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r.m. vaughan: q&a

Like you and about half a billion other people around the world, I use the search engine Google every day - for everything from e-mail and shopping to finding the location of, well, any place on Earth. Since its inception in 1997, Google has become the world's largest dot.com company, one of the world's most recognizable brands, and possibly the greatest library ever assembled.

According to filmmaker Ted Remerowski's fascinating new documentary Google World (debuting on CBC-TV's Doc Zone on Feb. 11 at 9 p.m.), the corporation has a mind-bending 300-year plan to put all known information into digital "clouds," virtual warehouses run by its spooky, HAL 9000-like mega computers. And that plan gives Remerowski reason to pause, because when Google says "all information," it means everything about you and me as well.

Who, Google World asks, will monitor Google's relentless advance into the minutiae of our lives? Is it healthy for so much information to be in the hands of a single corporation? To whom, if anyone, is Google accountable, and what are the implications of its insatiable appetite?

Google World is not designed to scare viewers away from their laptops, but it will make people reconsider their relationship with the seemingly omniscient entity (don't pretend you have never Googled yourself). The title of the film might be more prophetic than even Remerowski suspects.

What's the latest on Google's spat with China?

As of this morning?

It's that dynamic?

Yes. As of this morning, Google thinks that there was some inside help, from Google China, with the cyber attack. As to the spat in general, one of the things I've learned about Google is don't predict anything about what they're going to do or how they're going to react. My guess, and I shouldn't even guess, is that they'll come up with some kind of accommodation. But it's a sucker's game to try to guess what goes on there. It's complicated: there's Google China and then there's Google.com, and if you really want to, you can jump over the "great firewall" in China and get to Google.com. It takes a little finagling, but it's not as if people in China are totally shut out. The Chinese could shut out Google completely, but it would be difficult to do, if you want to be a nation that is on the Internet. Censoring is a tough job.

The 300-year plan sounds monomaniacal, to say the least, but is there anything inherently wrong with wanting to create a "world library"?

Absolutely not. It's a great concept. The difficulty is that you're talking about all intelligence, [but]held by whom? And how is it being used? Google claims that it is transparent and open, but what I discovered is that when you're talking about their intellectual property, they are not transparent. They keep everything very close to the chest. What happens when they have all the knowledge at their disposal? That's the question. Now, it's not going to be a question we're going to have to answer, because it's 300 years away, but they are moving in that direction, and as they keep getting more and more information, you've got to ask yourself: Are we getting access to that information? Are they doing something with that information that we don't know? Who knows? What do you do when you have the smartest guys in the room holding such enormous clout over data?

Won't Google's plans make it more powerful than any government? No government has the resources to do what Google is doing.

Absolutely. Here's an interesting thing: Google was able to track the flu epidemic. They created this service where you could punch in and see how your area is doing - they called it Flu Trends. Well, tell me which government agency has that information as quickly as Google does?

Google could argue that, in a case like Flu Trends, they are doing a better job and they are happy to share the information, so everybody wins.

Well that's terrific - when it's good stuff. The difficulty, again, arises when, for instance, what if it's stuff the government doesn't want people to know, or that we don't want the government to know? If Google wants to be transparent or not, there's no organization that can force them to be transparent. There's no agency out there, no government power. Yes, the U.S. government has the Patriot Act, which is a bludgeon, and the scariest part of that act is that the U.S. government can go to Google and say, "We want information about whoever, and you, Google, cannot tell that whoever that we are looking into them, and you, Google, cannot tell anyone that the U.S. government asked." As long as that sits there, where is the transparency?

What is your sense of Google's corporate culture? They sell themselves as a benign service.

I think that's the one of the biggest challenges for Google now. They've moved from being a start-up, where everybody knows everybody, to having 20,000 employees. That changes you, it changes your priorities, and maybe changes your values. I don't know. Again, I think it's one of those things that the people running Google must be constantly talking about: How do we keep the start-up mentality?

Where does your distrust of Google come from?

Well, ah, it's not distrust. I would say it is concern, there's a concern that there is no way to really monitor Google. It's all well and good right now, the "founders," as they are known, are still running the shop, but at some point they're going to have to let somebody else run the place. Who's going to take over, and are they going to keep that same original philosophy? If Google becomes the super corporation it plans to be, who is running the show?

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