Media stereotypes, which include search engine results, not only mask the unequal access to social, political, and economic life in the United States as broken down by race, gender, and sexuality; they maintain it.6 This suggests that commercial search engines, in order to opt out of such traditional racist representations, might want, at minimum, to do something like a “disclaimer” and, at maximum, to produce a permanent “technical fix” to the proliferation of racist or sexist content. Veronica Arreola wondered as much on the Ms. blog in 2010 when Google Instant, a new search-enhancement tool, initially did not include the words “Latinas,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” because of their X-rated front-page results: “You’re Google. . . . I think you could figure out how to put porn and violence-related results, say, on the second page?”7
It is these kinds of practices that mark the consequences of the rapid shift over the past decade from public-interest information to the corporate takeover of U.S. news media, which has made locating any kind of alternative information increasingly difficult and pushed the public toward the web. Equally, media consolidations have contributed to the erosion of professional standards such as fact checking, not misrepresenting people or situations, avoiding imposing cultural values on a group, and distinguishing between commercial and advertising interests versus editorial decisions—all of which can be applied to information provision on the web.8 As the search arena is consolidated under the control of a handful of corporations, it is even more crucial to pay close attention to the types of processes that are shaping the information prioritized in search engines. In practice, the higher a web page is ranked, the more it is trusted. Unlike the vetting of journalists and librarians, who are entrusted to fact check and curate information for the public according to professional codes of ethics, the legitimacy of websites’ ranking and credibility is simply taken for granted. The take-home message is that, when it comes to online commercial search engines, it is no longer enough to simply share news and education on the web; we must ask ourselves how the things we want to share are found and how the things we find have appeared.
A Monopoly on Information
Not enough attention has been paid to Google’s monopoly on information in the most recent debates about network control. The focus on net neutrality in the U.S. is largely invested in concerns over the movement of packets of data across commercial networks owned by the telecommunications and cable giants, which include AT&T, Verizon, DirecTV, and Comcast. Much of the debate has focused on maintaining an open Internet, free from traffic-routing discrimination. In this context, discrimination refers to the movement of data and the rights of content providers not to have their traffic delayed or managed across the network regardless of size or content. Focus on content prioritization processes should enter the debates over net neutrality and the openness of the web when mediated by search engines, especially Google. Over the past few years, consumer watchdog organizations have been enhancing their efforts to provide data about Google’s commercial practices to the public, and the Federal Trade Commission is investigating everything from Wi-Fi data harvesting of consumer data to Google’s horizontal ownership and dominance of web-based services such as YouTube, AdSense, Google Maps, Blogger, Picasa, Android, Feedburner, and so on. Internet service providers have been set back by the recent U.S. court of appeals decision to protect the rights of consumers via maintaining the FCC stance on protecting net neutrality. The decision prevents Comcast from prioritizing or discriminating in traffic management over its networks. Organizations such as the Open Internet Coalition have been at the fore in lobbying Congress for protections from the prioritization of certain types of lawful Internet traffic that multinational telecommunications companies are able to promote, while simultaneously blocking access to their networks by competitors. Quietly, companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter that have high volumes of traffic have backed the Open Internet Coalition in an effort to ensure that they will have the necessary bandwidth to support their web-based assets that draw millions of users a day to their sites with tremendous traffic.
Outside the United States, Google has faced a host of complaints about representations of material culture and identity. In the realm of public information, the former Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton outlined the problematic issues that arose from the Google book-digitization project. In this project, Google digitized millions of books, over ten million as of the close of 2009, opening up considerable speculation about the terms on which readers will be able to access these texts. The legal issues at play at the height of the legal battle included potential violations of antitrust law and whether public interests would prevail against monopolistic tendencies inherent in one company’s control and ownership of such a large volume of digital content.9 Proponents of Google’s project suggested that the world’s largest library will make previously out-of-print and unavailable texts accessible to a new generation of readers/consumers. Opponents were fearful that Google would control the terms of access, unlike public libraries, on the basis of shareholder interests. Further challenges to this project were leveled by France and Germany, which rejected the ownership of their material culture by a U.S.-based company, claiming it is impinging on their national and cultural works.10 They suggested that the digitization of works by their national citizens of the past is an infringement on the public good, which is threatened by Google’s monopoly on information. In 2013, U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin ruled that the Google book project was “fair use,” serving a blow to critics, and in 2015, a hearing of the case was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.11 An appeal to the Second Circuit, New York, affirmed Google’s right to claim fair use. Despite Darnton’s critique, underscored by media scholars such as Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, who has written substantially on the threats of the decision to the legal concept of “fair use,” the verdict underscores the power of Google’s capital and its influence, to the detriment of nations that cannot withstand its move to create the largest digital repository in the world. This includes the ability to own, categorize, and determine the conditions or terms of access to such content. In support of the position against the project before the European Commission, concerns were presented by France that “a large portion of the world’s heritage books in digital format will be under the control of a single corporate entity.”12
Closer to home, with the exception of the Anti-Defamation League’s previously mentioned letter, many protests of Google’s information and website representation have not been based on the way cultural identities are presented, but rather the focus has been on commercial interests in patents, intellectual property, and even page ranking. For example, in 2003, an early lawsuit against Google focused on its prioritization of high-paying advertisers that were competing against small businesses and entities that do not index pages on the basis of the pay-per-click advertising model that has come to dominate experiences of the Internet in the United States. The lawsuit by Search King and PR Network against Google alleged that Google decreased the page rank of its clients in a direct effort to annihilate competition.13 Since Bob Massa, the president of Search King and PR Ad Network, issued a statement against Google’s biased ranking practices, Google’s business practices have been under increased scrutiny, both in the U.S. and globally.
Why Public Policy Matters
Given the controversies over commercial, cultural, and ethnic representations of information in PageRank, the question that the Federal Trade Commission might ask today, however, is whether search engines such as Google should be regulated over the values they assign to racial, gendered, and sexual identities, as evidenced by the types of results that are retrieved. At one time, the FCC enforced decency standards for media content, particularly in television, radio, and print. Many political interventions over indecency and pornography on the web have occurred since the mid-1990s, with the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) being the most visible and
widely contested example, particularly section 230 with respect to immunity for online companies, which cannot be found liable for content posted by third parties. Section 230 is specifically designed to protect children from online pornography, while granting the greatest rights to freedom of expression, which it does by not holding harm toward Internet service providers, search engines, or any other Internet site that is trafficking content from other people, organizations, or businesses—companies such as Google, Facebook, Verizon, AT&T, Wordpress, and Wikipedia—all of which are exempt from liability under the act.14 These were the same protections afforded to Hunter Moore and his revenge-porn site discussed in chapter 4.
The attorney Gregory M. Dickinson describes the important precedents set by a court ruling against the Internet service provider Prodigy. He suggests that the court’s interpretation of Prodigy’s market position was that of a “family-friendly, carefully controlled and edited Internet provider,” which engaged in processes to filter or screen offensive content in its message boards; as such, it “had taken on the role of a newspaper-like publisher rather than a mere distributor and could therefore be held liable.”15 He underscores the importance of the court ruling in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. (1995) that Prodigy’s engagement in some level of filtering content of an objectionable nature meant that Prodigy was responsible and liable. This, he argues, was not Congress’s intent—to hold harmless any platform providing content that is obscene, pornographic, or objectionable by community standards of decency.
Commercial search engines, at present, have been able to hide behind disclaimers asserting that they are not responsible for what happens in their search engine technologies. Yet Dickinson’s study of the law with respect to Prodigy raises interesting legal issues that could be explored in relationship to search engines, particularly Google, now that it has admitted to engaging in filtering practices. What is most apparent since the passage of the CDA in 1996 is that decency standards on the web and in traditional media have been fodder for “the culture wars,” and by all apparent measures, indecency is sanctioned by Congress, the FCC, and media companies themselves. These protections of immunity are mostly upheld by the Zeran v. America Online, Inc. (1997) ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which found that companies are not the responsible parties or authors of problematic material distributed over their hardware, software, or infrastructure, even though section 230 was intended to have these companies self-censor indecent material. Instead, the courts have ruled that they cannot hold companies liable for not self-censoring or removing content. Complicating the issues in the 1996 act is the distinction between “computer service providers” (nonmediated content) and “information providers” (mediated content).16
During the congressional hearings that led to the Federal Trade Commission investigation of Google, the reporter Matthew Ingram suggested in a September 2011 article that “it would be hard for anyone to prove that the company’s free services have injured consumers.”17 But Ingram is arguably defining “injury” a little too narrowly. Searching for “Latinas” or “Asian women” brings about results that focus on porn, dating, and fetishization. What is strikingly similar in the cases of searching for “Jew” and for “black girls” is that objectionable results materialized in Google’s page-ranking algorithm—results that might not reflect the social or historical context of the lives of each group or their desire to be represented this way. However, what is strikingly dissimilar is that Black teenagers and girls of color have far less social, political, or economic agency than the Anti-Defamation League does. Public policy must open up avenues to explore and assess the quality of group identity information that is available to the public, a project that will certainly be hotly contested but that should still ensue.
The Web as a Source of Opportunity
The web is characterized as a source of opportunity for oppressed and marginalized people, with tremendous focus put on closing the hardware, software, and access gaps on the Internet for various communities. Among the most prevalent ideas about the political aspects of technology disenfranchisement and opportunity are theories that center on the concept of the “digital divide,” a term coined in a series of speeches and surveys by the Clinton-Gore administration and the National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration. Digital-divide narratives have focused on three key aspects of disempowerment that have led to technological deficits between Whites and Blacks: access to computers and software, development of skills and training in computer technologies, and Internet connectivity—most recently characterized by access to broadband.18
However true the disparities between Whites and non-Whites or men and women in the traditional articulations of the digital divide, often missing from this discourse is the framework of power relations that precipitate such unequal access to social, economic, and educational resources.19 Thus, the context for discussing the digital divide in the U.S. is too narrow a framework that focuses on the skills and capabilities of people of color and women, rather than questioning the historical and cultural development of science and technology and representations prioritized through digital technologies, as well as the uneven and exploitive global distribution of resources and labor in the information and communication ecosystem. Certainly, the digital divide was an important conceptual framework to deeper engagement for poor people and people of color, but it also created new sites of profit for multinational corporations.20 Closing the digital divide through ubiquitous access, training, and the provisioning of hardware and software does address the core criticisms of the digital technology have and have-not culture in the U.S.; but much like the provisioning of other technological goods such as the telephone, it has not altered the landscape of power relations by race and gender.
Search needs to be reconciled with the critical necessity of closing the digital divide, since search is such a significant part of mediating the online experience. Digital-divide scholars have argued that increased culturally relevant engagements with technology, web presence, and skill building will contribute to greater inclusion and to greater social, political, and economic agency for historically underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed groups.21 This is the thrust of the neoliberal project of “uplift” and “empowerment”—by closing the skill-based gaps in computer programming, for example. These approaches do not account for the political economy and corporate mechanisms at play, and we must ask how communities can intervene to directly shape the practices of market-dominant and well-established technology platforms that are mediating most of our web interaction.22 They also often underexamine the diasporic labor conditions facing Black women who are engaged in the raw-mineral extraction process to facilitate the manufacture of computer and mobile phone hardware. I raise this issue because research on the global digital divide, and Google’s role in it,23 must continue to expand to include a look at the ways that Black people in the U.S. and abroad are participating and, in the case of the United States, not participating to a significant degree in information and communication technology industries.24 This makes calls for “prosumer” participation,25 as a way of conceptualizing how Black people can move beyond being simple consumers of digital technologies to producers of technological output, a far more complex discussion.
George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson at the University of Maryland characterize this emphasis of merging the consumptive and productive aspects of digital engagement as “a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated.”26 The critical communications scholar Dallas Smythe describes this type of prosumerism as “the audience as commodity,” where users are sold to advertisers as a commodity and, in return for “free” services, users are explicitly exposed to advertising.27 Christian Fuchs, the director of the Communication and Media Research Institute and Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies, discusses this accumulation strategy, bols
tered by Google’s users, as a process of both prosumer commodity and audience commodity by virtue of the decentralized nature of the web.28 The intensive participation of people in uploading, downloading, sharing, tagging, browsing, community building, and content generation allows for mass distribution and one-to-many or many-to-many engagements in a way that traditional media could not have done due to its centralized nature.29 In Fuchs’s work on the political economy of Google, he characterizes the unpaid, user-generated content provided by its users as the basis for Google’s ability to conduct keyword searching because it indexes all user-generated content and “thereby acts as a meta-exploiter of all user-generated content producers.”30 Surplus labor is created for Google through users’ engagements with its products, from Gmail to Google Scholar, the reading of blogs in Blogger/Blogspot, the use of Google Maps or Google Earth, or the watching of videos on YouTube, among many of the company’s services.31 The vertical offerings of Google are so great,32 coupled with its prioritization of its own properties in keyword searches, that mere use of any of these “free” tools creates billion-dollar profits for Google—profits generated from both unpaid labor from users and the delivery of audiences to advertisers. Fuchs’s work explicitly details how Google’s commodities are not its services such as Gmail or YouTube; its commodities are all of the content creators on the web whom Google indexes (the prosumer commodity) and users of their services who are exposed to advertising (audience commodity).
We are the product that Google sells to advertisers.
These aspects of software and hardware development are important, and decreased engagements of women and people of color in the high-tech design sector, coupled with increased marginalized participation in the most dangerous and volatile parts of the information and communication technology labor market, have impact on the artifacts such as search results themselves. According to U.S. Department of Labor workforce data obtained by the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request, of the 5,907 top managers in the Silicon Valley offices of the ten largest high-tech companies in 2005, 296 were Black or Hispanic, a 20% decline from 2000.33 Though the scope of this book does not include a formal interrogation of Black manufacturing labor migration to outsourced ICT manufacturing outside the United States, it is worth noting that this phenomenon has implications for participation in industries that shape everything from hardware to software design, of which Google is playing a primary role. As of July 1, 2016, Google’s own diversity scorecard shows that only 2% of its workforce is African American, and Latinos represent 3%. With all of the aberrations and challenges that tech companies face in charges of data discrimination, the possibility of hiring recent graduates and advanced-degree holders in Black studies, ethnic studies, American Indian studies, gender and women’s studies, and Asian American studies with deep knowledge of history and critical theory could be a massive boon to working through the kinds of complex challenges facing society, if this is indeed the goal of the technocracy. From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform34 to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes35 to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia36 and Snapchat’s racist filters,37 there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley impacts its intellectual output.
Algorithms of Oppression Page 17