Google makes a market in freely copying and redistributing other publisher’s products. They do not make a deal with the publisher, and they don’t disclose the details of their activities. They don’t respect copyright in the traditional, accepted form, but rather argued for (and apparently won) a special consideration that treats search “snippets” differently than any other excerpt published by anyone else. They have since extended that “permission” over the years. It can be argued that Google has been given a “free pass” by governments, since it is innovating and governments are unsure of the total cost of resisting Google at this time.

Google assumes that publishers will accept referred search traffic from Google as remuneration for the copying and redistribution.

A publisher who does not want to “be in Google” cannot opt out of Google’s program, despite some claims that technical machinations like noindex and robots exclusions are available as options. Each of the published methods to manage your Google appearance has loopholes which Google freely and admittedly exploits whenever the marketplace signals that your content is important. If you mark your content as “off limits” to Google, for example, but others link to it, Google will still show it in the Google index and allow it to be clicked through. Ask any experienced SEO expert how to properly and reliably prevent Google from showing one of your pages to Google’s customers, and you will either be told not to publish it at all, or you will get a convoluted, conditional response that will most likely be very costly to implement at best. The only true way to remove yourself is to block the entire public world from seeing your content, or to engage in spy/counterspy maneuvers with Google’s bots. Why is Google able to get away with that?

Google also, simultaneously, makes a market in advertising on the Internet. Despite the obvious conflict of interest that creates, Google dominates as a profitable company solely because it plays both sides. Virtually all of Google’s revenues come from the advertising side, which is enabled by the scrape, search and display side.  But the conflict is troublesome even for Google. Advocating for what used to be illegal copying and republishing of copyrighted content without permission, while incentivizing publishers who put Google’s ads on such scraped or illegally copied content, Google has created a commercial force that even Google can’t control. Google’s CEO has referred to the post-Google Internet as a “cesspool”, full of junk content. It has become clear during the past year that our public cesspool of junk content is largely funded by Google’s ads.

Google is the hungry snake that has started eating it’s own tail. It can’t stop eating or it will die of malnourishment. But as it eats and eats, the head knows that one day, there will be no more snake to eat.

It sure seems that 2010 will be the year of reckoning for Google. A week doesn’t pass without at least one venture capitalist or entrepreneur showing me a new web strategy designed to exploit Google’s reliance on the cesspool of junk content. Systems are in place to auto-generate massive amounts of junk content with little to no overhead cost nor publishing burden. Dozens to hundreds of “companies” will launch such projects in January alone. Some are capable of achieving a massive scale. All are driven by visions of the millions of dollars in cash their junk sausage grinders will spit out, courtesy of Google’s ads. How can this continue? How can even Google survive such a gold rush?

A few questions the investors in these projects should be asking of the so-called entrepreneurs planning to cash in on the post-Google cesspool we call the Internet:

• If the revenues are expected to come from Google’s advertising, then wouldn’t it be wise to document some sort of business relationship with Google before betting the farm? Obviously Mahalo and Demand Media have formal business relationships with Google to ensure the success of their projects as they scale. Shouldn’t you have similar assurances before stepping in to compete in the cesspool?

• Why has Google worked so hard to prevent the development of cottage industries around Google’s index and search engine, if not to protect its search engine as a stand-alone entity? Won’t such junk content projects similarly threaten Google’s search engine integrity, and thus face a similar resistance from Google?

• What is Google’s hold-back policy for all of these Google Guideline-breaking content plays? It’s one thing to expect Google to continue to allow junk content, but the Google guidelines still prohibit it. Would it not be wise from a risk management point of view, to know if Google can withhold payment for 90 days or whatever, or shut the account and keep the earned revenue without any notice?

• What is the downside risk to building a platform based solely on publishing low-value content monetized with low-value ads? Will the domain get blacklisted in Google one day? Will the company behind the domain be black listed? Will the CEO behind the strategy be blacklisted? Will the venture capital firm, angel investors, or named investors and advisors be blacklisted by Google for future projects?

• How much do other owned businesses rely on the integrity of Google’s search engine and search traffic for revenues? In other words, is poisoning the well with an exploitative fast-money web venture a good idea for the long term?

• What is Google’s personality? How has it traditionally reacted, as an organization, to attempts to exploit its business model on a massive scale? perhaps it would be wise to consider the nature of the shark in the water before jumping in for a swim?

I sense desperation in the hearts of many involved in these ventures. I don’t mean the “we need revenues” desperation of a venture, but a true failure in the creativity and innovation department. A crisis of confidence in entrepreneuring. Maybe that’s an age thing.. is it time for a return to under-30 passionate CEO’s?

Related :

• “Just Make Good Content” is BS http://www.johnon.com/622/seo-pricing.html

• Google’s Brand Arrogance and the Internet Cesspool http://www.johnon.com/617/brand-domains.html

In my twitter stream this morning was a quip about Proctor and Gamble having a new strategy. I clicked through.

I landed on an old-school designed page with a 66 year old woman’s face smiling at me. She was Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the author of the article. It was a Harvard web site. Her bio was monstrous: named professorship at Harvard  Business School, 25 years of experience in strategy consulting to Big Brands, former editor of Harvard Business Review. Listed by a British newspaper as one of the “50 most powerful women in the world”. And she wrote some books.

If you know me, you probably know I was less than impressed. Old school credentials mean little to me. Oh sure 30 years ago you had to be great to be great. But somewhere around 30 or so years ago, you only had to be better than someone else to be great. More recently, you merely had to know someone great, to be great. Lately, it seems you simply have to say how great you are, to be great. And anyone can write a book… even people who don’t write their own books are book authors. Best sellers? You can pre-sell your way to the best seller list today. There’s even a search marketing book selling for twenty something dollars that is practically famous for including a $200 advertising credit for Microsoft’s AdCenter system. What profit-minded web marketer would not buy a $20 book that includes a $200 rebate? I expect that author to publish claims of his “best selling book author” status any day now.

Ms. Kanter’s article says Proctor and Gamble is revamping business strategy around values. Reaching out to the consumers, to understand their modern value systems, and speaking to those values with innovative new products. Making their world a better place. Sound familiar?

We saw this generations ago (or last week on Mad Men for you young ‘uns), and almost every day since. Corporations telling us how their products improve our world. Unfortunately, those corporations exploited every available opportunity along the way. They would improve one aspect of life with a consumer product, and exploit every other aspect of life that was not being monitored.If the people were ignorant of some other aspects of their miserable or soon to be miserable lives, the corporation would exploit that in the profit equation. They sell one product that makes life better, while making life much worse (in the long run) through the manufacturing and selling that same product.
If a community used drinking glasses in the school cafeteria, that could be spun as expensive, dangerous, and unsanitary. Glasses can break. Unsanitary meant germ-fostering. Germs are a problem, so getting rid of germs would improve quality of life. Viola.. a values-driven business strategy to sell disposable cups to school systems. It would not require a hard sell, just some marketing. Any responsible parent would choose germ-free over unsanitary. As long as the community didn’t know that bleaching process used to make white paper cups would destroy their rivers and streams, or that the foam used in foam cups would require the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and never degrade once “disposed” of, the corporation would profit from the matching of product to values. No one counted carbon molecules, and to this day no one measures the local water consumed to produce products shipped outside of the local community. Exploitation. It’s profitable. No one considered how glass was sanitary itself, glass could be recycled locally, and no one did a factual risk analysis for broken glasses. None of that was profitable.

Now Ms. Kanter tells us Proctor and Gamble is at it again. She cites an example from colorful far away India. She tells us “In India, about half of men’s shaves are done in barbershops where barbers break double-sided blades in two and use them repeatedly. (Ouch! Unsanitary and bloody inconvenient.)”

Contrary to Ms. Kanter’s apparent assumptions, I read that example as rather sustainable. According to my values (based here in the US, like the “Himalaya Team” at Proctor and Gamble, which is based in Boston), I’d rather see a metal razor blade re-used than see a disposable, plastic-handled Gillette razor thrown into the trash to be dumped in a landfill next to a (former) trout stream. Ms. Kanter reports that Gillette has innovated a new razor product to match the Indian community’s values. She tells us “The team’s razor-and-blade innovation, they report, involves simplification to the essential features to do the job, an affordable cost through manufacturing innovations, and new way to reach lower-income shavers. They preach health as well as grooming benefits.”

India is a country fraught with water problems and economic growth issues. Is it wise for them to adopt some new Gillette disposable razor system, no matter how much better it is than it used to be? Do we know anything about actual sanitation risks of barber-wielded razors? I would think a shaky-handed barber would go out of business pretty quickly. Think about this…. if half of the shaves in India are done by barbers, that’s local money going through local commerce. A self-employed tradesman could actually live without working for a corporation at minimum wage. If they buy Gillette disposables, the money goes through channels to overseas companies, and the garbage stays local. So does the packaging garbage. The barbers will have to take jobs at Wal-Mart (stocking the shelves with Gillette razors?). Haven’t we already learned the pitfalls of this type of global commerce? Aren’t today’s value systems already aware of the evil of this sort of “making lives better through consumer products” approach? And Ms. Kaner calls this new and innovative?

I have no doubt Proctor and Gamble will succeed. It’s “too big to fail”. There will always be a community ignorant of the exploits and willing to adopt the products, believing the marketing and hoping for a better life. There will always be corrupt or selfish government officials willing to trade away their people’s well being for incentives (While advising corporations, Ms. Kanter notes the importance of earning “favorable treatment from government”).

But I also believe that today, more than ever, the consumer is in a position to tell these corporations how they need to make their products. Those Indian men are already saying “it is good to visit the local barber for a shave. It is good to have strong community, and to reduce waste and support local commerce.” Ms. Kanter says P&G is listening and innovating. I disagree. It seems to me P&G is listening and maneuvering, trying to work around the changing value systems because profits are down and they need to sustain global growth in order to continue to please shareholders and support executive at P&G and on Wall Street. I suspect that if P&G had done research to show there were real sanitation concerns associated with the use of re-usable razors in barber shops in India, those barbers would address the root problems of cleanliness. They would have to, in order to keep their customers. But I doubt P&G could sustain profitability selling such minimal solutions into that market. After all, the real reason those barbers are not using disposable razors now is probably cost, not environmental awareness.

We, you and I, not corporations, need to lead the front on values. The Internet and Social Media, especially, helps educate everyone and eliminate the pockets of exploitable communities. It helps get the word out in both directions… what works, and what does not. Where there is no Internet, there can be people carrying knowledge of how the rest of the world works.You and I need to discuss openly, in public, what works and what does not. The conversation needs to take place in the open, not behind closed doors in some research and development department of a consumer products corporation.

Our world has gotten smaller. Do you have any idea where your garbage goes today? We won’t always have overseas garbage dumps for our toxic waste. We won’t always have ignorant communities with corrupt politicians willing to trade the health and welfare of their people for American dollars. It was practically yesterday that some were suggesting we dig holes in the arctic ice and bury our waste, yet already that ice is melting and the ice caps are breaking up. Where would that buried waste be now? The ocean has already begun to regurgitate the trash we’ve been dumping into it for the past 70 years. Where will it go now? Who will clean it up?  I guarantee it won’t be Proctor and Gamble or Gillette.

HarvardBusiness.org is old school, and Ms. Kanter is old school, and as a former editor at Harvard and current consultant to big brands, she will get her stuff published. But that doesn’t mean it’s good or worthy even. And you don’t have to buy it, or read it. And most of all, you don’t need to put it into my Twitter stream. Instead, tweet something valuable. I’ll retweet it if you do. Together, we can lead on values, and perhaps keep one step ahead of the “innovators” at places like Proctor and Gamble as they seek new exploits to drive their profits. Perhaps most intriguing of all is the idea that maybe, if not today then someday soon, there will be better odds of a barber in India reading Twitter than an executive at Proctor and Gamble reading Twitter. Wouldn’t that be great? That would lead to innovation, for sure.

For years I’ve pointed out that Google consistently acts to disintermediate web publishers. For years I’ve noted how Google, while saying that we are all friends, reliably “improves” Google’s services in ways which force webmasters to eliminate their own interest in the dissemination of what they publish. The “nickels from Google” may add up to tens of thousands of dollars for some publishers, when you aggregate all those hard-earned page views and ad clicks, but the profits are not sufficient to support publishing. They support Google, and they support aggressive innovators (right now). Google has us all in the cross hairs. We are the future profit sources for Google.

One tactic of any PR machine is to engage the enemy in conversation. Debate even. It keeps everyone busy. There is so much to talk about… microformats being one huge current trend supported by Google, which serves to quite effectively disintermediate publishers. “Please wrap your content into neat little tags, so we can easily parse it” asks Google. The nickels will come soon enough.. rewards for compliance. And the scammers innovators will go “all in” on the new opportunities, and we’ll see pictures on DailyBooth of big fat smiles with big fat Google checks, and pictures of Yachts named “Google Me” and Maserati’s and Bentley’s and bling bling bling buy my program and learn how you, too can profit from Google!

If I start debating these things, I’ll be distracted. I won’t be able to also see the forest… to see the impending damage on the horizon. Everyone is amazed at Google’s progress. Meanwhile, the real issues of economic stability and industry infrastructure are secondary to the awe with which technology (led by Google) decimates our work environments. Google’s amazing. Our modern civilization is only hundreds of years old, but in that past if any “company” had ever worked to wipe out industries and destroy people’s livelihoods, they would have faced mobs with pitchforks. People would have been scared, politicians motivated, and war machines activated. Of course they probably would have been overrun and decimated by a beast as powerful as Google, but they would not have been blind to their fate as we seem to be today.

It’s easy to write an article about how amazing or how ominous Google is. It’s hard to figure out just how bad this will get for all of us non-Googlers (i.e. people who don’t work for Google). Of course Google (the machine) would love us to keep busy like that.

Everytime someone from Google speaks, we need to listen carefully. Eric Schmidt’s latest comments reported by TechCrunch include this little gem. He was asked to look 10 years out, and what the future Google looks like. He answers that Google will determine the best, most authoritative site for a given question, read it, and summarize it back to the Google user as “the answer”:

“So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time…what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site [the definitive authority on a particular searched query] and then summarize what it says, and answer the question”

I cut out some because the answers were reported almost verbatum, with roundabout thoughts and an example in the middle. Read it for yourself if you like.

Eric Schmidt, the guy who thinks Wikipedia is the greatest gift to mankind ever created by man, has web publishers (and domain owners) in his cross hairs. If Google succeeds, no one needs a domain name and no one needs to create a brand. They just need to submit to Google, and then, perhaps if Google has not completely satisfied the users with “the answer”, provide a way to be contacted or a server IP for a web site for further reading (perhaps through the Google Profile conduit).

Eric Schmidt is a technologist, and geeks (relatively speaking) are poorly schooled in political and social aspects of reality. But is he really clueless? He’s CEO of one of the world’s most powerful companies. . I can’t believe he’s dumb enough to not think through the eventual outcome of his aggressive behavior… that he hasn’t considered that this is not a technological world, but a world of people. That people need to get along and compromise, and that we have been lucky enough to evolve a fragile economy based on our human interactions (not computer transactions) with less than the possible amount of war waging. Some call that “civilization”.

Civilization requires a ton of work, and most of that work is “talking”. History shows us that failure of communications, refusal to talk,  failure of educataion with respect to tolerance and cultural differences, and strong arm approaches that devalue human interaction and force a will upon others, lead to unreasonable behavior (terrorism, war, disobedience, etc). Does Eric Schmidt think the world is ready for one global economy and culture? Does he think the masses are so educated and appreciative of knowledge that they will choose one great website for answers at a cost of say food for their families or stable employment?

Ten years out is 2019. Many of you will be “mid career” by then. Between now and then, are you prepared for a Google that collects, analyzes, and summarizes what you publish, using your work to serve 80% of the world’s Internet users without your involvement? Think about it. Just how much are you giving away by allowing Google to own the Internet?