This paper, which will appear in an anthology on Internet governance later this year, is my attempt to argue that it is not only technology which poses serious challenges, but rather the elusive and difficult concept of democracy. My impression was – and still is – that the latter term is too often used too easily and without enough attention paid to the fundamental contradictions and tensions that characterize this concept.

Instead of asking whether or not the Internet is a force of democratization, I wanted to show that this term, democratization, is complicated, puzzling, and full of conflict: a conundrum.

In a hearing on Wednesday, Lee confronted Eric Schmidt with accusations of tampering with results and the evidence the Senator presented was in fact very interesting because it raises the question of how to show or even prove that a highly complex algorithmic procedure “has been tampered with”. As you can see in this video, a scatter-plot from an “independent study” that compares the search ranking for three price comparison sites (Nextag, Pricegrabber, and Shopper) with Google Price Search using 650 shopping related queries. What we can see on the graph is that while there is considerable variation in ranking for the competitors (a site shows up first for one query and way down for another), Google’s site seems to consistently stick to place three. Lee makes this astounding difference the core of his argument and directly asks Schmidt: “These results are in fact the result of the same algorithm as the rankings for the other comparison sites?” The answer is interesting in itself as Schmidt argues that Google’s service is not a product comparison site but a “product site” and that the study basically compares apples to oranges (“they are different animals”). Lee then homes in on the “uncanny” statistical regularity and says “I don’t know whether you call this a separate algorithm or whether you’re reverse engineered a single algorithm, but either way, you’ve cooked it!” to which Schmidt replies “I can assure you that we haven’t cooked anything.”

According to this LA Times article, Schmidt’s testimony did not satisfy the senators and there’s open talk about bias and conflict of interest. I would like to add to add three things here:

1) The debate shows a real mismatch between 20th century concepts of both bias and technology and the 21st century challenge to both of these question that comes in the form of Google. For the senator, bias is something very blatant and obvious, a malicious individual going to the server room at night, tempering with the machinery, transforming the pure technological objectivity into travesty by inserting a line of code that puts Google to third place most of the time. The problem with this view is of course that it makes a clear and strong distinction between a “biased” and an “unbiased” algorithm and clearly misses the point that every ranking procedure implies a bias. If Schmidt says “We haven’t cooked anything!”, who has written the algorithm? If it comes to an audit of Google’s code, I am certain that no “smoking gun” in the form of a primitive and obvious “manipulation” will be found. If Google wants to favor its own services, there are much more subtle and efficient ways to do so – the company does have the best SEO team one could possibly imagine after all. There is simply no need to “cook” anything if you are the one who specifies the features of the algorithm.

2) The research method applied in the mentioned study however is really quite interesting and I am curious to see how far the Senate committee will be able to take the argument. The statistical regularity shown is certainly astounding and if the hearings attain a deeper level of technological expertise, Google may be forced to detail a significant portion of its ranking procedures to show how something like this can happen. It would, of course, be extremely simple to break the pattern by introducing some random element that does not affect the average rank but adds variation. That’s also the reason why I think that Lee’s argument will ultimately fizzle.

3) The core of the problem, I would argue, is not so much the question of manipulation but the fact that by branching into more and more commercial areas, Google finds itself in a market configuration where conflicts of interest are popping up everywhere they turn. As both a search business and an actor on many of the markets that are, at least in part, ordered by the visibility layering in search results, there is a fundamental and structural problem that cannot be solved by any kind of imagined technical neutrality. Even if there is no “in house SEO” going on, the mere fact that Google search prominently links to other company services could already be seen as problematic. In a sense, Senator Lee’s argument actually creates a potentially useful “way out”: if there is no evil line of code written in the dark of night, no “smoking gun”, then everything is fine. The systematic conflict of interest persists however, and I do not believe that more subtle forms of bias towards Google services could be proven or even be seriously debated in a court of law. This level of technicality, I would argue, is no longer (fully) in reach for this kind of causal demonstration. Not so much because of the complexity of the algorithms, but rather because the “state” of the machine includes the full structure of the dataset it is working on, which means the full index in this case. To understand what Google’s algorithms actually do, looking at these algorithms without the data is no longer enough. And the data is big. Very big.

As you can see, I am quite pessimistic about the possibility to bring the kind of argumentation presented by Senator Lee to a real conclusion. If the case against Microsoft is an indicator, I would argue that this pessimism is warranted.

I do believe that we need to concentrate much more on the principal conflicts of interest rather than actual cases of abuse that may be simply too difficult to prove. The fundamental question is really how far a search company that controls such a large portion of the global market should be allowed to be active in other markets. And, really, should a single company control the search market in the first place? Limiting the very potential for abuse is, in my view, the road that legislators and regulators should take, rather than picking a fight over technological issues that they simply cannot win in the long run.

EDIT: Google has compiled its own Guide to the Hearing. Interesting.

Data protection and privacy are long-standing concerns of the heise editors and true to a spirit of society-oriented design, they have introduced a concept as well as a technical implementation of a two-step “like” button. Such buttons, by Facebook or other companies, have of course become a major vector of user-tracking on the Web. By using an iframe, every button loads some code from Facebook’s server and sends the referring url (e.g. http://nytimes.com/articlename/blabla) as an information. The iframe being hosted on the facebook.com domain, cross-site privacy protections can be circumvented, the url information connected to an identifier cookie and, consequently, to a user account. Plugins like the Priv3 project block these mechanisms but a) users have to have a heightened level of awareness to even consider installing something like this and b) the plugin interferes with convenient functions like Google search preferences.

Heise’s suggestion, which they already implemented on their own sites, is simple: websites can download a small bit of code that implements a two-step procedure: the “like” button is greyed out after the page first loads and there is no tracking happening. A first click on the button loads the “real” Facebook code, and the second click provides the usual functionality. The solution is very simple to implement and really a very minor inconvenience. Independently from the debate whether “like” buttons and such add any real value to the Web, this example shows that “social” features like these can be designed in a way that does not necessarily lead to pervasive user tracking.

The echo to this initiative has been very strong (check the Slashdot discussion here), especially in Germany, where privacy (or rather Datenschutz, a concept less centered on the individual but rather on the role of data in society) is an intensely debated issue, due to obvious historical reasons. Facebook apparently threatened to blacklist heise.de at a point, but has since then backpedaled. After all, c’t magazin prints around 600.000 issues of every number and is extremely influential in the German (and Dutch!) computer landscape. I am very curious to see how this story unfolds, because let’s be clear: Facebook’s earning potential is closely tied to its capacity to capture, enrich, and analyze user data.

This initiative – and the Heise ethos in general – underscores that a “respectable” and sober engineering culture does not exclude an explicit normative stance on social and political issues. And is shows that this stance can be translated into technical models, implemented, and shared, both as an idea and as code.

Twitter continues to make hostile and aggressive moves to alienate the third-party developers who helped make it the platform it is now. Today it’s third party Twitter clients. Tomorrow it’ll be URL shorteners and image/video hosts. Next it’ll be analytics and ads and who knows what else. Maybe you guys should spend some time improving the core of the service (uptime, reliability, bug fixes, etc.) rather than ingressing on the work of the thousands of developers who made Twitter an exciting place to be.

The story itself is not new. APIs are a great way for a company to experiment with new features and ideas without having to take any major risks themselves. Google led the way with Google Maps, slowly adding features to its service that had been pioneered by third party developers and deemed viable by users. Legally, there is not much to do about these practices (it they want to, companies can simply close down their web services, too) and it’s quite understandable that Twitter wants to control a value chain that promises to be quite profitable in the end. But for users and developers the reliance on private companies and closed systems is a big risk indeed. I’ve been working on a research project using Twitter data for over a year and while everything seems to be OK for the moment, what if our team suddenly gets locked out? Hundreds of hours down the drain?

When using proprietary services, you should be prepared for such things to happen but when I look at the role Twitter did play in recent events in North Africa and the Middle East – it was a mayor conduit after all – and I think about that one company’s (well, there’s Facebook, too) ability to simply close the pipes, I can’t help but feel worried. While the Internet was presented as a herald of decentralization, its global span has actually allowed for a concentration and system lock-in that is quite unique in the history of communication.

I think I’m just going to stick to email after all…

The great advances which have so far been made with computers have been in those fields where we find countable items or have ready substitutes for them. The real or seeming extraneousness of computer studies for the humanities is owed to the fact that, in the humanities, what are most important are, if items at all, items that we can’t count, or can count only most artificially. We know, for example, how little definite we mean in saying that we have two or three ideas, that there are four themes in a play, or that there were this or that number of historical events. Our “counting” is not the counting of items that were somehow there separate, waiting to be pointed out; it is a “counting” in which judgments themselves mark out what come to be the items that we count. Apart from the judgments, there are no separate items. Therefore, no technique of counting such items so as to yield, for the first time, a judgment or a summary is possible at all. But, granting that this sort of limitation is inescapable, computers could, it seems, still come to have a more vital use in the humanities than we have seen so far.

[...]

The suggestion, then, is that some of the simplest but most important work to be done in deepening the usefulness of computers for the humanities will be in imagining those schemas by which we will model what we know cannot be modeled undistortedly: — ideas, themes, events and even more importantly, insights, appraisals, and appreciations. There are, there must be, revealing models for all of these. And as we think of them, and then use them in the humanities, the achievement for us will come as we feel out just what the distortions are, as we make the right mistakes. For as we see them as mistakes, we will penetrate further and still more appreciate what we are most concerned to understand. With the possibilities for computer studies of depth and importance in the humanities seeming still so genuine, it would be a mistake, I think, to curtail our exploration of them soon.

Whether the issues related to “social media” are important or not, I have the feeling that the debate overshadows questions and problem fields that may in fact be much more important. The most obvious case, in my view, is the debate on privacy on Facebook. While the matter is not irrelevant, I think that e.g. present and future state-run information systems such as the french EDVIGE, a central police database that assembles all kinds of personal information concerning select persons “of interest”, have been overshadowed by debate on whether your employer can see the pictures that document your drinking binges after somebody (you?) put them on the ‘Book. There is a certain disequilibrium in how Internet researchers and critics distribute their attention that has allowed all kinds of things to pass below the radar. But there is one event that has really shook me up recently, both because of its importance and the lack of outcry it garnered, at least in my echo chamber: the acquisition of the Reuters group by the Thomson corporation in 2008 and the creation of Thomson Reuters, an information giant second to none.

Thomson Reuters market divisions

I have stumbled upon Thomson Reuters a couple of times over the last years: first, when I researched the history of citation indexing, I learned that Thomson Scientific had bought the Institute of Scientific Information (and their Web of Science citation index megabase from which things like the notorious Impact Factor are calculated) in 1992; then again when I noticed that the ClearForest API for term extraction had be renamed, remodeled, and rebranded as OpenCalais after Reuters bought the company in 2007; finally, last year, when I noticed that the Reuters video platform appeared more and more often in articles and links. When I finally started to look a little closer (NYSE:TRI) I was astounded to find a company with a market cap of $31B, annual revenues of $13B, and 55K+ employees all over the world. Yes, this is no Apple big, but still very, very big for a company that sells information.

I knew Reuters from my studies in communication science as the world’s biggest news agency (with roughly one and a half competitors: Associated Press and Agence France Presse) but I had never consciously registered the Thomson company – a Canadian Family business that went from the media (owning the London Times at one point) to publishing before transforming itself in a rather risky move into a digital information broker for all kinds of special fields (legal, health, finance, etc.). Reuters was a perfect match and I really wonder how that merger went through without too much hassle from the different regulatory bodies. Even more so when I found out that Reuters actually had devised a very spicy regulatory clause when it made its IPO in 1984: to avoid control over such a central source of information, no  single shareholder would be allowed to hold more than 15% of the companies stocks. Apparently, that clause was enacted at least once when Murdoch’s News Corporation (already holding 15%) bought a competitor that also owned a piece of Reuters and consequently had to shed stock to stay below the threshold. The merger effectively brought the new Reuters Thomson under full control (53%) of The Woodbridge Company, a private holding that represents the Thomson family.

Such control over a news agency (and the many more specialized services that are part of the giant’s portfolio) should give us pause in the best of times when media companies are swimming in resources, are able to pay good money for good journalism, and keep their own network of correspondents. But recent years have seen nothing but cost cutting in journalism, which has led to an even greater reliance on news agencies. I wager that Google News would work a lot less well if people actually started to write their own copy instead of remodeling Reuters’ and AP send outs.

But despite these rather traditional – but nonetheless crucial – concerns over media ownership and control, there is a second point that is somewhat closer to my area of expertise. I have recently been thinking a lot about how to best phrase criticism of the assumption that digital networks necessarily lead to decentralization. Thomson Reuters – but also other information giants such as Google and Facebook – is a great example for how digital technologies can lead to quite impressive cost reductions for economies of scale and, consequently, market concentration. These arguments should be taken into account:

• While the barriers of entry to the Internet are really low (you can have your own blog in minutes), scaling up to millions of visitors is a real challenge. Building your own datacenter is a real bump in the learning curve and to get over it, you need  to make certain investments. But once you pass that bump, scaling suddenly becomes cheaper again because you have the knowledge ressources and experience that can now be applied to make the datacenter grow. One of Google’s strengths lies in this area and this immensely facilitates branching out into new information ventures. The same goes for Thomson Reuters: they master platform technology and distribution technologies for all kinds of contents and they can build on that mastery to add new things to serve information to a globalized planet. To use the language of the long tail: there may be more special interest information that can find an audience with shelve space becoming effectively unlimited; but there is also no longer a need for more than one shelve.
• The same goes for a more elusive matter: the mastery of information. The database techniques and indexing tools we use to store information – as well as the search and data-mining algorithms – can be very easily transported from one domain to the next. While it may be (very) difficult to create useful search tools for medical information, once you have built them it is rather easy to adapt these tools to, let’s say the legal domain. Again, this is what makes Google strong: basic search technology can be applied to advertising, books, mail, product prices, and even video if you can do automatic transcription. With the acquisition of ClearForest, Thomson Reuters has class-leading in-house data-mining and this is not something you can get by simply posting a couple of job ads in the local newspaper. Data-mining is extremely useful in areas where fast decision-making is crucial but also when it comes to building powerful search tools. Again, these techniques can be applied to any number of fields and once you have the basics right you can just add new domains with very little cost.

These two points go a far way in explaining why the Internet has seen the lightning fast emergence of network giants over the last couple of years. I really don’t want to postulate yet another “law” of the Net but I believe that there is something to this idea of the bump: it’s easy to have a basic presence on the Web but it’s hard to scale up to a large audience and to use advanced computational techniques; but one you pass the bump, the economies of scale kick in and from there it seems like there are no barriers to growth. The Thomsons have certainly made that bet when they acquired Reuters and so far, it seems to work out quite nicely for them.

I hope we can find a means to extend critique from questions of ownership into the heart of the (informational) beast and come up with better ways to understand how the still ongoing shift to exclusively digital information affords new means of handling and exploiting that information – with organizational, economic, and political consequences. While that work is starting to take shape for consumer companies like Google that are in the spotlight, there is surprisingly little on invisible network giants like Thomson Reuters that cater mostly to professional clients.

What have the humanities been doing for thirty-five years except to do exactly what a computer would do, only with their own unaided card indexes and fountain pens? They have taken apart poetry, they have taken apart novels, they have counted images, they have followed symbols that are sometimes non-existent, they have destroyed their own subject matter by a pseudo-computer-like approach, and now they have only themselves to blame if they have to learn the tricks and the jargon of computerizing. (Jacques Barzun at a conference at Yale University, cited in. Taviss (ed.), The Computer Impact, 1970, p.199)

While I have not found the original document of Barzun’s talk, Bowler (ed.), Computers in Humanistic Research, 1967, p.232 has a summary of his three main points of critique:

First is the assumption of a false relation between the units defined and written and the reality they are supposed to represent. For example, 20 years ago, someone attempted to study genius by selecting names from Who’s Who in America, as being indicative of the quality of genius. Second is the fallacy of assessing importance by weight or numbers. The speaker mentioned a published census, again some 20 years ago, which indicated that the number of brownstone or frame houses in New York was much larger than the number of skyscrapers, giving the erroneous impression that the former represented the city’s characteristic architectural form. The third error is the attribution of meaning based upon only a partial study of the object in question. Two conspicuous examples of the faulty attribution of meaning to partial signs are the cases of machine translation and the objective tests given to school children and the people in business.

Would it be very hard to find contemporary examples that fit these three points?

Bing’s new features basically use the same technical layer as the Facebook boxes that popped up all over the Web about half a year ago (most modern browsers have plug-ins that allow you to block those by the way). If Bing detects the Facebook cookie while you’re on their site and adds a couple of features that allow you to interact with “friends” more easily. There are some basic convenience features but it is the “liked results” that are the most remarkable: results will use your contact’s “likes” to rank results. While we will have to wait to see how these features will pan out, social search may look something like this:

In this example, the first result is the announcement of a news article on the release of the DVD version of Iron Man 2 and this would be hardly a top-ranked result without the social layer. If Bing continues to make inroads on Google, the “like” button may take on additional importance for driving traffic and marketeers will most certainly device new ways to get people to “like” stuff – e.g. “press the button and win a free t-shirt”.

Cas Sunstein’s arguments on the dangers of echo chambers – “incestuous amplification” in social groups – will certainly be taken up again, and perhaps rightfully so: while the Internet remains a beautifully heterogeneous mess, the algorithmically sustained support for the logic of homophily (“birds of a feather…”) that can be observed in more and more places on the Web merits critical examination. While Diana Mutz’s work makes the inconvenient argument that “hearing the other side” of political debate may actually lead to less political engagement, our representative systems of democratic governance require a certain willingness to accept different political viewpoints (that always float on less clearly delineated cultural sensibilities) as sincere and legitimate. Also, adding a “friend” dimension to yet another dimension of the Web could be seen as a further reduction of the “publicness” that, according to Michael Schudson, caracterizes working democratic discourse. Being able to dissociate ourselves from our private entanglements and take into account the interests of those who do not ressemble us is perhaps the central prerequisite to successfully navigating a smaller planet.

Bing’s new features are certainly not the end of life as we know it but I believe that the privacy question – as important as it is – is covering a series of more difficult problems that sit at the heart of political life in the age of the Internet…

…and another one…

…browser wars all over again…