Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Unstoppable Big Brother?

Thursday, July 19, 2007

In my summer retreat from that feverish media capital, New York, I felt I’d gained a bit of distance on some hot controversies. Like for instance the supposedly “Do No Evil” crowd at Google and the mounting doubts over how committed it really is to its users’ interests, not least their internet security and their privacy. I personally felt pretty safe anyway, having trusted in a security service provided for at least my email accounts by Postini, the whizzy 8-year-old company based in San Carlos, California.

Imagine my chagrin, or at least my quizzical apprehension, to discover that Postini is now suddenly owned (for the outlay of $625 million) by that ever-expanding giant, Google itself.

Many are disquieted by such unstoppable corporate growth. An earlier Google acquisition, dating back inauspiciously to Friday the Thirteenth (of April) when the search-engine goliath spent an even larger sum, $3.1 billion, to buy the 11-year-old, often intrusive web-advertiser called Doubleclick, has raised hackles in the US Senate. Its Judiciary Committee is now devoting a hearing to the acquisition, probably next week.

And across the Rotunda, Congressman Bobby Rush (Democrat of Illinois) is also determined on a hearing - in his case, of the House Sub-committee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection - although (despite his impatient name) he's not scheduling it until the Fall. His office tells me he's busy preparing to address thoroughly the main issues raised by the takeover - the dangers of a business monopoly and of Big Brotherly invasion of consumer privacy.

The internet is perpetually portrayed as an idealistic community of democratizing sharers of information. It’s also seen as a constantly switching game of poachers and gamekeepers - and has been ever since, or perhaps even before, the term “e-commerce” was invented. So I feel on balance that we are right to be on our guard about businesses who use the ‘net as a tool to reach and of course to multiply their customer-base, and in particular on our guard about internet marketers. It’s wise to be wary of the rhetorical notion quite often put about that we are all one big family, “ordinary” internet users and corporate users both.

Read the parochial publications of the trade - electronic newsletters with names like E-Mail Insider, Marketing to Emerging Majority Consumers (meaning the US Hispanic community, of course), or Behavioral Insider (- and whose behavior are they studying? - yours and mine, of course) and you'll gain insight into the real motives and methods of this medium’s commercial practitioners.

Just one example, complete with a revealing them-and-us attitude, came this week in Tuesday’s edition of Online Media Daily, where editor Joe Mandese had a story about consumer understanding, or non-understanding, of “cookies” - those oh-so-innocently-named bits of coding that get planted in our hard-drives and enable marketers and researchers to track our every move, just about, around the internet. The piece was summarized in the newsletter’s contents-list with the following words:

“Awareness of cookies has increased significantly among consumers over the past two years, but most are still ignorant about the actual role they play in the online industry … The good news for industry pros is that consumers are equally ignorant in their ability to delete cookies”.

Bully for every single “industry pro” who rejoices in such good news.



ON THE OTHER HAND, THERE ARE BUSINESS NET-USERS OUT THERE who display some saving grace – not least in their use of eye-catching, entertaining presentation. In E-mail Insider this week, marketing pundit David Baker, a vice-president at the recently Microsoft-acquired Avenue A – Razorfish site-building agency, acknowledges that:

“We often get so entrenched in our worlds of digital marketing we forget to be a consumer”.

And so to correct this, Baker presents a real-world take on that bane of all our lives as consumers - e-mailed SPAM. He in fact offers what he calls “a refreshing perspective”, the thoughts of one Cynthia Edwards, a freelance writer who blogs from Texas. (Coincidence of the week -- my talented sister Julie Tereshchuk, at www.jtworld.biz, provides similar services and more, from the state capital, Austin).

What Edwards composed about the inescapability of marketers’ e-stalking doesn’t much grab me (I can say, perhaps unsurprisingly but also quite objectively, that my sister writes much better) but the headline that sits atop her and Baker's pieces is simply delightful:

"HOW MUCH SPAM CAN CAN-SPAM CAN?"

The wit here refers, as I’m sure you’ll know, to the federal law intended to limit unwanted email material in our inboxes - the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. This law’s name in itself exemplifies some deft work by Congress’s version of headline-writers. Naming the Act became an exercise in retrospectively, and frankly a bit convolutedly, applying an acronym-based rationale to the once purely fanciful (and Monty Python-inspired) SPAM label, and of course to the process of canning the offensive material.

The legislation’s official name became “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act.

Someone on the staffs of sponsoring Senators Ron Wyden (Democrat from Oregon) and Conrad Burns (Republican of Montana – but now out since November 2006) deserves a small comedy award, or at least a crossword prize.



JUST TO RECALL MYSELF FROM THIS UNWONTED MOOD OF GENTLE indulgence (purely the product of summering amid country delights, I assure you) I should also remember how that self-same Republican-dominated 108th Congress completely failed to pass other internet legislation before it. Losses included laws intended to control the advertising industry’s “spyware”, notably the kind of software that gets some control of your computer and displays advertisements on your screen related to what it discovers from spying on you.

Newer attempts have since been made at meaningful regulation, most recently the Internet Spyware (I-SPY) Prevention Act of 2007, passed by the House in May this year and now referred to the Senate’s Judiciary Committee; and the Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act of 2007 (SPY ACT, geddit? - but this acronym thing is now getting very tired). This second bill has also been referred to a Senate committee, this time for Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Seasoned Capitol Hill observers are not giving either of these bills much chance of passage, any more than the 2003 efforts. I’m told that it’s something to do with the much smaller Democratic majority in this Senate than in the current House, and with the undoubted lobbying power of the advertising business in Washington. And you’re not surprised, either, are you?