And now for a wholly different area of politics. Here’s Google, the mightiest search engine in the universe, struggling to win press friends and get the European Union’s antitrust campaigners off its back. So here, in turn, is £107m (carved from some $66bn in revenues last year) to start a “Digital News Initiative” that will help eight European newspapers (including the Guardian) to devise fresh platform opportunities, train staff and – via the Reuters Foundation – learn more about the good digital things that are happening across the 28 EU nations. Oh, and we’re sorry we haven’t been softer and gentler down the years, a European main man tells an FT conference of the great, good and grateful. What’s not to like?
There’s no instant reason to poll the lucky first eight perhaps – although their initial reaction is a bit suck-it-and-see. Google doesn’t do “nice”. Google is Godzilla, not Paddington Bear. But let’s dig around for theories that might underpin this beneficence.
One is simply what it says on the label. News is content. We at Google need content to aggregate or string ads around. But we don’t do news ourselves: you guys do it for us, and you’re having a rough time. Let us play good Samaritan (up to a finite financial point). Let’s also get closer to publishing ourselves, and to the publishers that count.
Another is spin doctoring. EU politicians are causing us a good deal of grief because they’re responding to the voluble grief of their printed press. But if we give publishers money, maybe they’ll go quiet in turn – and lo! a certain hush does descend. But now, in time-honoured electoral fashion, consider adding complexity to these approaches: the frisson-of-fear factor.
Surely Google is so big, so powerful, that apprehensive frowns never cross corporate faces? Just last week, the Pew Center’s US State of the News Media 2015 report showed that Google still gets 38% of online ads – but look at display, with Google stuck on a 14% share, and mobile, with 12%. Then click over to Facebook, taking 24% of digital display, 37% of mobile display and growing fast. It’s Godzilla versus King Kong, and the omens aren’t heartening. Does Google want to get mired in the kind of antitrust nightmare that took the wind out of Microsoft’s sails and once pushed IBM to the brink?
One answer is to click back through 10 years of Pew reports. Where are the mobile display figures for 2005? There aren’t any. The iPhone came two years later, the iPad two more. Facebook was just starting. Yahoo and AOL were Google’s big rivals. There were other nasties called Monster and Craigslist. And could the New York Times follow the Wall Street Journal and start charging for digital subscriptions? Cue anxious comparisons with cable TV.
It was a different world. But most of the newsrooms that served it are still around. Bricks, mortar and hands on keyboards still have a role. Someone needs to get the news in the first place. Not everything changes utterly. But what changes most of all is corporate hegemony once the flood of entrepreneurial force and technological wizardry subsides.
Impermanence, 10 years on, seems a pretty permanent digital condition, rooted in fractured human relationships as well misfiring money machines. No wonder the ease with which Facebook’s algorithms control the money tap seems just as much threat as a promise. No wonder new challengers such as Twitter suddenly stumble into a wall. No wonder Google needs to be part of the continuing, evolving action. No wonder, up to an profoundly uncertain point, it wants to buy love not war.
