Google had all potential to begin an excellent example of C2I (C squared I). The search engine was born by needs of a community: an efficient search engine. Two persons, Larry Page e Sergey Brin, studied a model and an application able to satisfied that requirement. In full agreement with C2I model, needs of C factors stimulated (and still stimulate nowadays) development of new innovation about searching information; the success of google and development of other kinds of search engine stimulate new innovations in searching application and more sophisticated needs in consumers and communities. In a perpetual and reciprocal stimulus:
“Google took a big step to unify its different categories of Internet search — for images, news, books, Web sites, local information, video — in one service.” (CNN)
Again in perfect compliance with C2I, Larry and Bin offer before a service with high added value and then they found a business model. In this way the business model was an instrument and not the scope (or it seemed). Working full time and earning a lot of money, they were able to improve both technological platform and software (see “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” -John Battelle)
What Google needs to become C2I? Opening! In actual structure there is a danger of technocracy. They own many information about our internet behaviours and this kind of knowledge is concentrate in few persons. It isn’t good. Thanks to sillydoggies I read an CNN article (Paranoia grows over Google’s power):
As people spend more time online and realize just how much information Google is collecting about their habits and interests, the fear develops that true or false revelations of the most personal, embarrassing or even intrusive kind are no more than a Web search away.
-> Consequence of it: Google possesses many information also about powerful persons. Could Google utilize it for his interest? How many dollars it could receive to reveal (or blackmail to hide) some significant information? Impossible? Read more in readwrite:
Google has also been inviting presidential candidates to the Google campus for interviews in front of Google employees.
This is not Google’s first foray into politics, of course. Shortly before the 2006 mid-term elections in America, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Google had filed paperwork to form a political action committee called NetPAC “to support candidates who promote an open and free Internet for our users.” They also hired to former Republican senators Dan Coats of Indiana and Connie Mack of Florida to work as lobbyists.
-> Power of Google “force” it to interact with political men. The problem is that Google not only interacts when it is “obligated”, but it stimulates this interaction. It organizes meetings in its campus; it institutes committee to supports candidates who promote an open and free Internet for our users and probably many other thinks we don’t know. All this only for our welfare? If it would has to choose between its profit and our welfare, it will decide always and forever for the second one?Mercurynews has the same doubt:
Google/YouTube will take another step into presidential politics, co-sponsoring a presidential debate. As Google positions itself as a virtual election headquarters for 2008, the question becomes whether one of America’s most successful companies can balance its professed civic aims with corporate profits.
There have been a few instances that have prompted calls for more transparency, including YouTube’s April decision to remove an unflattering video of Republican candidate John McCain. YouTube would only say at the time that it had been “mistakenly removed.”
-> YouTube belong to Google. The second paragraph remonstrate the border line is not so clear as we could think. Remove or not remove many video or information is not always so simple. In this undefined border line it could play a significant rule (never to one’s own profit?). Also because the motivation could be always the same: “mistakenly removed”.
In a C2I model we would have distribution of information to avoid power concentration in few subjects.
The problem is: C2I require a sustainable business model. Larry and Bin would be able to realize a sustainable business in a open structure? I think yes, thanks to a more equal model, sustainable in the long period and, perhaps, with the same or more benefits. In a next post I’ll explain which kind of business model could be in compliance with C2I.