No Other Entity

"There is no other entity on the planet that is Google," - Bob Huggins, the founder of Paper of Record

I know, I KNOW information is a commodity and that people who work to create it or organize it or make it accessible should be able to get paid for that. I realize that sort of work is the sort of thing that I, personally, and hoping to get paid a fair salary to do. So why does this article from Inside Higher Ed about Google shutting down access to a database that they paid for, fair and square, give me the willies? I can’t even really say. As I was reading it, I was self-talking myself through it -- mentally nodding and affirming – and I did fine until the end line that I quoted above. I think it’s scary to me to consider how much I rely on Google, and the greater Google Digital Empire they are building/acquiring. Empire-building makes me uncomfortable, even if everything goes OK; you are reading this on a Google product, even. The fact that this acquisition resulted in a loss of access to information that is essential to our neighbor, Mexico, well it just seems really un-neighborly to me, at least.

I think it was Gretchen who talked, one night in class, about how Google isn’t this plucky little underdog anymore, though people (including me, sometimes) forget that they aren’t. They seem fairly benevolent most of the time, but they are undeniably powerful, and they have a huge financial interest in what they do. Power + the potential for gain = trouble for regular folks, most of the time. Libraries are so important because they can protect information, somewhat, from a system of financial interests.