Planet Google
Summary
Stross, a journalist and business school professor, examines Google's ambition to organise all information and the projects through which it pursued that, writing in 2008 when the company was about a decade old.
The book covers the search business and the advertising auction that funds everything else, the acquisition of YouTube and the copyright problems it inherited, Google Book Search and the publishers' and authors' litigation over scanning copyrighted works without permission, Google Earth and Street View and the privacy responses in several countries, Gmail and the initial reaction to advertising placed against message content, the data centre infrastructure the company built and treated as a competitive secret, and the recruitment and engineering culture.
Stross's analytical theme is the gap between the company's stated mission and what pursuing it required: that organising all information means acquiring, copying and indexing material other people own or consider private, and that Google consistently treated the objection as an obstacle to be managed rather than as a legitimate constraint.
He also examines the algorithmic principle, that decisions should be made by systems rather than by editorial judgement, and shows where it broke down, particularly in content moderation and in country-specific censorship compliance.
The book is from 2008 and is dated in every particular. Android, Chrome, the mobile transition, the antitrust cases and the artificial intelligence work are all absent or nascent. It is useful as a record of the company's early positions and of the objections raised at the time, several of which became the substance of later regulation.
Key takeaways 7
- Organising all information requires acquiring, copying and indexing material that other parties own or consider private, which is a conflict inherent in the mission rather than incidental.
- Google treated legal and privacy objections as obstacles to be managed rather than as constraints on what it would attempt.
- The advertising auction on search funds every other project, which means the company's entire structure depends on one revenue mechanism.
- Google built and operated its own data centre infrastructure at a cost advantage it treated as a competitive secret rather than buying capacity.
- The principle that decisions should be made algorithmically rather than editorially broke down wherever judgement was unavoidable, particularly in moderation and censorship compliance.
- Book scanning proceeded without permission on a fair use theory, which converted a product decision into years of litigation.
- Objections raised to Google's practices in 2008 became the substance of privacy and competition regulation in the following decade.
Who should read it
Readers wanting a record of Google's early positions and of the objections raised at the time, understood as a 2008 document.
About Randall E. Stross
Business historian and journalist, longtime professor at San Jose State University; wrote reported histories of Edison, Microsoft, Google and Y Combinator.
Each book reports one organisation from inside over a defined stretch of time: a year among Y Combinator's batch companies, Benchmark's partners through the dot-com IPO wave, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. The result records how venture firms and inventors actually spent their days, which reads as evidence rather than retrospective summary.
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