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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/google-rigs-its-results-say-critics-at-senate-antitrust-hearing.ars
http://www.benedelman.org/hardcoding/

From its inception, Google’s motto “don’t be evil” has been the topic of many conversations. However, the topic of late has not been about Google’s righteous ways but rather their questionable business practices.

Imagine days prior to Google where information was more than just a click away. Every person was part of a heavily localized network. The pathways of information flow before 1998 could be thought of as distinct clusters with high clustering coefficients. This graph closely resembles ones we’ve seen in class where there are multiple groups of close friends and relatively few bridges between the groups. In the real world, the friend groups are represented by geographical regions such as towns or cities and the local bridges symbolizes important links between these cities such as import/export agreements. This means there exist certain people/nodes in these cities who’re highly connected thus putting them in a very powerful position. On the contrary, there are also people with very few connections therefore causing them to be in very weak bargaining positions. However, this has been the way in the world of business for centuries and there are always powerful and weak nodes. The key is that there has never a node that is powerful in all of the clusters. It has been impossible to be the dominant node in each geographical region simply because of the sheer distance separating them.

At least that was the case 10 years ago. When Google first entered the graph, it started off as a single node with few connections. Slowly it increased its interactions its neighbors, and before long, it entered into an exponential feed back cycle of growth where it began connecting to every other node in the network. Today, it acts as a central node in one of the most important networks of all time.

Google’s role in the internet has brought on many positive changes. Nodes previously in weak positions can now go through the super node (Google) and bargain with nodes on the other side of the world. The amount of information flow and potential opportunities Google has created is uncountable. On the other hand, as people and business become more reliant on Google, we are putting ourselves into increasingly weaker positions where as Google’s position is becoming exponentially stronger. By relying on a central node as a middle man for all of our communications, we are slaves to its own rules and definitions of fairness. The traditional ways of bargaining no longer applies when a node has so much power over all the other nodes in the network. As depicted in the articles, if Google decides to sever a single node’s connection to the giant component, it is nearly impossible for that node be noticed and gain any traction in the market place. This creates a world where business’s dependence on Google is no longer out of interest but rather out of necessity for survival.

This sort of power does not lead to network stability as we are noticing more and more law suits and investigations targeted towards Google’s practices. When a node is connected to so many people, it can not only influence everyone’s actions but also have its own actions cross examined by many others. The future of this giant graph is not predictable by any means but any changes to the central node is bound to have significant impacts on millions of people.

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