Marcelo Thompson

Awesomeness: Google in Search of a Value

MARCELO THOMPSON*

Google’s glove slap in the mainland reflects an ambiguity which is not atypical among Internet policies it normally champions. What has really prompted the Internet giant’s threat to move its search engine away from a regime it has, in the past, worked so closely with? It may have been an awakening to the importance of values it had arguably disregarded in agreeing to filter its search results. It may have been just business as usual, before its incapability to overtake Baidu in the Chinese market of general-purpose search.

Whatever the answer may be, we are left to try  to make sense of the evaluative cacophony in the air. Two things are clear, however, in the episode. On the one hand, an important and difficult political choice has been made and will be reflected by Google in the architecture of its technologies. On the other hand, such a choice will have far-reaching consequences for how the Internet will unfold. The way Google structures its engines tends, in effect, to determine how information flows through the net and around the globe. Google is vindicating its right to do so.

Though all this may seem obvious, one is left surprised when confronting Google’s policy-choosing posture with its traditional advocacy of evaluative restraint for other important actors on the Internet. Google has been indeed at the forefront of a movement for network neutrality – the idea that Internet Access Providers should not be allowed to discriminate packets of bits according to their source, content or destination. The natural though often unstated outcome of a principle of network neutrality is that, in the absence of choices being made at the network layer of the Internet, it is at the applications layer that such choices will be cast. Search engines are a fundamental part of the latter layer and it is extremely convenient for them to leave the burden of neutrality for the former while remaining unfettered to make their own decisions.

As political theorist Joseph Raz explains, neutrality is a doctrine of political restraint; of exclusion of ideals. It excludes action which is based on a distinction “between valid and invalid conceptions of the good”. Within such logic, neutral Internet Access Providers would be those that do not act upon their choices on the goodness of the things they route around, even when there may be valid, sound reasons for doing so. A principle of network neutrality circumvents the liberal logic by placing severe restraints on the possibilities of action of Internet Access Providers – and doing so with regard to the very core of their activities. Such is, understandably, a burden that no company sanely wants to embrace.

Though the year has started big with Google’s stance on China, it seems that Google’s advocacy of network neutrality is also undergoing a paradigmatic change. Google’s traditional Guide to “Net Neutrality”, which used to rank first whenever one googled the quoted term, can now only be found on the Internet Archive. In November last year, Google authored a joint blog post with Verizon calling for an open and user-centric Internet, with flexible rules and transparent practices on how traffic is managed. On Thursday last week, Google filed comments before the Federal Communications Commission on that agency’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making ensuing from the Comcast case. Google’s opening statement? A remark on their interest in the Internet being kept “awesome for everyone”. The word neutrality, however, made few and brief appearances in both the blog post and the 98-page comments – almost always in attribution to someone else. In its place, clear rules have been demanded.

In much of contemporary liberal political theory a principle of neutrality has been abandoned. It should not happen otherwise. Evaluative choices are always made and conceptions of the good will be pursued whenever practical decisions – decisions on how to act – are at stake. Values such as openness, user-centricity and, why not, awesomeness are as much part of technological discourses of our societies as they should be addressed in this regard through our political processes. One should watch as closely and as respectfully Hillary Clinton’s statement this week and the one which will ensue, by the Chinese government. Both sides are staking out the values that constitute the architecture of their different moral traditions – “hypergoods”, as Charles Taylor would call them.

Google’s ambiguous move is less helpful as a political affront than it is as a call for clarification of choices that governments and companies do make in pursuing their visions of the good. The year ahead, as it seems, will be marked more by discussions on which values will define the architecture of the Internet than on if they will.

*Marcelo Thompson teaches “Regulation of Cyberspace” at The University of Hong Kong