Opinion

Is Google evil?

One virtual supercomputer, tended by one company, is all the world needs.

Or so Google proposes, as it gently, ineluctably, pulls us in. The more we use Google, the less we need computing power on our desk or lap and the less we need any software other than Google's.

From its start, Google has set for itself the mission of organizing all the world's information. Not some. All. In its first 10 years, it has shown no hesitation in tackling the largest scale computing challenges it can find. This company does not scare.

Add enough servers to store 1 trillion Web pages? Done.

Scan every book in print? Well underway.

Create the world's largest photo album - of the entire Earth? No problem.

Become the No. 1 destination for online video? Easy; write a $1.6 billion check, made out to "YouTube."

Secretly develop its own Web browser and catch the tech world by complete surprise? Meet the newborn Chrome.

This year, the most significant announcement for Google was just made: the commercial release of T-Mobile's G1 phone, the first cell phone that uses Android, Google's new operating system for mobile phones. If Android software developers fill in some missing pieces, an Android phone will jump ahead of the iPhone in capabilities and features.

Its significance isn't in comparisons to other phones, however, but in the way it sets Google up for the future. Google already possesses the world's most powerful network of computing machines, harnessed together to function as the world's most heavily used supercomputer. What it needs is a way to bring ever-more users to its services, wherever they happen to be, any place, any time. The limited, cell phone-only versions of software that we have in our so-called "smart" phones will not suffice. Android is intended to bring the Google supercomputer to everyone's palm.

Google is not only assiduously collecting vast archives of information, but is also using its massive computing power to take on more and more software tasks we now use our personal computers for. The company has been making huge investments designed to hasten the shift from computing on desktop and laptop machines to computing in what's being called "the cloud," remote servers whose exact location we never know but can be accessed wherever we have an Internet connection.

Microsoft has seen this shift to cloud computing coming for a long time, but has been slow to adapt. The shift demands that Microsoft move in exactly the opposite direction from that which led it to dominance. Microsoft's founding mission was to put "a computer on every desk and in every home," in essence to decentralize computing, bringing it from the mainframe into our homes. Google is re-centralizing computing.

Which leads to the question, in light of Google's audacious information collecting, why were we ever scared of the Microsoft Evil Empire? At the apogee of Microsoft's power, its ability to know what its customers were doing was nil. Our information was privately stored on our PCs. But if you discard Word and Excel for Google's Docs and Spreadsheets, your files sit on Google's computers. And if you avail yourself of Google's array of other free services, so do your personal calendar, your e-mail, your online shopping history, personal photos, health records and stock portfolio.

It's a certainty more offerings will come. Google has made clear that it has no intention of excluding anything.

Were the federal government to embark on collecting a cross-indexed collection of records of our lives with the same zeal as Google, how comfortable would we feel? Now, take away the accountability and transparency that we demand of our government and put the same information into an impenetrable black box held snugly by a for-profit company. It's a bit unsettling, no?

We've never faced the concentration of personal information in a single institution like this before. We even lack a basic vocabulary for describing the phenomenon: What Google is collecting cannot be measured by "market share," nor does it raise antitrust questions in any conventional sense. Whether we even want to restrict Google's information-gathering activities is a difficult question. One confounding aspect of Google's supercomputer is that the more information it collects, the smarter its algorithm becomes - and the more useful we find its services.

The Googleplex is moving with untiring energy in collecting, processing - and commercializing - our most personal information. The outstanding question that we must consider is whether a privately controlled storehouse of so much personal information constitutes a concentration of power that begs for public oversight.

Trust Us is not an acceptable substitute.