Krugman obliquely argues for the idea of Search Engines as a public utility
He does mention search in the closing paragraph but it's kind of a weird segue from Google Reader, which is the thing he's actually talking about.
The problem is that we depend on Google too much for shit that Google can easily yank out from under us. On the one hand, I suppose the logical conclusion of this discussion is "Google could take away search and Gmail and then where would we be?", but that's a pretty unproductive avenue to go down inasmuch as search and Gmail are the two things Google is absolutely least likely to cancel. The very proposition is that Google's not going to yank services that everyone uses, it's going to yank ones that not enough people use to justify the expense. Today it's Reader, a year from now it could be Google Docs or Google+ -- probably not, but those are more plausible examples than search.
Long-term, I think this moment could prove to be a major misstep for Google -- because they saw "expense" only in terms of the direct monetary cost of keeping Reader up and did not consider the potential negative impact on their reputation from taking it down. This, perhaps more than anything Google has ever done, is a reminder that relying on them for anything mission-critical is a bad fucking idea, and that Google users are not customers but products. Google underestimated the backlash here -- they figured they were canceling an unpopular program (how many people even know what RSS is?) and didn't think the nerdrage echo chamber would be this loud or that people in mainstream outlets like the New York Times would actually take notice.
There's every possibility that Google will fold RSS sync functionality into Google+. That could go a couple of ways -- it could mean this whole thing blows over and people decide to trust Google again, or it could lead to increased resentment that Google continues to try to cram Google+ down everybody's fucking throats whether we want it or not. I had to sign up for the fucking thing just to post videos on YouTube. I don't use it, I don't want it, and I resent it.
As for the "public utility" argument, that's an economist's way of looking at what an engineer would probably see as the open-source argument. It's not that we need government funds or regulation to protect us from software monopolies (though I'm not denying that we do, either); what we need is the opportunity to say "Fork you" when a software company does something that is not in its users' interests. (Major examples include the mass exodus from
XFree86 when its publishers changed the license to something nobody wanted, the more recent forking of
OpenOffice to
LibreOffice when Oracle decided the best way to treat its developers was with open hostility and contempt, and of course the proliferation of BSD and GNU/Linux OS's all but replacing UNIX System V.)
It is, of course, instructive to look at Google's record as an open-source donor. It's historically been the biggest financial supporter of Firefox, and it's made major open-source contributions in Android, Chrome the browser, and ChromeOS, not to mention its major sponsorship of legions of projects in Summer of Code and its free hosting on Google Code. All that's for the good. But it's also telling that its biggest services -- search, Analytics, Docs, etc. -- are all closed and proprietary. (And while Android is free, its branding is not -- anyone can use Android, but vendors can't use the Android brand or bundle the standard suite of Google apps without licensing and approval from Google.) I think it's fair to say that Google's support of open-source software is a razors-and-blades model -- it's happy to deploy its software far and wide, and even support imitators and competitors -- so long as it knows the vast majority of those users will continue to use Google for search, mail, comment section logins, and everything else on the Web.
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Topic: It's the economy, stupid! (Read 69351 times)