Google has asked us to build our lives around it: to use its e-mail system (which, for many of us, is truly indispensible), its search engines, its maps, its calendars, its cloud-based apps and storage services, its video- and photo- hosting services, and on and on and on. It hasn't done this because we're its customers, it's worth remembering. We aren't; we're the products Google sells to its customers, the advertisers...
...What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure. The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world...
...That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us....
...But in the long run that's a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector....
...I find myself thinking again of the brave new world of the industrial city, when new patterns of interaction led to enormous changes in economic activity, in culture and personal behaviour, and in the way we think. We upgraded ourselves, in terms of education, hygiene, and social norms, to maximise the return to urban life. And the history of modern urbanisation is littered with examples of privately provided goods and services that became the domain of the government once everyone realised that this new life and new us couldn't work without them. I think we, meaning users of the web and the companies that provide its blood and bones, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of a world awash in information.
