can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story.”^6 A
thousand flowers would bloom in the ether, she implied; we’d
maintain the country’s DNA of innovation, and inner city kids would
get their book reports done. It was similar to PBS hauling out Big Bird
when it wanted its subsidy renewed. Who wants to kill Big Bird?
Indeed, Mayer testified, Google provided “a valuable free service to
online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their
sites.”^7 She sounded disappointed that the New York Times and the
Chicago Tribune weren’t thanking Google for all it had done for them.
Perhaps this was because Google’s “valuable free service” was, in fact,
rapidly gutting the advertising base of the American media—and
rerouting all those revenues to Google.
Never fear, Mayer told Congress, Google has a valuable, although
not free, service for that, too. Publishers, who were increasingly
dependent on Google to source their traffic, could join Google
AdSense, which “helps publishers generate revenue from their
content.”^8
The reality, of course, was that by the 2016 election, information
had become polarized by algorithms that determine your “political
viewpoint and ideology” in a millisecond.^9 In the period after Mayer
delivered her testimony, news publishers—who before Google had no
need for “help” generating revenue—disappeared at an alarming rate.
Meanwhile, Google hoovered up information—about us, about our
habits, about our world—turning its algorithms loose on that
information to bring us more “valuable free services.”
Both Facebook and Google stated, earlier in the decade, that they
would not share information across silos (Facebook to Instagram,
Google to Gmail to YouTube to DoubleClick). However, both lied and
have quietly changed their privacy policies, requiring a specific request
to opt out if you don’t want them to cross-reference your movements
and activity against location and searches. There is no evidence of any
intent beyond the data being used for better targeting. Creepy and
relevance are strongly correlated in the world of digital marketing. To
date, consumers and advertisers have voted with their actions and
expressed that creepy is a price worth paying for the relevance.