‘Don’t be evil.’ Google’s unofficial motto.
‘Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do evil.” They say, “I’m going to make the world a better place.”’ Christopher Booker.
Meanwhile — while you were distracted by other things like tax bills and school fees and somehow scraping by — Google and Amazon and Apple took over the world. This, of course, is what novels by the likes of William Gibson, films such as Blade Runner and comic strips like Judge Dredd have been telling us for some time: that one day, the world will be ruled not by governments but by giant corporations. What I don’t think many of us realised — I certainly didn’t — was that such a thing was going to happen in our lifetime.
But then I watched Ben Lewis’s glacial but rewarding Storyville documentary Google and the World Brain (BBC4, Monday) and my eyes were opened. What Google has been trying to do — in all our best interests, apparently — is very, very scary. And the thing that’s so scary is precisely this: that Google cannot see — or claims to be unable to see — that it has been doing anything wrong.
Google’s plan went something like this: with the permission of the world’s greatest libraries — from Harvard and the Bodleian to the 11th-century Monastery of Montserrat in Spain — it would scan the pages of all the books ever written. These would then be made available for free access at all the world’s public libraries, thus treating all mankind to the gift of knowledge.
But there was at least one problem with this. Out of the ten million books Google has scanned so far, six million are still under copyright.
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