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Frank Pasquale

Congress Investigates Google-Yahoo Deal

Tomorrow I’ll be testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Task Force on Competition Policy and Antitrust Laws (apparently it will be broadcast here) on the Google-Yahoo Deal. The Senate is also holding hearings. I’m happy to see this level of Congressional scrutiny because, as On the Media asked last week, what happens if a “single company becomes the gateway to the Internet?” Consider this exchange between Bob Garfield and Drake Bennett:

BENNETT: [T]here have been a couple of cases, lawsuits against Google, where companies have accused Google, Inc. of basically blackballing them. . . . what Google said was – that’s none of your business. I mean, we get to decide how we rank information, and this is basically free speech.

GARFIELD: It makes some people think of the railroads, which were owned by private companies but which nonetheless, because they were essential monopolies and because they so influenced the public economy, [were extensively regulated].

I think Garfield meant to say “essential facilities” . . . but in any case, the point is well-taken. My testimony will extend that railroad analogy a bit. . . but there are also many traditional antitrust concerns with the deal.Read More »Congress Investigates Google-Yahoo Deal

So What’s the Google End-Game?

Nicholas Carr is one of the leading commentators on internet culture, and his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” will influence discussion of its effects for a long time. Here’s one conclusion from the piece:

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people –or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” . . .

[T]heir easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The Google goals may seem a bit overambitious given AI’s failure to master the emotional dimensions of speech recognition and production. Nevertheless, the merger of man and machine remains a tempting trope for new economy superstars, primarily because the very idea of “superhuman intelligence” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Read More »So What’s the Google End-Game?