Google's Destruction of the Internet and the Paucity of Public Imagination

Google is about to destroy the internet.

Yes, yes, I can hear you say: exaggeration, hyberbole, clickbait! And I am not above crafting lines for attention, but in this case, I think I am accurately describing Google’s result, even if it is not their intention. What is worse is that we as a society seem to be content to simply allow that destruction to happen. Not because nothing can be done, but because we lack the imagination to do otherwise.

Google is changing their search. They are heading toward a future where everything is an AI search box. They are already pushing AI autocomplete into its search bar, and heavily pushing AI search mode. It likely will not be long before that because the default, and possibly the only option. The fact that these changes are more likely to provide you with wrong answers and a lack of follow up is apparently not a concern.

It’s summary answer in normal mode may or may not be based on AI results, but they push the links that generated the information below the fold so to speak, pushing them below the part of the screen normally viewable in may cases. We have all seen the silly answers — Saturday has fish in its name, for example. While those are funny (and quickly corrected), they mask the real issue. By pushing people toward the summary answer, whether in AI mode or the standard format, they deny the creators of that information traffic. And without traffic, those creators lose the money they require to exist. Either they don’t get ads on their own site or they don’t get traffic necessary to support a subscription. Regardless, they die and the information and jobs they provide dies with them.

Google, of course, is intent on keeping people on their pages for as long as possible. They made search deliberately worse in order to keep people in Google, and viewing ads Google gets paid for. Number must go up, and this is merely the latest attempt to keep Wall Street happy. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Wall Street is run by people who cannot see past the next quarter. Obviously, driving people who provide real information and services off the internet is going to, eventually, make Google search useless. The information will become less and less reliable, especially if they try and use synthetic information to cover the gap. They could eventually try and create or incentivize people to create information for themselves. But a future where Google shows Google generated information is not necessarily a good future. We should be, as a society, much more alarmed about this than we appear.

Google used to be a simple phone book. Type in a search and its algorithm would direct you to pages that likely contained the information you were searching for. They attempted to present more reliable information first in the list. It was a revelation at the time — a way to catalog the insanity that was the internet. It provided a service that was essential for the growth of the internet, unlocking both the economic and cultural engine that the internet briefly became. Now, Google, using its monopoly position (and it is a monopoly, whether you believe it achieved that power through its own superiority or through other, more common methods) is about to effectively shut that service down. Letting that happen is a choice, however, one the government could un-choose.

We could, as a government, build a replacement Google. We could pay to build one ourselves. We could license another engine. We could do things to encourage use of non-Google search engines. We could ban engines that use AI from gathering government data. We could license Google’s algorithm for our own use. We could tax AI generated search results. Some of these may be terrible ideas. Some may be unworkable. The fact that no one is discussing this problem in terms of how the government should respond to it is the greatest threat. It demonstrates just how we have allowed the power of democracy, civil society, and the common good to atrophy.

When it became clear that electrification was required to fully integrate regions into the modern economy, the government electrified the country. When it became clear that modern economy required easy travel, it built the highway system (should it have built a passenger rail system? Sure, but at least it did something). When it became clear that scientific and cultural advancement was required to drive the economy, it built the largest, most effective university system in the world. Today, faced with a similar need to drive our economy and culture, no one even suggests that the government should do … anything.

This is the real danger of neo-liberalism. We have been told for more than a generation that the government cannot help, that exercising our collective will to shape the environment we live and work in is not possible. That doing so treads on the very foundations of the modern economy — profit, profit, profit. Something can only be done, we have been told, if it is done by or to the benefit of business. Google gutting the internet is the inevitable result of the doctrine of neo-liberalism.

We used to do things. We used to try and control our own destiny as a society. today, we have sold our souls to the company store to such an extent that we can see an economic and cultural disaster heading toward us and merely shrug. If a business won’t fix it, what, then, really, can anyone do? We have become spectators, mere consumers, rather than full citizens. If we want to crawl out of any one of our present disasters, we must remember that we are not mere purchasers. We are citizens first and foremost and the rules of our society are ours to shape.