Auletta - Googled : the end of the world as we know it

Table of Contents

ALSO BY KEN AULETTA

Media Man: Ted Turners Improbable Empire
Backstory: Inside the Business of News
World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies
The Higbwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway
Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way
Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman
The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger
The Underclass
Hard Feelings
The Streets Were Paved with Gold

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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Ken Auletta, 2009

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Auletta, Ken.
Googled : the end of the world as we know it / Ken Auletta.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-15140-2

1. Google (Firm) 2. Internet industryUnited States. 3. Web search enginesUnited
StatesHistory. 4. Internet searching. I. Title.
HD9696.8.U64G6623 2008
338.76102304dc22 2009024770

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For Kate and Mike

PREFACE

T he world has been Googled. We dont search for information, we Google it. Type a question in the Google search box, as do more than 70 percent of all searchers worldwide, and in about a half second answers appear. Want to find an episode of Charlie Rose you missed, or a funny video made by some guy of his three-year-old daughters brilliant ninety-second synopsis of Star Wars: Episode IV ? Googles YouTube, with ninety million unique visitors in March 2009two-thirds of all Web video traffichas it. Want to place an online ad? Googles DoubleClick is the foremost digital advertising services company. Googles advertising revenuesmore than twenty billion dollars a yearaccount for 40 percent of all the advertising dollars spent online. In turn, Google pumps ad dollars into tens of thousands of Web sites, bringing both traffic and commerce to them. Want to read a newspaper or magazine story from anywhere in the world? Google News aggregates twenty-five thousand news sites daily. Looking for an out-of-print book or a scholarly journal? Google is seeking to make almost every book ever published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for free. The Internet, said Googles chief economist, Hal Varian, makes information available. Google makes information accessible.

Googles uncorporate sloganDont be evilappeals to Americans who embrace underdogs like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Googles is one of the worlds most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional media companiesfrom newspapers and magazines to book publishers, television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone companies, and Microsoftno company inspires more awe, or more fear.

There are sound reasons for traditional media to fear Google. Today, Googles software initiatives encroach on every media industry, from telephone to television to advertising to newspapers to magazines to book publishers to Hollywood studios to digital companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, or eBay. For companies built on owning and selling or distributing that information, Google can be perceived as the new Evil Empire.

Google is run by engineers, and engineers are people who ask why: Why must we do things the way theyve always been done? Why shouldnt all the books ever published be digitized? Why shouldnt we be able to read any newspaper or magazine online? Why cant we watch television for free on our computers? Why cant we make copies of our music or DVDs and share them with friends? Why cant advertising be targeted and sold without paying fat fees to the media middleman? Why cant we make phone calls more cheaply? Googles leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers. They are scientists, always seeking new answers. They seek a construct, a formula, an algorithm that both graphs and predicts behavior. They naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data. Of course, Wall Streets faith in such mathematical models for derivatives helped cripple the American economy.

Naivete and passion make a potent mix; combine the two with power and you have an extraordinary force, one that can effect great change for good or for ill. Google fervently believes it has a mission. Our goal is to change the world, Googles CEO, Eric Schmidt, told me. Making money, he continued, is a technology to pay for it.

I came away from two and a half years of reporting on Google believing that its leaders genuinely want to make the world a better place. But they are in business to make money. Making money is not a dirty goal; nor is it a philanthropic activity. Any company with Googles power needs to be scrutinized. I also came away impatient with companies that spend too much time whining about Google and too little time devising an offense. Most old media companies were inexcusably slow to wake to the digital disruption.

In 2007, Eric Schmidt told me that one day Google could become a hundred-billion-dollar media companymore than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, or News Corporation, the worlds three largest media conglomerates. That Google might achieve this goal in less than a generation, in a time when copyright and privacy practices are being upended, when newspapers are declaring bankruptcy and in-depth journalism is endangered, when the profit margins of book publishers are squeezed along with their commitment to serious authors, when broadcast television networks dilute their programming with less expensive reality shows and unscripted fare, when cable news networks talk more than they listen, when the definitions of community and privacy are being redefined, and the way citizens read and process information is being altered, and when most traditional media models are being reconfigured by digital companies like Googleall this means that its important to put Google under the microscope.