Of course, the conquest of omne scibile—“everything knowable”—has been a cornerstone of many utopian projects, from Edward Bellamy’s passionate call for accessible and resourceful libraries in Looking Backward to H.G. Wells’s idea of the “World Brain,” which he described as “a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing, and release of knowledge.” But those were abstract prototypes. Google has actually delivered the infrastructure. Utopians dream, Googlers code. And unlike the Mundaneum—the Belgian initiative, in 1910, to gather and classify all the world’s knowledge to create a “permanent and complete representation of the entire world” (and house it in just one building in Brussels!)—Google is far more realistic, striking partnerships with university libraries over their existing collections. Whatever happens to its troubled book-scanning initiative, the company has already deprived technophobes and cultural conservatives of their key arguments against digitization: it seems that creating a global digital library will not take forever and will not cost a fortune. For this we must be grateful.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin fashion themselves as heirs to Diderot and D’Alembert rather than to Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch. And conversely, Google’s founders view any opposition to Google as the work of reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces that would like to keep the world’s knowledge to themselves. That the world at large refuses to recognize the purity of their intentions must be a real drain on their psyches. So they have no choice but to shed their idealism and opt for pragmatism—and they do not hide their disgust at this option. Having realized that there are entrenched social and business interests that Google is bound to disrupt, and that the public may not always see such disruptions as valuable (let alone inevitable), Google is aggressively beefing up its lobbying operations in Washington and launching a charm offensive in European capitals. Where ten years ago it would rush into taking an uncompromising stance and fight to the last click, today it is likely to strike backdoor deals, often angering millions of its fans in the process.

For all its uniqueness, then, Google is also increasingly beset by the same boring problems that plague most other companies. Google does a terrible job at integrating all of the start-ups it acquires, greatly alienating their founders. With the rise of companies such as Facebook and Twitter, Google is no longer the most appealing Internet company to work for—nor is it the best paid, with hundreds of talented engineers jumping ship to hotter start-ups. (Earlier this year, Google reportedly offered $50 million and $100 million in stock grants to prevent two of its engineers from departing for Twitter.)

Will Google’s exceptionalism prove to be short-lived? The company was shaped by the early Internet culture—with its emphasis on openness, mutual aid, and collaboration—and so far it has embodied the spirit of that culture remarkably well. For much of its existence, Google’s corporate interests—maximizing the number of online users and minimizing Internet censorship—roughly coincided with those of the general Internet public. Moreover, Google understood the Internet much better than either Apple or Microsoft, its two more mature competitors: theirs was a world of gadgets and software, not of blogs, links, and eyeballs. But set against the giants of the 1970s—the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard—both Apple and Microsoft seemed as exceptional as Google did in the early 2000s, and that did not last very long. Few think of Microsoft or Apple today as being in the business of “doing good things for the world” (even though Bill Gates is trying to make up for all those lost years with his foundation). Had Apple or Microsoft come up with Google’s current plan to scan all of the world’s books back in the 1970s, would we feel comfortable granting them such authority, knowing what we do know about them today?