environmentally sound conditions, we satisfy our guilt and concerns by patronizing stores like Whole Foods and celebrating the wide availability of organic products. Thus food that keeps people healthy and the earth livable remains available only to the well informed and affluent.
Because market fundamentalism declares that consumers have “choice” in the market, doing little or no harm becomes just another tactic by which vendors exploit a niche market. Consumers have become depoliticized, unable to see that personal choices to buy Timberland shoes (not made in sweatshops by children) and Body Shop cosmetics (not tested on animals) make no difference at all to the children and animals that suffer supplying the bulk of similar, less sensitively manufactured products to the vast majority of the world’s consumers. Feeling good about our own choices is enough. And instead of organizing, lobbying, and campaigning for better rules and regulations to ensure safe toys and cars for people everywhere, we rely on expressions of disgruntlement as a weak proxy for real political action. Starting or joining a Facebook protest group suffices for many as political action.
Since the 1980s, firms in the United States and Western Europe have found it useful to represent themselves as socially responsible. As states have retreated from their roles as protectors of the commons and mitigators of market failures, firms have found that trumpeting certain policies and positions puts them at an advantage in competitive markets, especially for consumer goods and services.63
The problem, however, is that corporate responsibility is toothless. Corporations do—and should do—what is in the interests of their shareholders, and nothing more.64 We become aware of the voluntary benevolence of certain firms only when it is in their interest to make that benevolence known.
The principal reason why the idea of corporate responsibility appeals to us is that for thirty years, we have retreated from any sense of public responsibility—any willingness to talk about, identify, and pursue the public good. In the absence of the political will to employ state power to push all firms toward responsible behavior, the purported responsibility of one firm is quickly neutralized by the irresponsibility of the rest. Because we have failed at politics, we now rely on marketing to make our world better. That reliance is the height of collective civic irresponsibility. It’s a meaningless pose.
Google has taken advantage of both of these externalities. It has stepped into voids better filled by the public sector, which can forge consensus and protect long-term public interests instead of immediate commercial interests. The Google Books project, as I show in chapter 5, is the best example of this tendency. Google has used such undertakings to its advantage by generating a tremendous amount of goodwill and pushing a strong ethic of corporate responsibility. This in turn retards efforts to propose even mild and modest regulations on the firm to protect users’ privacy and ensure competition in the Web advertising world. After all, if you can’t trust Google to do something well and ethically, whom can you trust?65
WHO’S REGULATING WHOM?
The ways we talk about markets and regulation have become impoverished in recent decades. In June 2009, the radio journalist Brian Lehrer asked Eric Schmidt about the potential for the regulation of Google. “I use Google all day every day like a lot of people in this room,” Lehrer said to Schmidt after Schmidt had given a talk at the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival. “But is there ever a point at which Google becomes so big that it’s kind of scary and needs to be regulated as a public utility?” The room filled with laughter before Schmidt could respond. So Lehrer, a knowledgeable and experienced interviewer continued: “We kind of reached that with Microsoft in the ‘90s, some of the same discussions. When you’re aggregating all of the contents of books, when Google News is the place that people go for news content instead of the sites—New York Times and everything else that you are aggregating—and you know some in traditional media are upset with you for that.
Seriously, literally, is there a point where you need to be regulated as a public utility?”
“You’ll be surprised that my answer is no,” Schmidt responded. “Would you prefer to have the government running innovative companies or would you rather have the private sector running them? There are models and there are countries where in fact the government does try to do that, and I think the American model works better.”
Lehrer interjected: “But Eric, if I could jump in, I would expect a more sophisticated answer from you. As we saw with the banks, it’s not a question of Soviet-style communism or free-market capitalism. Banks needed smart regulation that they didn’t have—as I think you were just saying. Is it possible that information is in the same boat?”
Schmidt started again:
Well, again. My answer would be no. Perhaps I should expand on my answer: Google plays an important role in information. And the reason you are asking that question is because information is important to all of us. We run Google based on a set of values and principles. And we work very, very hard to make sure people know what they are.… Companies are defined by the values that they were founded with and that they operate with today. So if you are concerned about the need for regulation of Google’s role, part of my answer would be that—independent of my leadership and the founders’ leadership and so forth, the company’s formed in a certain way. A thing that you should be worried about is that a combination of special interests plus unintended regulation could in fact prevent the kind of consumer benefits that we push so hard to do. Part of the other pushback that I would offer is that the things that we do are available to others.… We haven’t largely prevented people from doing their own thing.66
Of course Google is regulated, and Schmidt knows it. Google spends millions of dollars every year ensuring it adheres to copyright, patent, antitrust, financial disclosure, and national security regulations. Google is promoting stronger regulations to keep the Internet “neutral,” so that Internet service providers such as telecommunication companies cannot extort payments to deliver particular content at a more profitable rate. But we have become so allergic to the notion of regulation that we assume brilliant companies just arise because of the boldness and vision of investors and the talents of inventors. We actually think there is such a thing as a free market, and that we can liberate private firms and people from government influence. We forget that every modern corporation—especially every Internet business—was built on or with public resources. And every party that does business conforms to obvious policy restrictions. But Schmidt, who understands the state of political rhetoric in the United States, knew how to tease laughter out of the audience, and he understood that positing “regulation” as a choice of oppression over freedom would resonate.
Schmidt also knew that his best rejoinder to concerns about Google’s enormous power was to remind people of Google’s internal code of ethical conduct: “Don’t be evil.” Oddly, Schmidt asserts, without evidence or explanation, that this ethic would survive at the company regardless of who ran it and how far into the future we might look. Like so much else about Google’s public image, this is a matter of faith. Last, Schmidt asserted that Google was careful to avoid locking in content or locking out competition through computer code or restrictive contracts: in other words, it does not behave like Microsoft. If market entry is open de jure, on paper, then that should satisfy doubters, Schmidt argued. It is easy to elide the fact that real competition in many of Google’s successful areas of business such as search and advertising is almost impossible to imagine.
So if we push past the idealistic rhetoric of Google’s officials, we can see that the proper question is whether Google—or the knowledge ecosystem in general—is appropriately regulated. In some areas, Google might be regulated too lightly. In others, it might be overly or improperly regulated. There is no general notion of regulation that can apply to such a complex company involved in so many different areas of life and commerce. Sadly, we seem incapable of holding a reasonable debate on this topic because raising the question seems
