Whit Andrews

Great news organizations (and lesser ones) have frequently created the role of ombudsman to serve the people who otherwise might not be heard by a giant media power. Such a role serves as a voice for the people to a putative voice of the people. When a media organization is extremely powerful, ombudsman offices temper that power. Google is such a media organization, and like the other major powers in its industry — I would name here particularly Yahoo and Microsoft — it needs an ombudsman.

Organizations and companies with the power and reach of Google benefit substantially from the role of ombudsman, and Google is no exception. Anyone who uses Google for any purpose would benefit from the company’s designating a powerful internal ombudsman to serve as a foil for its power.

The key reason Google needs an ombudsman is that its influence and information store are unprecedented in intellectual history, and so existing controls and models for control are inadequate or insufficient. If Google does not establish a fresh perspective on its own activities, it will fail to detect any impending backlash. Google’s success has benefited consumers, businesses and governments. An ombudsman would help Google protect itself from developing blind ambition. (The same is true for Google’s rivals, both present and future. Facebook, too. Oh, heck, throw in Twitter.)

Previous calls for Google to develop an ombudsman role have gone unheeded. Google is too powerful and too swiftly traveling a trajectory of its own making to continue without an ombudsman to help it see the risks its own size and power create. So, I know bringing this back up may go nowhere, but I intend to pound this drum for a while. Earlier efforts in 2006 and 2007 have gone unanswered. There may have been others I haven’t found. That’s a mistake. Google must stop ignoring its own need — and so should its competitors, their own.

Ombudsman’s offices typically are granted a staff and a guaranteed outlet for the results of investigations and thinking exercises they conduct. In the newspaper industry, that might have been a “column” in which the ombudsman was given the right to write anything he chose about the operations of the paper. He might scold the paper for mistreating a politician, or for failing to respond to a citizen’s plea for help. The job is difficult, but the ombudsman typically is indemnified for all but the most egregious breaches of decorum.

Essentially, the aim is to create a guaranteed public dissenter within the powerful structure of a hegemonic information broker.

With the majority of the world’s search traffic, Google serves as the primary arbiter of information to all Internet users. It is perceived as a great authority. Its ambition extends throughout people’s lives, including their shopping, their advertising, their daily interests, their personal and business correspondence and their business records.

The company’s key dictum is, famously, “Don’t be evil.”

But — and IMHO, this is the tweetbite — How does Google know it is not being evil?

Google has found itself in disputes about photos that allegedly must have been taken while someone trespassing, about allegedly purloined databases, and about unfortunate results for searches on sensitive terms. It regularly apologizes for mistakes it may (or may not) have made. These examples I use are because they are times that Google would substantially benefit from a steady internal critic who could speak externally without nuance — not because I think they are times Google has in fact been evil.

However, because the company is understandably private about its activities, methods and strategies, it is difficult to credit its position on many issues. Google does not have an easy method for reversing apparent injustices — if such a word is even appropriate — in the rank of businesses in search results. (This is generally related to “SEO,” for Search Engine Optimization, the means of trying to affect such rankings.) Nor does it have an active and publicly visible worker aiding it in determining when its ambition is too great or the data it could collect so sensitive that it should abort a project.

Such challenges seem academic or intriguing to enterprises who are not affected. However, such concerns can become real all too quickly. Effective search optimization strategies executed by opponents of companies, governments or individuals can result in reputation damage. Privacy concerns can emerge quickly and escaped information can be irreversible. Most important, Google’s march into innovation raises the risk of effective monoculture across various applications and capabilities. The specter of a single company successfully serving as a gateway to electronic shopping, communications, information location, news and other critical elements is daunting.

The internal watchdog that an ombudsman could become would raise concerns before such potential became irreversible and temper Google’s necessary capitalist drive.

With extremely rare exceptions, actions that look evil to the affected weren’t conducted with evil intent. Again: How does Google know it is not being evil?