The Oracle of Google and Justice

Google will surprise you: It knows more about who you are than you yourself do.

“If you want to learn about yourself, ask Google.” Judging by the ever-growing mountains of data, it would seem that Google has been around for decades. But Google Inc. is only two decades old, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, under the name BackRub.

When Page talks about how Google is reconfiguring the future of humanity, he is not just providing a description of its advantages. What he is hoping for is to shape the course of evolution, in the Darwinian sense of the term.

In the 2018 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Sundar Pichai, the then-new CEO of Google, stated, “When I stepped into the role two years ago, one of the things that struck me was that the core mission of Google in some ways is a timeless mission. … We undertook this journey ‘to organize the world’s information,’ and if anything today people deal with more information than ever before. … The mission hasn’t changed, but we can do it radically better with AI.”

In 2002, Google added a strategy that was one of the keys to its wealth — to its status as an economic and technological empire. The strategy was that the location of an ad would not only be determined by bids, but also by the frequency or rate at which users clicked on the ad. Google wins every time a user clicks on something on their page. So the number of users makes earnings increase exponentially, which is what the googol number does —increases exponentially. (This is the number after which the company was named.)

To me, Google, the search engine par excellence, is “the oracle of the digital era.” In Ancient Greece, there were many oracles: Delphi, Olympus, Delos and others. Today, the world consults the “oracle” of Google, which certainly knows more about us than we ourselves do, and which is visited each second by millions of digital citizens, who can use the information they find there (which may be about me or you) for good or for ill. By just typing our names and clicking, we appear in Google’s index and we will immediately find webpages with results that may be related to us.

Now, 22 years after its birth, Google is totally integrated into our lives. Like the oracles of Ancient Greece, Google is the first option that we turn to for answers to our questions. If we are unsure about something, if we want to find out something about someone, if we want to find information about anything at all, like about COVID-19, we go to Google first. All of the information in the world is concentrated in this search engine. This includes our personal information.

As Foer Franklin wrote: “Silicon Valley’s biggest companies don’t merely crave monopoly as a matter of profit; its pundits and theorists don’t merely tolerate gigantism as a fact of economic life. In the great office parks south of San Francisco, monopoly is a spiritual yearning, a concept unabashedly embraced. Big tech considers the concentration of power in its companies—in the networks they control—an urgent social good, the precursor to global harmony, a necessary condition for undoing the alienation of humankind.”

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with 11 states, filed an anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., claiming that the company uses its market power to unfairly protect itself against potential rivals. The legal action is the largest suit in 20 years, preceded by the case against Microsoft Corp. in 1998 and against AT&T in 1974. The suit does not come as a surprise, especially since the European Union recently imposed a 7.5 billion euro fine on Google.

With the oracle being held to justice, it will surely design an algorithm to defend itself, though it may not be able to beat justice’s own algorithm: “give to each what they deserve.”