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Google's Future In Washington
by Sarah Lai Stirland
Google's plan for an advertising-supported e-mail service has made the search-engine firm the latest whipping boy for watchdogs in the digital era. Without even having formally launched its Gmail service, Google has re-ignited the global debate about expectations of privacy online.
The service offers a gigabyte of e-mail storage for free on one condition: Users agree to have their personal mail on the service scanned for keywords so Google can then direct relevant advertisements based on those keywords. Global protests erupted after the service was announced April 1, and within five days, 31 privacy advocates had issued an open letter asking Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to suspend the test phase of Gmail. By April 12, California state Sen. Liz Figueroa had announced plans for legislation to ban such services.
But privacy likely will be just one of many policy debates that Google's services will provoke. Although Google cannot discuss its policy agenda during its mandatory quiet period before its initial public offering (IPO) of stock, the company previously has addressed issues such as online freedom of speech, intellectual property, and media and telecommunications policy -- all issues that will be central to both its business and to policy debates in the digital era.
"As long as they're the leading search engine, they're going to be a central player, and they should expect to be the center of focus," said David Hart, an associate professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Keeping A Low Lobbying Profile
Andrew McLaughlin is Google's chief policy officer, and his friends said the company could not have chosen a better person to handle what is sure to become a controversial role.
Jonathan Zittrain, a faculty co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, compared McLaughlin's current job to his 1999-2002 stint as vice president and chief policy officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the Internet-addressing system. "It's keeping Google out of trouble and letting the engineers do what they do best, and that was what the job at ICANN was essentially," Zittrain said.
Google has maintained a relatively low profile in Washington. The extent of its lobbying appears to consist of McLaughlin participating in various panel discussions and working with players such as NetChoice, a coalition of trade associations. Google also has been involved with e-commerce businesses, online consumers and the Center for Democracy and Technology on issues related to "spyware" that secretly tracks consumers' computer habits. And the company hired Public Policy Partners to lobby for the firm.
On the telecom front, McLaughlin made a cameo appearance at a March 26 Capitol Hill briefing on the future of an "open" Internet. Mark Cooper, the research director for the Consumer Federation of America and a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, organized the event, and the panelists discussed the basic concepts of what constitutes an open, nondiscriminatory, high-speed Internet environment.
As Congress begins to reconsider the parameters of 1996 Telecommunications Act, Cooper predicted that Google will be part of a broad class of online companies that will be lobbying against telecom and cable firms, the traditional owners of communications wires.
"If you think about the '96 act, it was a debate between the broadcasters, cable operators, local and long-distance phone companies," he said. "If you think about the next act, it's going to be the High-Tech Broadband Coalition and companies that make applications, companies like Google and Microsoft. You have all the people who actually use the Internet against those who own the wires. This time, we're playing with the Internet guys on our side, and that's why they're an interesting company."
The Policy Pitfalls Of Online Power
Google also is inspiring talk about its role in the media sector. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference last month, panelists noted various ways that Google acts as a gateway to information on the Web and its limitations in that role. They chose Google, they said, because it is currently the market leader and thus a proxy for the world of search engines.
Marcel Machill, a media professor at the University of Leipzig, cited results of a Bertelsmann Foundation study on the role search engines play in German society that said many Germans do not fully understand how search engines might limit access to all available information. The study also found that typos in Google sometimes result in links to pornographic sites. He wondered if search engines like Google could change how they rank results to address such concerns.
"All these questions," he said, "reflect classical questions of media policy and media regulation: market concentration, media power, the protection of minors, the separation of advertising from content and media literacy."
Matthew Hindman, a politics doctoral candidate at Princeton University, also discussed the results of his research, which found that search-engine results are limited by the structure of hyperlinks to information on the Web. Because the results of many top search engines are similar, he said, access to much relevant information is effectively blocked. The name of his paper was "Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily Linked Sites Dominate Politics Online."
Google also has garnered attention for its policies governing both the inclusion and exclusion of sites within the search engine. Letter writers often ask the firm either to remove links to sites that they deem as hateful or that allegedly infringe upon intellectual property rights. So far, Google has tried to address such concerns individually.
Google has received some praise for its search policies. Jennifer Urban, a fellow and lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, said Google has helped the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a project aimed at preserving online free speech, track usage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The law requires copyright owners to notify Internet firms like Google of alleged violations on their servers. Google forwards all of the DMCA-related letters it receives to the clearinghouse, and if content ultimately is removed because of the alleged copyright violations, then Google links to the "takedown notice" at the clearinghouse.
Money Talks -- And Everyone Listens
The bigger question for Google is whether it can maintain a low profile within Washington as it grows and more people rely on the company's services. Lobbyists compare Google to companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Microsoft that grew quickly and, by the sheer size of the customer base, realized that they needed advocates to explain their positions on key issues. They expect Google to slowly expand its public policy presence.
The danger at this stage, one lobbyist said, is that once companies complete their IPOs, expectations run high, and lobbying without the requisite follow-through in time and commitment could alienate potential allies in the policy community.
The Consumer Federation of America's Cooper said Silicon Valley companies like Google typically are not joiners. But he added that as a public-interest advocate, he would be happy to help the company get politically organized. "They're like cats; it's hard to organize these guys," he said. "On the other hand, they're great to have on your side because with the IPO, everyone's going to listen."
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