Google emergence as a Tech Baron

Google is a success story that embodies tech capitalism gone wild.

Shoshana Zuboff illustrates that story magistrally in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

It started with the realization that small traces involuntary left by users on their computers was providing some knowledge of their intimate behavior. Google had this search engine scraping the whole World Wide Web and providing a free service to millions of users, and this service was invaluable for its users, but not providing revenue for the company that was doing it. Google realized that by collecting the search queries, as well as some other information such as cookies on all users, they acquired an intimate knowledge that nobody else had. That knowledge had an enormous commercial potential, because the advertising industry dream was to do targeting ads. If they knew what their users were thinking, they would consequently know the products they could likely be interested by, and purchase.

The advertisement industry relies on sophisticated psychological underpinning that predict behavior based on individual features. It was a dream come true for the advertisers to know on a very large scale who the people who would buy products were. That is what Google, for the first time, provided them.

Google did not stop to search. They offered a free, highly reliable, email service. Reading the correspondence of the users was even more precise than just looking at what they searched. The calendar provided with the email software allowed Google to know what people were doing.

Google mapped the world, not just figuratively, but for real. And they took photos of every single house in every single street in the world, got live traffic information, providing an innovative GPS service that helped anybody where to go.

Knowing both the search queries and the contents of the correspondence of a critical mass of users secured Google takeover of the advertisement industry. They achieved an unprecedented success and became a de facto monopoly.

Google got a solid position in the smartphone market by creating Android, that is installed on all smart phones that are not from Apple. Google was in position to add to their intimate knowledge of users the fact that now they knew who they were speaking with and what they were speaking about.

There was a thorny ethical problem though. Google was sneaking into individual's private data, looking at what they searched, what they wrote, what they did, where they were. That was done without the explicit consent of the users. Yes, some of what Google did was explicitly written in terms of service that they knew nobody would be reading. Apart from a handful of privacy nerds that refused to buy into it, and a handful of criminals who couldn't afford to share any information about their activities, everybody went on board. After all, most people had nothing to hide. Who cared about saveguarding privacy at a time where the digital world was offering wonderful new possibilities, for free?

No regulation was in place to protect individual rights to privacy, the rights to anonymity. Google made a deal with the American government after 9/11. They would share their data on individual with the government in order to track terrorist activity, and in exchange the government would protect Google's ability to acquire private information without any regulatory or statutatory limitations. What could go wrong with this?

Google didn't stop there. They started to seize human accumulated knowledge. They helped academics and libraries to digitize tons of printed materials, with the "Google Books" and "Google Scholar" services. What used to be public property suddenly became private property. But Google was generous, threw a lot of money into academic projects, and became very popular among the academic world. They owned it.

The protests against Google monopolistic appetite focused on a small subset of Google empire: the fact that their search engine was getting a privileged position, by default, on computers and smart phones. But that legal action did not address all other sectors where Google became a monopoly. Google domination would not suffer significantly, even if they are forced to become a search option among multiple other choices.