Summer is a good time to pick lazily at the archives. Here’s a post that originally appeared on Rough Type on October 12, 2006. Given last week’s news that the Federal Trade Commission has launched a formal anti-trust investigation of Google, it seems timely to repost it now.

Every era of computing has its defining antitrust case. In 1969, at the height of the mainframe age’s go-go years, the Justice Department filed its United States vs. IBM lawsuit, claiming that Big Blue had an unfair monopoly over the computer industry. At the time, IBM held a 70 percent share of the mainframe market (including services and software as well as machines).

In 1994, with the PC age in full flower, the Justice Department threatened Microsoft with an antitrust suit over the company’s practice of bundling products into its ubiquitous Windows operating system. Three years later, when Microsoft tightened the integration of its Internet Explorer browser into Windows, the government acted, filing its United States vs. Microsoft suit.

With Google this week taking over YouTube, it seems like an opportune time to look forward to the prospect – entirely speculative, of course – of what could be the defining antitrust case of the Internet era: United States vs. Google.

That may seem far-fetched at this point. In contrast to IBM and Microsoft, whose fierce competitiveness made them good villains, Google seems an unlikely monopolist. It’s a happy-face company, childlike even, which has gone out of its way to portray itself as the Good Witch to Microsoft’s Bad Witch, as the Silicon Valley Skywalker to the Redmond Vader. And yet, however pure its intentions, Google already has managed to seize a remarkable degree of control over the Internet. According to recent ComScore figures, it already holds a dominant 44 percent share of the web search market, more than its next two competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, combined, and its share rises to 50% if you include AOL searches, which are subcontracted to Google. An RBC Capital Markets analyst recently predicted that Google’s share will reach 70 percent. “The question, really,” he wrote, “comes down to, ‘How long could it take?'”

Google’s AdWords ad-serving system, tightly integrated with the search engine, is even more dominant. It accounts for 62 percent of the market for search-based ads. That gives the company substantial control over the money flows throughout the vast non-retailing sector of the commercial internet.

With the YouTube buy, Google seizes a commanding 43 percent share of the web’s crowded and burgeoning video market. In a recent interview, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley said that his business enjoys a “natural network effect” that should allow its share to continue to rise strongly. “We have the most content because we have the largest audience and that’s going to continue to drive each other,” he said. “Both sides, both the content coming in and and the audience we’re creating. And it’s very similar again to the eBay issue where they had an auction product that gained critical mass.”

Google has been less successful in building up its own content and services businesses, but it’s a fabulously profitable company, thanks to its AdWords money-printing machine, and it can easily afford to acquire other attractive content and services companies. It can also afford, following the lead of Microsoft in the formative years of the PC market, to launch a slew of products across many different categories and let them chip away at their respective markets – which is exactly what it’s been doing. Moreover, its dominance in ad-serving enables it to cut exclusive advertising and search deals with major sites like MySpace, expanding its influence over users and hamstringing the competition.

Google’s corporate pronouncements are carefully, and, by all accounts, sincerely, aimed at countering fears that it is building a competition- and innovation-squelching empire. But its actions often belie its rhetoric. Its founders said they had no interest in launching an internet portal, but then they launched an internet portal. They said they wanted customers to leap off Google’s property as quickly as possible, but then they began cranking out more and more applications and sites aimed at keeping customers on Google’s property as long as possible. The company’s heart may be in the right place, but its economic interests lie elsewhere. And public companies aren’t known for being led by their hearts.

Nothing’s written in stone, of course. Someone could come up with a new and more attractive method of navigating the web that would quickly undermine the foundation of Google’s entire business. But it’s useful to remember that the commercial internet, and particularly Web 2.0, is all about scale, and right now scale is very much on Google’s side. Should Google’s dominance and power continue to grow, it would inevitably have a chilling effect on innovation and hence competition, and the public would suffer. At that point, the big unasked question would start being asked: should companies be able to compete in both the search/ad business and the content/services business, or should competition in those businesses be kept separate? If there is ultimately a defining antitrust case in the internet era, it is that question that will likely be at its core.

Over at the Times site, Errol Morris has just posted the last installment of a five-part series about the role his late brother Noel played in the invention of e-mail. In addition to being a fascinating and valuable oral history of the time-sharing era of computing, it’s a moving memoir and a meditation on life’s refusal to be calculable:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

A new study provides evidence that heavy internet use by the young results in “brain structural alterations” of a kind associated with “impairment of cognitive control.” The study, published this month in PLoS ONE, was conducted in China, where approximately 14 percent of urban youths – some 24 million kids – are believed to suffer from so-called “internet addiction disorder.” Using brain scans, the researchers compared the brains of 18 adolescents who spend around eight to twelve hours a day online (playing games, mainly) with the brains of 18 adolescents who spend less than 2 hours a day online. The heavy Net users exhibited gray-matter “atrophy” as well as other “abnormalities,” and the changes appeared to grow more severe the longer the kids engaged in intensive Net use.

The whole subject of Internet addiction remains controversial among experts, but, according to a Scientific American article on the new research, the study “cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.” The Scientific American piece translates the key findings into layman’s terms:

One set of [MRI] images focused on gray matter at the brain’s wrinkled surface, or cortex, where processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory and other information occurs … The researchers discovered several small regions in online addicts’ brains shrunk, in some cases as much as 10 to 20 percent. The affected regions included the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, rostral anterior cingulate cortex, supplementary motor area and parts of the cerebellum.

What’s more, the longer the addiction’s duration, the more pronounced the tissue reduction. The study’s authors suggest this shrinkage could lead to negative effects, such as reduced inhibition of inappropriate behavior and diminished goal orientation …

As another crucial part of the new study on Internet addiction, the research team zeroed in on tissue deep in the brain called white matter, which links together its various regions. The scans showed increased white matter density in the right parahippocampal gyrus, a spot also tied to memory formation and retrieval. In another spot called the left posterior limb of the internal capsule, which is linked to cognitive and executive functions, white matter density dropped relative to the rest of the brain. [The researchers suggest that the white matter changes] may make it harder for Internet addicts to temporarily store and retrieve information … [and] could impair decision-making abilities—including those to trump the desire to stay online and return to the real world.

University College London neuroscientist Karl Friston tells Scientific American that while the shrinkage in gray matter is “quite extreme,” it’s “not surprising” when you take into account the plasticity of the adolescent brain: “Our brains grow wildly until our early teens, then we start pruning and toning areas to work more efficiently. So these areas may just be relevant to being a good online gamer, and were optimized for that.” But the study was a rigorous one, and the fact “that the results show anything significant at all is very telling,” Friston says. Further research will be required to confirm the study’s findings and to shed further light on behavioral and cognitive consequences of the changes.

It was shaping up to be a dreary Thursday until I stumbled upon this headline over at The Official Google Blog: “There’s a perfect ad for everyone.” I felt as if some benevolent god had hurled a spear of sunlight through the clouds and hit the bullseye of my heart dead-on. For close to a half century now, I have been searching for my perfect ad, and I have to confess that I had begun to despair that the object of my desire, the ad that would be the apple of my eye, simply didn’t exist in this world. A couple of nights ago, after perhaps one too many glasses of wine, I found myself tearfully saying to myself: I will never find my perfect ad.

I should not have underestimated Google and its kindhearted ad-serving algorithms. Now I know that somewhere deep in the Googleplex a flock of code-writing cupids is hard at work fashioning a promotional message that will dovetail perfectly with each and every one of my rational and emotional purchasing triggers. I need only be patient. My ad will come.

You can describe people in words, or you can describe them in numbers. Either system can be abused, but in general words tend to create bonds while numbers tend to create distance. (There’s a reason why parents give their babies names rather than numbers.) History, though, seems to tilt toward numbers, and the tilt is getting steeper as the potential profits get larger. Even the data miners are starting to get creeped out. In a thoughtful article over at O’Reilly Radar, Jim Stogdill, an IT consultant with expertise in large-scale data-management systems, poses a question to his colleagues:

Let me just ask this: If you are involved in data capture, analytics, or customer marketing in your company, would you be embarrassed to admit to your neighbor what about them you capture, store and analyze? Would you be willing to send them a zip file with all of it to let them see it? If the answer is “no,” why not? If I might hazard a guess at the answer, it would be because real relationships aren’t built on asymmetry, and you know that. But rather than eliminate that awkward source of asymmetry, you hide it …

I think what’s interesting is that you can’t help but get caught up in the moment. “If we could just join this stuff with that stuff, and then get this additional attribute, we could build a really sweet model. I’m sure that would get you some prospecting lift.” And then we all look at each other for a moment and go “wow, and that would be kinda creepy, too.” …

Ft. Meade in Maryland is that state’s single biggest consumer of electricity, and no small amount of it is being consumed by Hadoop (or similar) [data-mining computer] clusters that, as it turns out, are probably surveilling you. That is a troublesome thought, but only about half as troublesome to me as the even more thorough, broad, and pervasive corporate surveillance we are unleashing on ourselves. The only thing that keeps me sleeping is that the competitive dimension will slow the rate that these pools of data coalesce.

The time has come, says Stogdill, to think seriously about the ethics of what the geeks and the suits have come to call Big Data.

A day made of glass:

I’m reminded of an interesting passage in the book Glass: A World History:

As we have seen, one of the rapid developments in glass technology was the making of panes of window glass, plain and coloured, which was particularly noticeable in the northern half of Europe [after the twelfth century]. One very practical effect of this was on working conditions. In the cold and dark northern half of Europe people could now work for longer hours and with more precision because they were shielded from the elements. The light poured in, yet the cold was kept out. Prior to glass only thin slivers of horn or parchment were used and the window spaces were of necessity much smaller and the light admitted, dimmer.

It could also be argued that windows altered thought at a deeper level. The question here is the way in which glass, whether in a mirror, window, or through a lens, tends to concentrate and frame thought by bounding vision, and at the same time leads to abstraction and attention to the details of nature. It seems likely that the glass window altered the relations between humans and their world in ways which it is now difficult to recover.

This echoes an earlier observation by Lewis Mumford, in his book Technics and Civilization: “In losing color and ceasing to serve as a picture – the function it had occupied in medieval church decoration – and in letting in, instead, the forms and colors of the outside world, glass served also as a symbol of the double process of naturalization and abstraction which had begun to characterize the thought of Europe. More that that: it furthered this process. Glass helped put the world in a frame: it made it possible to see certain elements of reality more clearly; and it focussed attention on a sharply defined field – namely, that which was bounded by the frame.”

The windows that surround us, once clear, are increasingly filled with summoned images and symbols. We don’t look through them but into them. Naturalism fades; abstraction loses its backdrop of “the outside world.” The window turns back into a picture – a series of pictures, rapidly moving. The field blurs. The frame changes.

The paperback edition of The Shallows has just been published and should be in stores now. It includes a new afterword, which takes a look at the mounting backlash against the Net’s cultural hegemony. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young “Internet natives” and old “Internet immigrants.” Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics on Web use over the past two decades, you see that the average adult has spent more time online than the average kid. Parents are as besotted with their BlackBerrys as their children are with their Xboxes. And the idea that those who grow up peering at screens will somehow manage to avoid the cognitive toll exacted by multitasking and persistent interruptions is a fantasy contradicted by neuroscientific research. All of us, young and old alike, have similar neurons and synapses, and our brains are affected in similar ways by the media we use.

Net culture isn’t youth culture; it’s mainstream culture. And my guess is that if the incipient Net backlash expands into a broad movement, the people leading it will be not the nostalgic old but the idealistic young. It’s worth remembering that one of the original targets of the sixties counterculture was the then-new mainframe computer, which seemed to be reducing human beings to strings of numbers. Campus protesters didn’t just burn draft cards; they folded, spindled, and mutilated IBM punch cards. “Punch cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of uniformity,” historian Steven Lubar has written, and “they became the symbolic point of attack.”

Those times, and those attitudes, feel like ancient history now. As computers shrank, they became a lot less threatening. Eager for their assistance, we welcomed them into our homes and then into our pockets. But the young are still the enemies of uniformity, and the Internet, as it extends its reach into all the nooks and crannies of our days, is looking more and more like an enormous conduit of conventionality. What are Facebook and Google but giant institutions, arms of the new establishment? What are smartphones if not high-tech leashes? Today, online databases hold more information about us than could fit on a mile-high stack of punch cards. Some kind of rebellion seems in order.