When was Google’s heel turn?

Previously: how Google can go legit

Somehow, the Old Google, which was respectable, has turned into New Google, which, well, not so much. But when did it happen? Can we assign a date to Google’s heel turn? It’s not going to be any of the current “AI” or “Epstein Ballroom” political stuff, it happened before that. Going whole hog for weird right-wing politics is the kind of thing an organization does when they have already crossed over.

I think we can narrow it down to some time before the Epstein Ballroom bribe and after Cory Doctorow’s “What if Google Were Evil?” That was saleable speculative fiction back in 2007, so the consensus date is going to be some time after that.

August 22, 2019: Launch of “Privacy Sandbox” project, to hard-code an anticompetitive advertising system into the web browser. (This project is still not over—control of ad measurement is too tempting of a target for Google to give up on.) I don’t think this is a good date to pick for the heel turn, though. It’s more of a symptom. The perpetrators of anticompetitive schemes were so thoroughly influential within the company that they could substitute their own project for something like web browser privacy.

February 5, 2019: The Men Who Killed Google Search do a “Code Yellow” update, which increased searches (and ad impressions) at the expense of search quality. This is a good story, especially since it shows the relevance of the old Brin and Page warning, “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” But something must have happened before this in order to give an ad revenue maximizer such influence over search quality.

November 25, 2019: Google retaliates against four organizers of the 2018 Google walkouts. This was an attention-getting event, but not a good date to assign for the heel turn. The harassment/crime faction ICYMI: The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment by Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell at Google was already dominant enough to provoke the walkout in the first place.

March 22, 2018: Google requires web publishers to hand over their reader data under the cover of changes in ad policies to comply with GDPR. Robin Berjon explains, in Notes on Google’s Commitments to the CMA. In one of the most ambitious crossover events in history, four publisher trade bodies representing several thousand publishers across two continents, including many of the biggest, wrote a letter requesting that this change. That the terms stuck should give you an idea of what asymmetric market power looks like.

August 15, 2015: Sundar Pichai, trained as a McKinsey consultant, becomes CEO.

October 13, 2013: The flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus doesn’t get an Android 4.4 update. I had food in my fridge when I bought this phone that was still good when they announced they would stop updating it. Yes, another event that’s more symptom than turning point. But this marks the old Google/new Google divide for me personally. Maybe there’s no one big heel turn, more of a series of rugpulls.

March 13, 2013: End of Google Reader. A fan favorite, and might be a good date for the beginning of the techlash in general. Google Reader wasn’t the Facebook-ish addictive feed that Google Plus was trying to make at the time, but did have a lot of power users who were journalists or lawyers. (Goomics 340)

May 18, 2012: Facebook IPO. Facebook (now Meta) and Google have been consistently bad influences on each other. Facebook’s Google envy means over-focusing on automation while failing to build up a hard-to-replicate team of skilled human moderators—the hard part about running a social site. Google’s Facebook envy means an over-focus on internal social/reputation graphs—not just under-emphasizing the company’s core competencies on analyzing and searching trustworthy content, but actively rewarding web sites for making themselves less useful.

March 17: 2011: Final judgment enforcing the settlement in High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation. It’s hard to tell when Google’s collusion against employees started, but this is a promising set of events for spotting the original heel turn. (TODO: Possibly replace this date with the date of the first documented agreement between Google and another employer)

September 1, 2008: Google Chrome announced. An open source release that is a strong contender for heel turn date. Like the switch from competing to colluding in hiring, shows Google de-emphasizing competing to offer a fair service on the server side and moving to try to control both client and server.

April 13, 2007: Google agrees to acquire DoubleClick Had to put this one on there, but really, why didn’t Old Google culture and priorities crowd out the adtech hustle, instead of the other way around?

Is it possible to get Old Google back?

You can never exactly roll back something like this, but IMHO it would be possible to get most of the constructive aspects of Old Google back with a careful split into client and server companies: how to break up Google

Bonus links

Google Academics Inc. from the Tech Transparency Project. Google has paid scholars millions to produce hundreds of papers supporting its policy interests, following in the footsteps of the oil and tobacco industries.