European concern for the commercial and cultural dominance of Google’s universal library
The Institute for the Future of the Book discusses the new book by Jean-Noel Jeanneney,
i.e. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: a View from Europe.
They dismiss the cultural concerns of the French National Library director, showing the multilingual basis of the Google project, but sympathise with the concern for the commercial dominance of public culture. Below a significant excerpt, but the whole entry and subsequent comment-discussion is worth reading:
“Still, the “driven by commercial interests” part of Jeanneney’s attack is important and on-target. I worry less about the dominance of any single language (I assume Google wants to get its scanners on all books in all tongues), and more about the distorting power of the market on the rankings and accessibility of future collections, not to mention the effect on the privacy of users, whose search profiles become company assets. France tends much further toward the enlightenment end of the cultural policy scale — witness what they (almost) achieved with their anti-DRM iTunes interoperability legislation. Can you imagine James Billington, of our own Library of Congress, asserting such leadership on the future of digital collections? LOC’s feeble World Digital Library effort is a mere afterthought to what Google and its commercial rivals are doing (they even receive private investment from Google). Most public debate in this country is also of the afterthought variety. The privatization of public knowledge plows ahead, and yet few complain. Good for Jeanneney and the French for piping up.”
