So what is it about Google?

A MEMBER of the NUJ asks: so what is it about Google? And the Freelance will try to give a short, personal answer.

The Google internet search engine states that its mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Once upon a time, it had another motto: "don't be evil."

So how does it do?

On the one hand, Google provides an astounding search tool. From day to day I use DuckDuckGo because it promises not to keep my personal information. It is reported to have suspended its partnership with the Russian yandex.ru. But for tricky fact-checking - "who in the World Bank said that and when?" - I turn to Google.

Google provides an astonishingly good machine-translation service.

It offers email without charging to sign up.

It offers probably the best online mapping service - and the associated StreetView that is increasingly coming to the rescue of local news operations needing to illustrate the street where the news happened. Maps and StreetView are a massive and copyrighted asset of Google. It currently permits newspapers and magazines to use Maps images but specifically prohibits the common practice of using StreetView screenshots.

On the other hand...

The first three of the free-at-the-point-of-use services just mentioned are all based on Google hoovering up copyright work without payment or permission. The company (whose parent is now called Alpha) uses this to train its machine-learning ("artificial intelligence") systems of which Google Translate was the first to achieve widespread public visibility.

The other machine-learning system, of course, is that which delivers advertisements to you alongside extracts of your work and other creators' work.

For Google is an advertising business. Together with Facebook (also rebranding itself, as "Meta") it forms a duopoly that controls almost the whole online advertising business in many countries including the UK. This fact is the subject of several lawsuits and inquiries around allegations of anti-competitive behaviour - see for example here.

And it is this fact about advertising that forms the biggest single threat to news reporting. The advertising model that sustained relatively independent newspapers for a century and a half has been all but destroyed. Things are particularly bad in local news.

Some would see this as what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter - a favourite of neoliberals - described as creative destruction. But that view is sustainable only to those who regard news as an entirely discretionary, substitutable good - if not a commodity. Demanding a viable news "industry" is not like demanding a viable curling-tong industry or a viable typewriter industry. Without independent news reporting there is no hope of democracy.

The EU and Australia have legislated to press Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for their use of copyright works. The EU has specified that journalists should get a fair share of revenues; Australia has not. Both Google and Facebook are resisting paying. Google in particular is determined to pay only to "partners" of its choosing under its Google News Showcase terms - and to avoid legally mandated payments. Its "News Initiative", which funds training for journalists, is part of its public relations campaign to avoid regulation.

There are more criticisms - we have for example only brushed against the privacy issues here - but these seem central to the issues around Google and journalism.

© Mike Holderness

• 8 November 2022 sub-edited, re-thought the concept of a "commodity", and clarified by adding the penultimate paragraph.