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Google

Birthday blues

Google, which enjoyed its 10th anniversary as a corporation yesterday, has a lot to celebrate. During that short period it has become the most interesting - and powerful - company on the planet. Its search engine, the motor for its vast advertising-generated profits, is the gateway through which most people on the internet gain access to knowledge about practically anything. From this ubiquitous base it has expanded - often by acquisition - to provide for all our web needs, including spreadsheets, email, documents, video (YouTube), blogs, calendars and news. One of its projects is scanning practically every book in the world for our perusal; it has just launched a virtual world to compete with the likes of Second Life; and in a few weeks it will release Android, its operating system for mobile phones, which could be its most important product when mobile devices become our main access to the internet.

Last week it threw another pebble - or maybe boulder - into the pool with the release of a web browser, Chrome, to challenge Microsoft's Internet Explorer (which has more than 70% of the global market). Like other Google consumer products this was free, built with open-source methods and so available for any other browser, including Explorer, to adopt or adapt. This is not philanthropy. It is an each-way bet. If it upsets Explorer's dominance of corporate markets it will be a big victory in Google's aim of establishing an online alternative to Microsoft's 90% armlock on PC operating systems. If it does not, but makes all browsers more effective, then more people will use the web - thereby boosting Google's search-linked advertising.

Google started off as a new kind of corporation that people could actually feel a part of. It had the motto "Don't be evil" - which it now seems to be playing down a bit - and a wonderful mission to make all the information in the world available to anyone. If it succeeds, the whole world will be better-educated. So far it has mainly kept to its principles, despite an ill-advised move to bow to censorship in China. But as it gets bigger, the awesome responsibility of curating the frightening amount of data it collects about us - which the FBI and MI6 can only dream about - becomes overwhelming. Even more urgently, Google's recent deal to let Yahoo adopt its contextual advertising capability means Google could command 90% of the web's contextual advertising. This is a monopoly - and potentially a very unhealthy one. Google, which won admirers through being a David against the Goliath of Microsoft, must be prevented at all costs from becoming a similar monopoly, even though it is giving its products away free.

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