The Wall Street Journal interviews one FOI advocate who opposes Google‘s quest to put all newspapers going back to 1888 online. He’s doing that himself, as part of a project sponsored by Yahoo and Microsoft. Coincidence?
Google Inc. made news last week when it said it was launching a service that would allow users to search newspaper archives going back as far as the 18th century. Announcements like that are usually applauded as an advance for the spread of knowledge. But Brewster Kahle, a long-time Internet activist and founder of Internet Archive, had some reservations. We asked him why.
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What’s not to like about Google making so much information freely available?
The opportunity for universal access to all public knowledge is one of the great opportunities of our times. And to the extent that companies are helping us get there, that’s terrific. Google is making great strides in this direction; the basic goal is terrific and their service is actually quite good.
The issue we have with what’s being built is that we are creating what is in effect a private library system. What we want, however, is a public library system, one where we can have many different points of view on the published literature of humankind. What we are actually building might end up being controlled by a single corporation. If this were some other industry — plastic or software — I wouldn’t be as worried about it. But we are taking about the cultural heritage, the intellectual heritage, of humans. And that’s too important to be left to one company.
In this we are in complete agreement. When companies have vested interests in controlling key components of the culture, that’s when a government solution is appropriate. Because a government, however venal and Machiavellian it may be, has a vested interest in the culture itself, and is responsive to the culture as a whole, whereas corporations are sensitive to (and vulnerable to) only the market, one tiny segment of the culture.
If only one such archive is to be built, why let it be in private hands? he asks. My response to that is another question: why not do this as a public project as well. Go ahead, duplicate the effort. Because as we learn on the Internet to our peril, things fall apart. And if the servers themselves don’t belong to you, there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it.
Wasteful? Not really; all those grad students are gonna hafta find co-ops or internships somewhere on the federal dime anyway. Any system administrator will tell you that redundancy can be a source of strength, and any savvy investor will tell you that competition improves quality.
Besides, what are you gonna do when China buys Google?
raincoaster 
I would prefer a dual private project: let the two archives (MSN/Yahoo! and Google) set up in competition with each other. In the information business, accuracy is usually fairly important.
Governments, on the other hand, have a vested interest in control and “data massage”–consider the Japanese history books that gloss over the massacres of Chinese during the run-up to WWII. Or the fact that your Canadian history book rarely mentions infected horse blankets.
Mine, in fact, did, although it was more accurate than blog postings because it didn’t confuse horseblankets with those for humans. Horses don’t get smallpox, you know.
A government is always in competition with the next administration, something which a few decades of experience with the written word have seemingly taught them. They have a vested interest in being transparent enough not to be shown to be complete liars.
Google lasted fewer than seven years before manipulating their results to conform to market forces. Yahoo BEGAN with that premise. At least governments are accountable to all the citizenry, not just the shareholders.
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