understand that this is really a fight for the soul of america. and not only for america, but for the world. there are going to be nine billion people on the planet in 2050. we absolutely need to get it right. we need america to help solve some of the big problems around resources, lack of water and land and issues around energy that, you know, the united states is great at solving these types of problems. we're not going to be able to rely on the u.s. if you don't have education. ..

>> well, it's a pleasure and an honor to be here. thank you for braving the rain to be here with me today. google is 12 years old. it's voice hasn't even changed yet. it's barely an adolescent, yet, it's an important part of so many daily activities for so many of us. one the major reasons i wrote this book is it struck me as weird, historically weird, technically weird, sociologically weird that one company would serve as the lens through which we view the world. in so many ways, so many times a day. i'm not sure -- or at least i wasn't sure at the beginning that we should complain about this situation. after all, we invited it, celebrate it, relish it, and do it; right? we google all the time.

i tried to enters this project with that sense of weirdness. first and foremost. i wanted to constantly remind myself and remind my readers that this was not the natural state of things. things could have been gone very differently. go back to when google was a renew. you probably had not even heard of it in it's first year, 1998. when it first rolled out for public use, it was actually hosted by the stanford university servers. you found it at google google.stanford.edu. the first notes refer to it at that url. even early on, it was clear that google was going to be the darling of people who were excited about technology. technologically sophisticated. it accomplished a couple of things that had been eluding a lot of other companies that had been trying to organize the web and help navigate the web.

first and foremost, it had a blank page; right? it was just a box to enter text and generate a fairly clean election of links. and the links would be in order and the order seemed to make sense to us; right? it struck us as intuitively right. intuitively relevant. and the great leap that google lead early on was first of all to use the blank page and at a time when if you remember the web in the late '90s, some of you might, the web was crazy. it was full of all kind of flashing things and crazy things and every page looked like, you know, walking down times square in the middle of the night. it was just lots of attention grabbing devices on too many web pages. in addition, the major search engine services of the day, vista, for instance, or yahoo! who is still with us and actually not going anywhere for a while. those services tended to crowd their pages with content.

some of that content, they would actually pay to create. others they would pay to harvest from other places. there was no sense that these other portals to the web understood the web. the way that google did; right? the folks who started google understood, first of all, you and i are perfectly willing to create content that google can harvest and link to and share with us. they don't have to pay us. the other insight about the blank page, the blank page was trustworthy. the blank page said i'm not trying to sell you anything or take you anywhere you don't want to go. and at a time when it was clear that many search engines were actually auctioning off of the positions of the search results, google made it very clear largely through the word of mouth and thus to the press ultimately that it's search engine results were generated by their algorithms purely. and the algorithms for at a

distance from the immediate interest of the company. the company had no interest if you can imagine until about 2003, the company wasn't selling advertisement. it was just running on venture capital and hasn't figured out a model well until 2003. the first four or five years of googles existence, it was there to be great. and it worked. so in 1998, it debuted. by the time took the is one year old, it's just started to walk, it's already organized the web. already picking it clear to millions of web users that the web didn't have to be a chaotic play. one could draw a map to get from one place to another. before search engines were good, before google really reinvited the search engine, one had to find a good starting page and follow of series of good links to other pages; right, and

collect that trail and try to guide other people through the same information. it was maddening, chaotic, you didn't know if you were missing good stuff. most of the time you didn't find good stuff. you found scary stuff, or weird stuff, or inappropriate stuff. there was no method to the madness of the web. google sets itself up as the custodian of the web inadvertently. over time, google did something else clever. google had to figure out who puts one link above another. why should one page be more important than another? and the term that google uses for the criteria upon which it would rank is relevance? which page is more relevant to the search than another page? there are a lot of different ways to do this; right? in the early days of web search, the number of times a search term showed up on a page counted

for a lot; right? if there were a page about a boston red sox, it might say red sox a lot on that page. that's a pretty good guess, you would think for the importance of that page to that search. problem is it didn't take long before people figured that out and they would pick a page about something completely different and load it up with invisible text for common search terms. terms that people were using all the time anywhere, and that would trick people into going to these unrelated pagers. you can imagine that pornographers were masters at this very early. pornographers were generally so much starter largely because it was the only business making money on the web at a time. the big trick for google, as it became the custodian, how to make the web less offendive, threatening, more usable, more pleasant, and to do that, google

figured eventually, i'm using grade school the -- i'm using google as if google is a person or an animal. my 5-year-old daughter when she talks about the book, google invited me to a party. there's some story she tells her friends. but imagine this; right? you've got the web which in the late '90s and early part, was a scary place and many reasonable people were not sure how much intersection they wanted to have with the web. these were days it was hard to convince someone that doing something like banking was a good idea on the web. that's probably the end of the list; right? shopping was risky, research was risky. putting your kids down in front of the computer without someone looking over his shoulder was risky. that sort of activity, it was important for everybody that wanted to make money on the web to make the web a less frightening place. we cannot even notice there was going on.

so google installed more criteria, instead of using the number of times search appear in the page, google decided that there's a vote of affirmation out there. it's called the hyperlink. if there are people created web pages, they happened to be interested in the boston red sox, and start creating web links to what they consider an an -- an aauthoritative page. they are going to start creates links for rod -- red sox, these are the pages to look for. the great insight of googles engineers and founders figured this out and wrote a paper in graduate school that basically made it to the page of real sense would be scored from the number of votes. then they weighted that. espn starts pointing to

somebody's homemade page about the red sox. that's powerful. if some other area, wall street journal web page links to somebody financial advice blog, there were actually blogs at the time, that counts for a lot. that's a major sense of affirmation within that field. those voted are weighting more than if i put up a link on someone's page to my blog. that was major insight number one. major insight number two was that you can start scoring the results based on the quality of the page. and this happens a little bit later in googles history. it actually happened in the last couple of years. google starts saying there are certain design elements of a page that work better for us and we think work better for our users, our readers, and those are often expressed graphicically and not just tect chilly. right. it's not hard to imagine that pages that are trying to trick

you into falling into the pornography world are going to be full of lots of extra video links that go into strange places, lots of code what they call malware, little program that embed yourself in their browsers and operating system. the bad people in the world are going to load up the pages. google has an interest again in making the web usable, trustworthy and pleasant. google starts downgrading the scores of pages that are designed in such a way and upgrades pages that are designed cleanly that have key words in them that relate honestly to the subject of the page and have the votes of affirmation. within a very short period of time, the web becomes a trustworthy place. low and behold this in combination with the widespread use of enchris. -- encryption. you get people shopping on the

web. google is the starting place. you go back to the central place and it gives you a menu of places to dive into. you are no longer actually using it in a webby way. you are plumbing for depth when you do a subject search on google. that's not nice store. google is 12. it's an adolescent. it's voice is just starting to change. when google is merely 6, it started expanding it's areas of interest. about that time, i started really taking notice. i had used google from '99 from the time i first heard from some very tech-savvy friends that this was the search engine to trust. around 2004, google started launching a number of other projects. we are all familiar with what the projects became and google books through which it was scanning millions of books from dozens of libraries around the world ultimately. it started with five, including

the universities, and then moved on to many others. this project kind of blew my mind. in 2004, i start reading about the project. and i start seeing this amazing hyperbole comes from people who are working for universities and university libraries from people who are big fans of google and from people who just want knowledge to spread. and they start saying what an amazing thing that the big powerful company is going to spread knowledge to every corner of the world pretty much for free and i start reading things from -- in all sorts of corners basically saying this is going to unlease information in an remarkable way, create a new library of alexandria that anyone can go into. i'm sitting back saying you know google is 6 years old; right? google at that point was around for less time than brad pitt and jennifer aniston had been married. look how well that turn out.

why is a university like michigan or stanford asking the 6-year-old to be the custodian of the immense amount of wealth and knowledge. this can't end well. it's what i thought. it might start beautifully. but it can't end well. there was a controversial topic. the publickers and authors who's work was being scanned in, raised all sorts of missions and lawsuits. and the lawsuits settled in a way that made it clear seven years down the line that google never intended to make a library, it intended to make a bookstore. i love bookstores. bookstores are great. but i'm not too pleased with the bookstore that tries to pretend it's a library. about 2004, i started seeing that google's real corporate mission is believe it or not to organize the world's information to make it easily accessible.

that's scary. i was born in 20th century. i know enough to know when somebody makes a big statement, you need to step back. 20th century involved a lot of grand statements that didn't turn out so well either. not that anything close to chaos and nastiness. but nonetheless, i thought, what an odd thing. what a strange way to run a company. to say that the goal of the company is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. i knew enough about the web. to know that their organizing the web, they are not organizing the worlds information. and the web is not the world. it wasn't then, it isn't now. what's valuable or important or relevant on the web is a fraction now. you can do this we doing a google subject that you know a

lot about. you can see pages that might not be the most authoritative, they bring the best design pages with the best links to them. the web is nearly an abstraction of the sort of thought that many people on this earth actually engage in every day. think of the number of people that don't engage with the web yet. think of the ways in which we engage with each other and information. it doesn't get accurately reflected on the web. it's important to remember that google itself has value judgment and bias is built into the algorithms. to steal the results in a particular way. there's nothing wrong with that. it's so much better than the absence of that. it's so many better than what anybody else has thought of. but it's not the world. and it's not the world's information. i'm enough of a pragmatist, enough of a pluralist to think no one institution and no one company should actually have that job of organizing the worlds information and making it

universally accessible. the mission statement of harvard university isn't that audacious; right? to educate the young men of doing one to be clergy or something, that's originally what it was meant to be. really, that's a stunning mission statement. we are probably all more familiar with the informal model. don't be evil. i'm thinking what that means. every time google does something that causes friction, it sends it's car to the streets of europe taking pictures without permission. in europe, people are sensible about putting a picture in the database. they had bad experiences with database. they didn't call them database, but people keeping too much about people and using it to pull them out of neighborhood and houses. there's a little bit of

sensitivity in europe about privacy, we don't necessarily have that kind of level of concern in this country. we're a lot more trustworthy, if nothing else, private sector and major corporations. there's been a lot of conflict, a lot of tension, a lot of stress and friction over these sorts of things. in the united states, we've had a lot of friction and controversy about youtube, about things that show up on youtube and a lot of friction and controversy about the google book program and understanding that every time that google is confronted with a situation in which somebody is upset and somebody calls for intervention or regulation, google's basic defense is trust us. we treat you well. we have always treated you well. we have the internal ethic, the internal motto of don't be evil. they actually don't say those words out loud. like the ceo of google, eric smith, who is about to step

down, as never stood up in front of an audience and said we believe the motto don't be evil. i've heard him say that. it's embedded in many things he said and in other major officials say things that sound like a declaration of corporate responsibility. i started asking that question, why do we fall for that every time? first of all, secondly, why do we think that a company that had -- that is basically 12 years old is going to be anything like it currently is in the next 20 years. why would we think that future performances in any way predicted by past performance? because, it isn't. conditions change, economies change, politics change, and we do know that in the world of new media or the world of digital communication, or the markets dealing with the internet, that nobody is king for very long; right? when google started, everyone was concerned that microsoft would be calling all of the

shots. i bought that. i thought it was true. things shifted, now google, facebook, in fact, google is worried about facebook for some very legitimate reasons in terms of competition and advertising dollars and our attention. as i started stringing together the concerns, i thought it's really important that i come up with a way to sort of distill what google means to us and what we mean to google. other really great writers had gotten inside of google, traveled on the plane with the big guys that run google, had told the story, written the biography, and other how with learn from google. i couldn't do that. people had already done that. my contribution was to delve into our relationship with google. what does google mean to us? what with do need to google?

what is the nature of the transaction? why does google do all of this for me? why do they spend so many billions of dollars on services that help me make any life better and don't ask for any money from me. what's going on there? i mean we should be a little suspicious of that. what is the nature of the transaction? what am i giving google? the obvious answer is i'm not actually google's customer or you. i'm a comcast customer. i get mad at comcast all the time. something doesn't work, bill is too high. i know i'm comcast's customer. i'm not google's customer, i'm the product. i'm what they sell to advertisers. i'm nbc's product every sunday when it watch the nfl; right? the nbc is selling my attention to beer companies and car companies. it's not a new model. i think we forget it because of the depth of interaction and

emersion in google. we consider google to be a part of our lives. google keeps very good track of our attentions and our desires and fetishes and obsessions and focuses the results of the searches to reflect what we told took the we like thinking about. google is changing; right? i described earlier the ways that google masters the web, figured out a way to help us navigate the web; right? brilliant ideas about counting these links, waiting these links properly. so in recent years, last two years, google has added yet another layer of standards or criteria. and what the really focusing on now is what they call the user experience. they want our experience with google to be really satisfying.

deeply satisfying. and more fun than it has been before. more satisfying in a social way and more satisfying in a intellectual, and more satisfying this is most important, in a commercial way. so they are taking the record of our expressions and desires. that we enter in the little box. right, it's the confessional. we confess to google. what we really want or what we have done and shouldn't be thinking about. we put all of that in the google box, we get results, google makes a note. it doesn't necessarily associate that text that you put into the box with you as a person. it doesn't care about your name, social security number, but it cares about where you are sitting when you are doing that. if knows generally in the world where you are. it can associate your set of inquiries with others who sit in the same general area. it might also over time if you happen to have an account, build up a pretty rich set of indicators, of the sorts of cars

that you like, the sorts of shoes that you like, the shorts of books that you like. kind of like how facebook does it. we like this stuff. i like this music. facebook's job is to take the data and associate ads in the column to try to sell us stuff. gag -- google is trying to do the same sort of thing. it's not anything that's easily exploitable or attachable to our name and social security number and address. it does know our location. especially if you have google phone, android phone. cook the knows where you are all the time. or apple knows where you are if you have an iphone. with all of the data, google is increasingly focusing the results on you. customizing the results, and localizing the results. so you are not likely to come up with a result that is distance

from you. or is sort of out of character, or out of space, or out of the field through which you usually explore. that has some pretty amazing implications. first of all, that's really great. think of the time they are saving us; right? i think a lot about a particular sports team or a car. maybe i have a car that breaks down a lot. and i do a lot of searches for parts and repairs. google is going to help me save time so i'm not clicking too many. it's going to keep giving me results that reflect those sorts of areas; right? google eventually will understand i do a lot of searches for that brand of car. that's really great for shopping, for buys, not so great for learning. if we want an information ecosystem that actually serves us well as curious people and citizens and people who are trying to navigate and figure out what the symptoms mean, as

people who are trying to figure out who's going on with climate change, as people who are trying to figure out what's going on with health care reform, we might actually be better off not having focused information. we might better off coming across a set of results that surprise us or challenge us. a set of results that don't reinforce where we were and where we are. we might be better off coming up with a set of results that aren't particularly geared towards consumption. and we're better off coming up with a set of results that aren't a mixture of ways to help us consume and ways to help us learn. now for a dozen years, we've gotten very lucky. google has served both of these interests remarkably well. think of all of the times that google has helped you answer a really important question. and, of course, if you were in any way doubtful or critical of google, you probably went to a second source. you might have called the librarian, you might have called someone who wrote the book on the subject, you might have

called the doctor instead of just going through web md and went through google. you might have run the same search on another search engine. all of these are very healthy techniques. another reason i wrote the book is i wanted people to learn how to use google in a better way. i use google every day. dozens of times a way. i used google to find my way to the store. i'm not going to advocate that we not use google. i am not going to advocate that we use google in a wiser way, not just a smarter way, a wiser way. i want us to understand that google has biases baked into the al borrow rhythm that google is a company, that must satisfy the shareholders. it's been so good at that, it's been so wealthy that it can afford to be good. so it has. for the most part. even when it's bad, it thinks it's being good. which is part of the problem.

with all of that, we could be better. the real problem is we are so addicted to the speed and convenience of that lovely sets of results that comes in a nice set of ten with a value attached to each. we trust it. we trust it so many that almost nobody clicks past result number three, set alone the second page. nobody clicks to the second page. next time you do a google search, click the second page. just to see what's there. you never know; right? we've seen study after study, academic and industry studies show that people do not even question the judgment that google makes. people do not question the judgment to the point of clicking on results 4, 5, 6, it's 1, 2, 3. if a lot of people click on two, it soon become number one. with that, it's incumbent to mix it up and bring diversity into

the information. to make sure that while we want google to keep getting better and serve us well in a way that it's a list of the desires. that's not that bad of a price to pay, considering the values it's brought to our lives. let's do it in a more intelligent and wiser way. let's understand that we actually have the power to manipulate what google learns about us and how it follows up. you can do that. it takes about seven clicks. most people don't want to make the seven clicks. we don't want to do it on facebook, and we should. you can customize the information you give google. there's a cost to that. that's another important thing. if you customize the way google track you and limit the amount of information and the kinds of information, you degrade the service that google gives you. it's a real tradeoff once you start clicking on those things. you start seeing google no

longer helps you shop as well, but it might help you learn a little better and challenge you. as google become better for shopping and worse for learning, that raised an important question for us as citizens. as citizens of the country and citizens of the world. because i happen to think there's more to life than shopping. not today. shop. shop here and shop a lot. after you get out of here, you don't have to shop so much. think about the extent to which we depend on the medium of the world war -- worldwide web to learn about the world. we need to invest more in systems like public libraries and university libraries and their outreaches to other communities. maybe we have to imagine that we can build a system and it might take 50 years. build a system that it equalize the distribution of information across the world. to the point where i don't think it's impossible that a child growing up in south africa has

no disadvantage to a child growing up in sweden. we have the tools to make it happen right now, we might have the political will to make it happen right now. we haven't even tested it. the reason we haven't, google has been too good to us. we have been going on believing that cotton candy is real good. google keeps feeding us great services that simulate the equality of information, the democratization of information, and google sincere that the number of users to increase, and every member of south africa to have information. it's pouring money into such projects. that's beautiful. we should not rely on the 12-year-old company to guide the effort. other times there are going to be hard choices to make in terms of policy, technologies, practice. so as a citizen, i think it's imperative that we start asking

questions about whether we want google to handle all of our shopping and all of our learning needs. if we don't, and if we recognize that google in 20 years is almost certain to be a very different company, maybe even owned at that time by somebody completely different like the reincarnated head of rupert murdoch. who knows what's going to happen. at that point, google won't be the google that we grew up. the mature google is going to have different pressure. who's going to know what the worldwide web in 20 years. as we move more of the information-seeking and shopping-seeking habits to lock down closed devices that aren't on the web but connected nonetheless, and the more time we spend in the gated community of facebook, the less money that google is going to make in the long term, unless it can keep expanding it's market. this is an interesting battle. right, google wants people to be

comfortable with the web as i said at the beginning. it's going everything that it can. because that's good for google. not just because it's good for us. it happens to be good for us. which is nice. but over time, not everything that's good for google will be good for us. and we have to be prepared for that divergence. at those moments, we're going to have to ask are there things that we want to preserve and extend and build that google should not do for us, or could not do for us. under those conditions, we might want to decide to take some other root. crazy as it may seem, the root that we might want to take is the old-fashioned public library. we might want to invest more in the presence, power, and expansion. that is a reasonable good old fashioned republican with the small r institution. it's there to help us as citizens and information seekers, as learners, students, teachers. we take it for granted because it worked so well and we make

this sort of false conclusion that google sends information so efficiently that we need the public library less. in fact, americans these days use the public library more than ever. americans these days are visiting public libraries in record numbers. the americans who happen to be visiting libraries in record numbers don't subscribe to broadband access at home. in fact, theycomcast for broadband access. that's what we have to member. the goal as citizens should be maximizing all consumers. that's such a different way of being. it's time we start taking both rules seriously instead of just one. thank you very much. i'd love to ask questions. [applause] [applause] >> yes, sir? >> i'm blown away off of my feet who a pro-google presentation.

the only thing we should worry that google isn't going it good enough. i'm concerned about the search traces that google collects about individuals. what happened if i want to learn about something bad or something i'm afraid of or threats i read about or bad person or gambling and google will accumulate that and surely, you know, about that incidence a few years ago where aol published search traces and some woman in connecticut was down to the social security number and given the wikileaks that's erasing the politics in the middle east. the preservation of security of these traces is a femiron, which is going to go away the first time some critical need says you have to release that or some step to pay and public this. >> so a couple of things. >> privacy. >> a couple of things to

remember about the case now. everything that we do in the electric environment is traced by somebody. google may be low on the list of potential problems google has done what it could do under our laws to keep federal investigators away from fishing expeditions and their data. unfortunately for us and google, our laws are on the side of the government. that's the problem with the government, not for gag of. it is a really important part of this. we've become so dependent on companies behaving well. we've come so dependent on us demanding that the companies that we use in our lives treat us well and are responsible that we forget that sometimesst not up to them. the fact is our leaders wrote some bad law that is not only give investigators way too much power that has no real over sight and accountability embedded in it, and that didn't

happen too long ago, and it doesn't seem to be changing for the better in recent months either. but on top of that, google is not the only private company in the chain; right? comcast and at&t and verizon and time warner are all part of the surveillance system. they keep the data on what we do as well. in fact, if you work for the university, the university keeps logs of much of what you do as well. sometimes they personal the logs and times they don't, and sometimes they align the logs. right now the government is on an effort to get internet service providers to seize the purging, and they want to have a record of who logged on when to do what? they want to use it for investigating data mining. those companies don't want to be a part of that. they don't want the responsibility and expense to be the custodian of that kind of

information. not like they are defending our interest. in this case, most of our companies want to protect us if they can. they'd rather be on our side than the government side, not out of love, it's actually out of concern for just having too much of a hassle and an expensive hassle. nonetheless, we are losing and the companies are losing. you are absolutely right to be concerned about the fact that any of us could get snagged in some sort of fishing expedition for data. it's too easy to come up with false positives in the data analysis games. we've seen the case of a number of innocent people it took years to extra indicate because they had the wrong data points. i'm not ready to write that book. i'm angry enough to write the book, but not qualified enough. i'm not anti-google. what i'm against is our own

faith-based embrace of google of all things. that's why i think there will be times -- there are times when i want to -- i do want to invoke the power of the state to restrict the amount of information that the companies can hold about us and the manner in which they hold us about. that's really important. it's going to be more important every day. now that's an argument that we need to have. and it has to occur at a better level than trust us, we are google, we've never done you wrong; right? that's really where i'm coming down. we need to be more responsible and engaged citizens and users. we want to use the power that people have, which at times actually involves the state to take care of our interest. do you have a question in the back? >> what about the scholar? >> okay. scholar. google scholar started around 2005 or 2006. it was a neat idea that came out of the policy that google has where they let employees spend

one day a week, 20% of the time, working on projects that don't serve the bottom line of google. and a couple of folks at google decided there's all of the literature and might be useful to people outside of the universities. if you don't work for the university, you are out of luck. they invested in google scholar and got permission from all of the publishers to come through and let google index their information to present these access to these articles. now, of course, as -- if you've used it, if you are not in a university environment, you have to pay for the article that you find. at least you can find the article. that's all great. i think that's a super thing up to a point. the problem again is how they do it. right? how they do the search system for one thing.

because their bias is built into the search engine. one thing about articles, they don't link to each other. if i write as a half and my friend jonathan writes, even if they are about the same subject and cite each other in the footnotes, there's no link like on the web. and that hyperlink is the magic thing that google follows. what is it that makes google rank one result over another in google scholar? nobody knows. i know it's not dependable. just like with web search, if you do the same search a week later, you do different results. the instability is somebody that needs to pay attention to where articles are. if you do the exact sights search or author search, you generally find what you want. if you are just grazing around in a subject area, it's maddening. better than nothing, poorly

designed. because it doesn't make google any money, they are not likely to make it better. it's good enough. i tell my students, especially graduate students, stopping with google scholar is fine, but don't stop there. there are a lot of articles they don't show i. the only way is to walk through the index in the library. you have to be affiliated with the university to get that level of access. that's a shame. i think that should be on the agenda of the human knowledge, the 50-year plan to give everyone in the world decent access to decent information. yes, sir. >> i've got a couple of questions. i want to make a comment about which is government getting access to people's browsing habits and whatever. i thought at this time, i'm not dead sure, i thought from what i read, that the federal government has subpoenaed control or request on web server

loan. that was a pretty standard situation at this point. >> it's not even a subpoena. subpoena would be great. what happens right now is the fbi can use national security lenders for information. >> right. >> that requires no oversight. that's just an fbi agent says i want to do this. it has not only the power to compel someone like a bookstore to handle over records of what people have purchased, it also have denialability. so the subject of that security letter is not allowed to -- i'm sorry, the firm that's handed that security letter is not allowed to tell the subject of the investigation of it's existence. you don't get to defriend yourself. >> is this part of the paid yacht act? >> question. but there are other things and element from the power that come from earlier laws and the clinton years.

basically what we have now, if you are a really bad person doing really bad things, you don't to have worry about the investigative power. you are going to use strong encryption. the really bad people are totally escaping. it's just the dumb people. they got arrested for being really dumb and coming up with plans that were never going to work. they were too dumb to use encryption and met in public places and get busted and the the fbi has a big press conference and everybody cheers. we have a situation where bad things that want to do really bad things are outside of the power of the law. the fbi which has to show it's doing something ends up snagging people who perhaps aren't that dangerous. >> i was thinking more of the browsing. there's also the problem of

intercepting their messages and reading them. that kind of thing with encryption. but as far as, you know, tracking patterns of anyone which are maintained in the server logs, it's a question of where the people are going to go with their browsers, what information, what they are getting back, what they are doing, and in addition to what they are actually what their packets are and the information that's coming back to them. it's a question of their motion patterns on the net. they are also very concerned about that. like if a person wants to go to the web site say in afghanistan or something and kick around in there, it's very important for the cia to know that. >> it could be. >> they can get into the server log that is say -- i think what's happening right now is some of the isps like at&t and comcast and the web servers on the towers and whatever. they are fighting and i think

the federal government access to those, the web servers themselves, in the isp like farms. >> sure. >> that's very contemporary. >> all of this goes above and beyond the search service. i think there's a much larger challenge, both in terms of enfansing security and enhancing justice. again, another another book. it's probably not the subject that you should be addressing right out here on c-span. yes, ma'am? >> a couple of questions. i wasn't wasn't -- you talk abot google being a young company and adolescent, you talk about it's life span in human terms which doesn't seem terribly accurate. a restaurant that's 12 years old is an old restaurant, very mature one. especially given your community about how fast business changes, it seems slightly disingenuous

to compare it. i was wondering if you would comment in company terms. >> in company years. >> is that even the length of it's life even relevant issue in >> >> i think you are right. in internet company, it's old and quite established. that speaks to my point in a stronger way on the cute way. we that, i mean that internet time is so compressed, 12 years is a time that demonstrates it's powerful and success. it speaks well to the ability to thrive. you can actually look at the balance sheets and turn -- returns and reports. and the nature of the company shifts so quickly. the years are so compressed.

for that reason, we can't expect it at 20 to resemble what it is at 12 or expect it to be around at 20. general motors has been around for about 75 years. that's pretty impressive. it's not what it was. it almost wasn't a year ago; right? so that's a long company. but nast an industry that's heavy and builds things that last on industry that brought off the government. that's a different game. that industry has a different time compression. i wanted to really compare it to the older institutions with deep root that is are ultimately, i think, the proper custodians. libraries and universities. not just limited, but the sense of our collective culture. the notion that i think we should have a diversity of

interest and we should respect the gathered wisdom of these institutions and the people that work there and not just be dazzled by the new. that was really my point. yes, sir? >> as someone who has watched google spread through hirer education, i'm curious what you see as the biggest danger or threat that it poses in that particular environment. >> yeah, biggest danger it's cheap or free. you know, universities are under such pressure to do whatever they can for almost nothing. most universities that i know are now considering if they haven't already shifted their e-mail hosting to google. letting google host their e-mails. at least with students, if not with staff and faculty. google gets a customer for life. if the student graduates and wants to keep that e-mail, because he or she already has job search, that person is going to remain a google customer through e-mail. it's a nice trick for them; right?

nothing really sleazy about it. the dangerous is the universities that supposed to keep the highest level of privacy respect for their students. that's compromised once you shift important information to a shift party. i'm not convinced that in that instance and instances where professors are being urged to use google documents service in classes and as part of course ware, in those cases, i'm not convinced that universities are looking out for the best cases. they are going for the cheap and easy and building in proper safeguards. there's almost no reason to negotiate with somebody that's giving it for free. in the real world, someone trying to give you something for free on the street, you should be worried and negotiating. that's not how it's working at universities right now. >> what about the dangerous? >> any record of a students grades, paper that's been graded

or comments about performance, or recommendation letters that i happen to write for students are not supposed to be distributed beyond the authorized recipient. if i write a regies letter, only the recipient of that -- with the students permission, is allowed to read it. and the student has to waive the right to read it him or herself actually, legally, according to federal law and any grade report can only be shared with the students. i can't even tell parents. which drives parents crazy. that's important. you never really know who you are dealing with on the other side of the phone. so respecting that sort of relationship and intriguing students at adults is the really important part of the culture and federal law. i'm afraid we're letting that slip in a lot of different ways. when we invite facebook and youtube, as we aren couraged to do, we run a lot of risks. i don't think we've thought it

all through. >> as you were talking about, you don't want to talk on the ideas about how the fbi gets the information is weak. other than just, you know, cruise -- using the library and other sources, how can we use the information without stopping it? >> you can go to privacy settings. when you do that, you do limit the functionality of a lot of its services. the other thing is just know. if you are aware that everything is used in some way, either by associating it with in some way or collectively as part of your community, then you might be careful about how you conduct a search. you might want to turn off the ability of google to follow you for certain searches and turn it back on when you are using innocent searches. if you are cleave very cleverer

ways. and the defaults are always set for maximum information. google wants you to be comfortable and unsuspicious and willing to give it everything and shared as widely as possible. the defaults is always maximum. it's up to us, unfortunately, to train ourselves, to be wary, careful, to worry, and then take action. i think this is the wrong way to have a system. i wish that our laws actually made it so the companies had to convince us to turn on the spigot. by the way, if you let us collect the information, we will give you the service. that's an honest transaction. have the default on maximum and have us have to guess, that's not very honest. for a company that claims to be responsible, the deal with us is

dishonest. >> yes, sir? >> i was wondering if you could comment on how google responds and reacts to the competitors. facebook is interesting one. i work at a publishing company. how it interacts with apple and amazon particularly interest me. you know, last week or two weeks ago, apple comes out and announces magazines and charge publishers 30%, the next day google says we'll do the same thing to 10%. how are they responding? >> google has so many competitors and areas. think about the fact is google now is a mobile phone company and nokia and apple is a competitor, and so is blackberry; right? so that's one market in which it has intense competition. in the area of publishing, google is involved. it's built a bookstore. it's also trying to offer sales through the peer -- periodicals.

i'm not a big fan of what they are doing with the library. i'm not upset with google, i'm upset the university lie -- libraries are suckers. if google wants to do this and create cool things and make money from it, i have no problem with it. but what google is doing in publishing both in periodicals and books is really undermining the powerful position that amazon has been in for a number of years. amazon is the problem in the publishing industry. if i thought i could sell even one book, i'd write a book about amazon. amazon would make sure i'd never sell the book. actually i'm sure amazon doesn't care what the books inside say. they just want to sell items. they sell widgets, and that's

part of the problem. they are good at selling widget at a cheap price. by driving down the price and every book to be commodity, they do great harm to people who write books and sell books and public books for a living. at the same time, for people who read, it's a great deal; right? so that's the massive tradeoff. it just so happens that we subsidize and have huge government subsidies for amazon. if you buy my book in this store, you have to pay sales tax. if you buy on amazon, you don't have to sales tax. we have government policy that make amazon richer and challenge stores. but it is the case. amazon had a heavy hand in all of the negotiations with publishers. it's been kick -- been dictating the commission and price.

it doesn't respect the fact that publishing is not that simple. every book is not going to yield a return if it's priced at $9.99. if consumers get used to paying no more than $9.99, and consider every book, is 00 or 400 panels, worth $9.99, then you have a tough time. i'm talking about scholarly books mostly, that we know might fail or likely to fail. right, for books like that, it's important to come up with a price point that covers the money sunken into the construction process. but amazon wants to disrupt and treat all books like a commodity. what happens with the competitors like google and now with apple doing it's bookstore and with barnes and noble, and a lot of independent publishers in new and interesting ways as well. that gets lost in the newspaper coverage of the this industry.

you have now more players who are able to work with publishers in gentler and more competitive ways. publishers now have the ability, although it rarely happens, to say no to amazon. that wasn't the case before about seven or eight months ago, or a year ago, to say no to amazon in terms of book descriptions and electronic distribution. now that there are enough competitors, google is a big reason why. a lot of people are thrilled that google is involved in this. because google is not ought to cash in in a big way on the sale of books. that's going to be a major side project for google, but always a side project. and google's role in the publishing industry and role with newspapers and magazines over time i think will be beneficial. at least that's how it looks today to all of those industries. i'm really happy to see them deal in a less coercive way with

publishers. if it were just amazon, we'd all be in trouble. >> yes? >> i'm just interested when you were talking about everybody going to google. and i noticed that certainly with microsoft in two airs ya -- areas, slowly encroaching upon google's control. i was wonder if people were becoming more aware or separating their searches so that google doesn't have their whole history. and also the battle not only when you mention about higher education, but it's about in the cloud with widows and google for k-12. it's starting when they are little ones. :