It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Google. It’s been criticized by Free Press and others for sidling up to Verizon to create a framework for Network Neutrality discussions. It’s been vilified by Consumer Watchdog, an organization supported by parties unknown, which showed a video on the Times Square Jumbotron that imputes that Google is a child molester. The context is conditioned by the false framing of Network Neutrality as a battle between Google and the big Internet access providers, when, in fact, it’s users of the Internet versus the big Internet access providers. The logic is that if Google loses its public esteem, its support for Network Neutrality is also disempowered. Meanwhile, Cass Sunstein’s 2008 paper on “cognitive infiltration” has suddenly become the topic of hot news again this week on the left and the right.
But here’s some potentially bigger bad news for Google:
Google’s technological lead over Baidu has eroded, [Google's] former China head has said, highlighting the increasing challenges western internet companies face in the world’s most populous internet market. In an interview with the Financial Times, Kai-fu Lee said western internet companies had no chance in China unless they build a more nimble and flexible local presence and retain a strong technological edge.
Mr. Lee, who was Mister Google China until a year ago when he visibly quit, may have lots of motives (besides communicating facts) to say this. But he’s also in a strong position to see how China’s Internet businesses are developing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Kai-fu Lee’s observation has some basis in fact. We know that China graduates more engineers that speak fluent English per year than the U.S. does. We also know that the U.S. is losing its Internet leadership. For the former, see Waiting For Superman, the movie. For the latter, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have been telling the U.S. Government to trust the marketplace (they used to call it the competitive marketplace) since before 1996.
Tim O’Reilly points out (in a letter to Dave Farber’s IP List),
“Google has lots of data about us, but so do our credit card companies, our phone companies, our insurance companies, various companies explicitly set up to mine consumer data for advertisers.”
Google isn’t the enemy here, but some parties sure seem to want it to be. I wonder what these parties would think if “Baidu” became the English synonym for “search?”
[See bottom of this article for disclosures of my potential influencing interests.]
Technorati Tags: Astroturf, AT&T, China, Comcast, EricSchmidt, fiberoptics, Framing, Google, USLosingLead, Verizon
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