Google’s Cold Betrayal of the Internet
Harry J. Bentham
IEET, 10 October 2014
Google Inc.’s 2013 book The New Digital Age, authored by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, was showered with praise by many, but attacked in a review by Julian Assange for the New York Times, where it is described as a “love song” from Google to the US state. Also addressed in Assange’s subsequent book When Google Met WikiLeaks, Google’s book makes an unconvincing effort to depict the internet as a double-edged sword, both empowering (p. 6) and threatening our lives (p. 7).
The popular internet, Google argues, might help defeat the US’s “authoritarian” opponents, but also threatens to aid “terrorism” (p. 9) (Google’s word for cypherpunks and anti-statists) against the US itself. Thus, Google argues, the internet is potentially disruptive and harmful to US national security priorities – as is the possibility of individuals being personally empowered by technology. Google laments the “anarchy” being caused by the “agents of chaos”: generations of tech-savvy individuals armed with modern personal technologies (p. 46-47, 59, 207-208). Anonymous and other clans of hackers, we are told, “might as well be terrorists” (p. 151-182).
This is fairly consistent with the ideas of former President George W. Bush, who famously warned graduates at West Point that the gravest danger to the United States is “at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.” This point of view, alongside its knuckle-dragging obsession with defeating “rogue states” and “terrorists”, places Google’s apparent value-system unambiguously within the neoconservative ideological camp. The case for “guiding” the path of the internet (p. 11, 36-39), in particular, sounds equally shy and unsustainable as the authoritarian regimes (p. 6) Google claims to oppose.
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