Five Problems with Google’s Expanding Reach
This morning, within an hour of my first cup of coffee, I heard an ad for Google’s telephone services, and read news of Google’s foray into health care data processing and its plans to enter the banking sector. I listened to the news on my Android phone, and not one to buck a trend I Googled “Google” to see what other news there was about the tech giant. (Fitbit…Stadia …Quantum Supremacy.) All this before I checked my email, some of which will come to me through Gmail, and looked at my schedule for the day, courtesy of Google calendar. You get the point: Google is everywhere, and it is on its way to doing just about everything.
Shouldn’t we be concerned about a company that is so all encompassing? It’s not that I think Google is an evil company or that it is bent on a dystopian project of world domination. Perhaps I’m naïve, but from what I can tell, those who run the various branches of Google and its parent company Alphabet—which is, really, just Google under a different set of, um, letters—are well intentioned, idealistic people who believe they are part of an unprecedented force for good. They have some good arguments on their side: their products have made so many important things so much easier for so many people, at a cost to the consumer of approximately zero dollars. Google appears to be the leader of the pack in artificial intelligence, which will likely lead to incredible developments in medicine, education, communication, engineering, and, well, everything.
Yet I think we should be concerned, even if we grant that Google has done everything legally and in accordance with privacy regulations, and even though it might be the case that within any particular industry Google doesn’t constitute a monopoly. Here are 5 reasons for concern:
1. Too Big to Fail and Too Powerful to Counter
It was supposed to be a lesson from the Great Recession: when companies become too integral to the workings of the economy, the possibility of failure becomes remote, not just in the minds of the company executives but in actuality. If a single company becomes too essential, it can virtually be guaranteed that it will be propped up in case of major failure. Google will not be Lehmann Brothers. At the moment, it seems extremely unlikely that it will face that sort of disaster, but if a major series of mistakes threaten Google, the U.S. Government will almost certainly step in. This means that Google doesn’t face one of the biggest checks on private corporations—the possibility of failure. The worry here is not so much that this will lead to financial recklessness, though that too is possible. The worry is that it lacks a major check on ethical recklessness. Set aside the fact that its lobbying power is astonishing, and that Google executives or ex-employees wind up having a hand in crafting regulation. If Google violates our trust there will be little we can do. Consumers will find it difficult to escape their ecosystem, and even if there is a financial toll for ethical problems there is good reason to believe it will be protected. Its failure is our failure.
2. A Single Point of Vulnerability
There is a reason that nature encourages biological diversity, and it’s not just because of the Hapsburg jaw. It’s because a diverse system is much less likely to be wiped out by single threats. If our food chain, for example, lacked genetic diversity we risk starvation due to a single blight. (See the Great Famine of Ireland.) If our economic, social and personal lives are intertwined with a single company we face a similar threat. No doubt the bigger they are, the more robust their security and the more established their corporate firewalls. (I hope so, anyway.) But given their involvement in every sector of our lives, a major mistake at Google, or a single successful attack, could be utterly disastrous. Maybe this Titanic won’t sink, but will we bet everything on it?
3. Power over the People
Google might abide by privacy regulations, but the fact is that these regulations are largely crafted with a poor understanding of the value of privacy. The main danger of our information being held by a government or private corporation isn’t the possibility of leaks or hacking, it’s the power it gives others to shape our lives. Google knows this, and intuitively we do too; it’s what enables Google to give us the best search results and deliver excellent products. But that power is inextricably linked with the power to manipulate users, both individually and as a group. This power increases with the scope of Google’s data collection: it grows exponentially, one imagines, with knowledge of health records, for example. It’s not that Google will sell this information to your insurance company, or even that it will become your insurance company (though don’t bet against it) but that it can influence you and your environment in ways you can’t even comprehend in order to achieve its goals. This is made all the easier because as individuals who believe in their unassailable free will, we believe ourselves beyond such influence, even though hundreds of studies in social psychology and billions of dollars spent on advertising argue otherwise.
4. Dominance over Norms
We are subtly shaped by the technology we adopt. This occurs in obvious ways, such as the default margins and fonts in our word processing client, but it also occurs in more subtle ways, such as which emails make it to a priority inbox and which get relegated for later attention. Do we memorize phone numbers anymore? Carry cameras? Do my students talk to each other during the breaks in class, or are they looking at their phones? We know we are shaped by our devices and technological environment, but shouldn’t we worry about the fact that more and more our environment is shaped by a single corporation? This is one of the themes brought out in Brett Frishmann’s and Evan Selinger’s excellent book Re-engineering Humanity, and though the point is somewhat subtle, it’s extremely important: the ability to shape our technologies comes with the ability to shape our norms, and the shaping of those norms isn’t driven by an abiding concern for our own deepest values. It’s driven at least in part by profit and market share. When a company like Google becomes a Leviathon, we have to ask whether that is too much power for one company to wield.
5. Artificial Intelligence Supremacy
Though Google may not be a monopoly in any particular sector now, they are set up to be a monopoly in the future, with utter dominance what might be mankind’s most powerful invention: artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence thrives off of data and the more domains in which an AI trains the more powerful it will be. Alphabet and Google aren’t looking to dominate us in Starcraft and ancient Chinese board games. They are aiming at leading the way to general artificial intelligence, and the more domains in which they gain traction the more dominant they will be in that field. If we thought a telecommunication monopoly made Ma Bell too powerful, we had better open our eyes to the worries that will come with a single company dominating artificial intelligence. It’s not an exaggeration to say that dominance in AI could easily lead to dominance in any field, especially if a singularity-style intelligence ramp-up is a possibility. If there is such a thing as a company having too much power, that would surely be it.
These are just a few of the worries that come to mind as Google expands its reach. I don’t claim that Google should be broken up, or that we should block them from new markets. I’m not certain that the dominance of Google will be a bad thing. But I do think we need to give it some thought and recognize that old models of the dangers of the monopoly might not do justice to the rise of the tech giants. Things go badly in surprising ways, but the more centralized power becomes the more we have to lose in our next surprise.