Total Legal Relevance

Siva Vaidhyanathan has written a book highly critical of Google’s practices and impact in the information ecosystem, and has titled his work The Googlization of Everything. My immediate reaction is that it would be useful to put forth a vision of the world where the capital-G Googlization of Everything has been replaced with the small-g googlization of everything; where a company like Google remains incentivized to take the admirable steps it has taken in finding, organizing, and granting access to various information and knowledge sets, but does not gain, through the development of this information platform, the ability to restrict public or private entities from replicating the Google-developed knowledge-sets or organizing these knowledge-sets in new ways. Perhaps this world is already the world we have; perhaps it is not; more likely, we’re somewhere in between. In any case, once the full vision of this world has been conceived and articulated, it would then be useful to rewrite Siva’s book.

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Essentially, this ambition entails decomposing the wholesale task of “googlizing everything” into tasks that can be accomplished by separate entities and then contributed back into a common access pool. Ideally, these entities would not be working at cross-purposes on the task (e.g., by signing multiple contracts with the same libraries to gain access to the books therein), but would instead coordinate their efforts to the extent needed, and no further than that. For instance, most upstream content & goods & media – and some downstream innovations upon these materials – would be deemed part of the commons (the river, the village green, whatever you want to call it) that all would be permitted to innovate upon. This commons would thus grow, although perhaps it would not contain all downstream innovations; rather, it might be delimited by the extent to which innovating parties agreed, in a rough consensus manner, that certain tools and goods were, or were likely to become, essential facilities to further downstream innovation. Designing the governance mechanisms by which this pool of essential facilities could expand and evolve would obviously be… a challenge.