The blog got an email from one Observer editor at the end of last week, subject heading: 'this is obscure but is it important?' The mail contained Paul Boutin's Slate column about Google's new AutoLink function, a piece of software gadgetry that has got anti-Corporate antennae twitching all over the internet.
Is it important? Does anyone outside the geek beltway really care?
Takes extra-thick-rimmed glasses from blog dressing up drawer. Looks at the issue.
If you haven't come across Google Autolink - and there's no reason why you should have done if you lead a healthy outdoor life - it is part of the Google toolbar, which is a new weapon in Google's arsenal of things that you use to navigate the net. You download it onto your browser, so Google becomes a pocket A-Z as you cruise around sites instead of a coffee table atlas that has to be consulted in a seperate window whenever you want to search for something.
And the scary, evil part? AutoLink scans pages for data that might yield a useful link - addresses, book titles, for example - and provides one (courtesy of Google of course) where there wasn't one before. This can interpreted variously. Either Google is making its awesome processing power available to you, the punter, in an innovative way; or Google is wantonly vandalising other people's content by plastering what are essentially advertisements all over sites without permission.
Yoz Grahame's blog is as good a place as any to get a flavour of the debate, which, frankly is a bit arcane for our tastes. We are more interested in the dance of death between Google's self-styled 'Do No Evil' brand and its corporate reponsibility, which, lest we forget, is primarily -and some would argue exclusively - to make money for shareholders.
Google first trod on soft-slippered geek toes when it decided to serve ads on Gmail messages. (Boutin has a summary of that scrap too.) The Gmail and AutoLink arguments come down to a single issue. If you offer a service for free on the internet you have a simple choice: make no money from it or generate revenue with sponsorship and advertising.
There follows from that another simple choice: if you make money through ads you can present them irrespective of the content alongside which they run, or you can try to tailor them to the content. So websites about cars can feature ads for, er...cars. Guess which option the commercially-minded go for.
The customisation offends people because it feels and looks like an invasion of privacy, especially when it appears on an email. (Although your service provider and your boss are scanning your emails in much the same way.) Ads generally offend people on the internet when they are crude and intrusive, which often they are because the people who sell advertising space need to demonstrate to the people who buy it that their product is being seen. Hence the cat-and-mouse game between people who serve ads and people who block them.
As usual, the internet turns out to be no different from the non-internet: if you want a free product, you have to depend on the generosity of individuals or the sponsorship of businesses. There's room on the internet for both. You opt in or out depending on your level of tolerance for commerce.
Google's AutoLink has to be activated by the user. You press a button, you get the links. So objections from the point of view of browsers are being made by the tech-literate on behalf of the tech-illiterate. It is the patrician assumption that while we, the cognoscenti, can disable and re-enable anything at the click of a mouse, they, the poor dumb Windows-dependent herd might not understand what is happening and be hoodwinked into a corporate trap to part with their money.
The objections from the point of view of the content provider - that Google is defacing your site - are stronger, and the argument that Google should provide code to deflect AutoLink is in interesting one. We're pretty sure that someone somewhere (probably outside of Google HQ) is working on just such a piece of code right now.
But either way the argument is really about a monopoly. Google is a commercial enterprise and it will naturally aspire to dominate the markets in which it operates. Of course it wants to be to internet searching what Windows is to operating systems. Sorry geeks, but the shareholders would very much like it if Google became the new Microsoft, and they own the company. Evil, huh?
