Google's ultimate undoing will not be some grassroots Web3 uprising, but something we can sum up in one word: content. And the content crisis has already begun.
Are you watching? If you've blinked at all since the summer you might have missed at least part of Google's desperate, ongoing quest to recover some semblance of quality in its search results. In recent weeks we've seen an unprecedented series of major updates to Google's search ranking algorithms, and it looks like the Californian behemoth is not stopping until the results pages start looking like someone gives a hoot.
AI WOES
The problem of the moment? Among other things, artificial intelligence. AI is now so clever and widely available that spammers can simply scrape the Internet, automatically re-word what they find, and mass-publish it without any worries about plagiarism or duplication.
"It would not be an exaggeration to say that Wikipedia has done everything it could possibly get away with doing to deny the prosperity of its sources."
DEATH BY MM-WHAT?
If you web-search the acronym MMC, I'm sure you'll find every trivial meaning you could possibly conceive. What you almost certainly won't find, is the meaning that resonates above all others within the cybertech cartel.
Google and Startpage will lead you to a Wikipedia (where else?) disambiguation, citing nearly 70 possible interpretations for MMC, but mysteriously excluding the one that most matters to Wikipedia. The one which, indeed, defines Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo gives us a top result of Marsh McLennan, a couple of nice little plugs for Microsoft (obviously), and, oooh, a Free Dictionary rundown, giving us over 140 possibles. But alas, once again, the one we want is absent.
"The public tolerance for Big Tech as an unelected, global government has all but worn through. Big Tech is NOT the government and it needs to be restrained with laws. In the fullness of time, no one will stop those laws from being made, so it's time for us to lobby for our own interests - not the interests of psychopaths who regard us as 'dumb fucks'."
It's coming. Change is in the air. In the works: a new digital world in which large distributors of online content can no longer rely on naive, 1990s laws to absolve them of responsibility for the content's effects.
We can't yet feel its presence, but we can see the embryo of reform emerging. Instances of massive tech platforms self-serving on the back of third-parties' misbehaviour have been way too relentless to write off as some prolonged blip. There's a crisis of public tolerance, and far from cooling off, it's hotting up. Politicians are showing more determination than ever before to tackle Big Tech's systemic abuse of safe harbours like US Section 230 and the DMCA OCILLA Section 512.
"Look at this!... That's over FOUR MILLION Google results for people on YouTube EXPLICITLY saying they're in breach of copyriđght, and yet, oh look, the videos are still up."
[UPDATE: July 2022] When I wrote this post, I was duped, as are so many people, into believing that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a representative of the public interest.
After much investigation, it's become abundantly clear that the EFF is in truth a tech industry shill, lobbyist and litigation resource, built around an aggressive anti-copyright/anti-patent drive, which has been at the org's core for decades. The more you look at the EFF's litigation record, the more horrific the scale of its commitment to destroying intellectual property rights becomes.
The EFF is Silicon Valley's own weapon of war against any and all intellectual property rights that inconvenience elite cybertech's seize-all, gatekeep-all game of monopoly.
The EFF should not even be seen as a singular entity. It is part of an organised and deeply-affiliated cartel of elitist "champagne nonprofits" which collectively, manipulatively, advocates the brutal exploitation of artists and creators, and is driven from the back seat by Google. Other names in the cartel include Wikimedia, Internet Archive and Creative Commons.
But since the title of this post singularly references the EFF, let me give an example of an abuse that encapsulates the individual org's true regard for content creators...
In 2001, the Electronic Frontier Foundation set up a site called Chilling Effects, expressly to publicise and shame copyright holders who served Google with DMCA takedown notices. The cast-iron intention behind this thuggish move was to discourage creators from exercising their legal rights, by displaying their private actions to a baying mob of anti-copyright anarchists, whom the EFF knew would sometimes attack. That was the point of the site. To establish a punishment for victims of copyright infringment who sought rightful remedy. To create fear among victims of theft.
Whilst, if I were writing this post today, it would have a much more aggressive tone, and would assert that WE DEFINITELY DO NOT NEED THE EFF, I'll leave the document as a reminder of how easy it is to believe that even the most abusive actors have honourable intentions... [End of update]
It's inevitable. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act's “safe harbour” is always going to be championed by the tech oligarchs who exploit it to steal content by proxy. But bizarrely, it's also advocated by a lot of highly-respected people and organisations. One such example is the Electronic Frontier Foundation - more often cited by its abbreviation, the EFF.
As perceived by the public, the EFF is firmly against the abuses perpetrated by big tech. It's an organisation that small contributors to the Web desperately need. But it supports the DMCA safe harbour, and in so doing it awards licence to massive, multi-billionaire corporations to steal content by proxy. To exploit the small creatives who produce that content - many of whom have incredibly low incomes.
Big tech has not only knowingly exploited impoverished creatives to fuel and feed its multi-billion dollar advertising machine. It has also deliberately vilified copyright holders who have the nerve to insist that their creative work is not casually thrown around the Internet for other people's gain. How? By labelling their efforts to stop the grand banquet of content theft, as “censorship”.
If you thought that privacy, decentralisation or free speech was going to drive the next big social media sensation, you were wrong. Anti-piracy on the other hand... Well...
It’s a telling trait that advancement within the different disciplines of technology has been unequal. Perhaps most telling of all, is the gaping chasm in progress between the tech giants’ ability to keep track of a person, versus their ability to keep track of stolen content.
Although big tech treats these two realms of progress as though they’re completely different disciplines, they actually use exactly the same principles. So the tools to eliminate online piracy already exist. They’re just rarely used. And the reason they’re so rarely used? Big tech is a pirate. Big tech loves piracy, and it defends its right to host pirated content by persistently derailing proposed anti-piracy laws.
The amount of money the tech giants have spent on lobbies and campaigns to block anti-piracy laws (which they always somehow manage to re-frame as “censorship bills”) is astronomical. So this is not a case of those tech giants simply not caring enough about piracy to stamp it out. It’s a case of those tech giants being ruthlessly committed to facilitating piracy.
Evidently, without that elusive change in the law, an internet which is anti-piracy by design is not going to be built from the top down. But could it be built from the bottom up?
Post a photo on the free internet, and by default its copyright will be twisted into a knot of "yes but"s and "you have to expect"s. Here's the "Actually, NO!" you were looking for...
One of most common things I see when I look at the average photographer online, is a person who truly has no concept of how grotesquely they’re being screwed over. I’ve said before that I despair when I see photographers accepting as normal a situation where they have to pay to contribute their work to the internet. But in this three and a half thousand word epic, I’m going to delve much deeper into the kit of psychological tools, used by big tech, to turn the web's most important contributors into the most unsung. And then I’m going to discuss some solutions…
The internet has deliberately been engineered to devalue photos, whilst at the same time using them to front nearly everything the web has to offer. And when I say front it, I don’t just mean appear at the top. I mean literally drive it. Photos are about 90% of the value of £billions worth of online content. Alongside provocative titles and egotistical lure, they’re one of the key push systems of traffic to some of the web’s most lucrative domains.
One might imagine that would be good news for the photographer. But because of the way the internet is set up, it’s the exact opposite. It’s very bad news indeed.
