I cannot imagine the world without Google, or something like Google. It has for all practical purposes made dictionaries, inter alia, obsolete: if you are uncertain of a word, it's faster to Google it than to use the American Heritage dictionary which I have relied on for decades. But there is something about it that bothers me and it is symbolized by the fact that Google is a de facto verb.

In a comment I wrote that it reeks of the left and there is a reason for it. Google is in the process of scanning in all the books on earth: type in a phrase dredged from your memory and you may find it in a scanned book, delivered to you on your computer screen, by Google. Very handy indeed, and the blogger's best friend.

When Steve Jobs started the iTunes store he made agreements with the various holders of copyrights to sell their content by payment of royalties: there are occasional dust-ups when some network decides that iTunes can no longer carry their stuff, but the thing to note is that iTunes has made contractual arrangements with the copyright holders.

Google has done no such thing with the authors. They claim that it is impossible, legally intractable and anyway they're not really giving away copyrighted material for you cannot download the entire book, and can look only a few pages on either side of what you found.

Sounds very good, no?

No.

Google was predicated, as I recall, on an academic thesis for a business model which was intended to produce revenue by the numbers of page views. In other words, what's important is eyes on pages, and not what's on the page.

This means that the value of the content is all leveled, that is, even the ranting of a blogger is no more than say F. Scott Fitzgerald. That my various rumblings and discontents are as likely to be fetched up as serious prose by serious writers.

This means that the only thing that matters is the portal to information, and Google is determined to be that portal. Totalitarian societies have always known that; recall the Samizdat press in the USSR. Google is in direct competition to Microsoft, traditionally a seller of software products, and is making Microsoft look more and more like a dinosaur. (Is it just me but is Ballmer just a little, er, underwhelming? Bitchy, entitled and touchy. And sclerotic.) Google is serving up online applications for word processing and spreadsheets, which you don't have to pay for, but you do have to let them have access to you. They'll be used more and more as access becomes faster and more reliable.

Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-awareness, made an offer for Yahoo to get Yahoo's search engine, which I feel will be needed to keep Microsoft from eventual irrelevance. If Linux can provide a stable, and free, and stable (did I say that?) OS for connection to the internet, where everything is or will be, why Vista? Why Microsoft? They're not cool, which is Apple's sole survival characteristic. They're useful and will survive only as long as they are useful.

Access to people is what is important, more important than anything else. Madison Avenue knows that, political parties know that. To sell anything--product, ideology, whatever--you have to have access. The last person who was a voice in the wilderness that we remember was John the Baptist and his circumstances were special. Traditional media are still reeling, coming to terms with the fact that their access is not guaranteed by their very existence, finally knowing that a few keystrokes and a few trillion electrons can make the paper that they've relied on for centuries beside the point. Google knows that access is all. Google knows that access is more important than content, which MSM does not know.

Google is developing the Android smart phone paradigm, for more access to people. This is in direction competition to the iPhone, and I suspect that is the reason that Steve Jobs changed the pricing of the iPhone to be half what it was. This iPhone is subsidized, like all other cell phones, by the carrier; the first one had AT&T paying Apple revenue. I was at first delighted to find anything taking a chunk out of the wireless carriers, even the cultish Apple (and I am a cult member), but now I rather suspect that Jobs, perhaps the sharpest technocrat on earth, knows he's in direct competition to the upcoming Google juggernaut. As you know, I'm an Apple groupie, but in this case my rooting for Apple is more than its cool factor. It's because Jobs, a creator of content, understands that content is important. Google understands that access is important. All totalitarians understand that too.

I am not suggesting that Google is composed of totalitarians; far from it. I am suggesting that the unlimited access is the wet dream of the left--read Orwell. My life is immeasurably enriched by Google, and the culture of the search engine that they validated. But anything that wants to get as close to you as possible is worrying for it's not doing it out of love. Big Brother is not your friend.

I would have thought that this was all my right-wing paranoia but Google willingly censored itself for China, the biggest totalitarian society in the history of the world. Was it fear? Greed? Or professional courtesy?