to apps, because they constitute little walled gardens that facilitate user “engagement” (ie control).

So three cheers for Google, then? Well, up to a point. The truth is that Google is not doing this out of the goodness of its corporate heart. Its commercial interest lies firmly in the continued existence of the open web that is the source of its colossal advertising–related revenues. A shift to an online world that is a giant honeycomb of hermetically sealed apps would seriously undermine that revenue stream, because its search engine can’t find out what goes on within.

Still, the fact that good deeds sometimes arise from dubious motives is no reason for not celebrating them when they do happen. So let us raise a glass to Google.

That does not mean that we should relax our vigilance about the company’s enduring power. The European commission’s investigation into whether it has abused its monopoly in search is still ongoing – and unresolved – for example. So too is the question of whether successful “right to be forgotten” requests/demands should be implemented on all Google search sites worldwide, rather than just on Google’s search sites within the European Union, as demanded by the French data-protection authority. This raises genuinely complicated – and perhaps intractable – problems of which the collision between the demands of the European data-protection authority and the first amendment to the US constitution is but one.

Google’s response to this is essentially that if it were obliged to respond to the demands of every single jurisdiction in the world then that would amount to comprehensive censorship of the web. Which sounds reasonable until one remembers that the company has been able to build a formidable automated system for globally censoring revenge porn – and, more significantly, for globally enforcing copyright law by taking down content that infringes the intellectual property of media conglomerates. And which country’s copyright laws are thus globally enforced by Google? Why, those of the US.

Google executives sometimes observe (in private) that the European commission’s baleful interest in its activities reflects thinly concealed anti-Americanism: Europeans are supposedly maddened by the fact that all the significant global internet companies are American. I’ve no idea if this is true or not. What is unarguable, though, is that no matter how loudly Google trumpets its “don’t be evil” corporate motto, the reality is that the company is a manifestation of the “soft power” of the US. The internet may be borderless but, in the end, compliance begins at home.