Google has ensured that the Web is a calmer, friendlier, less controversial and frightening medium-as long as one uses Google to navigate it. Google has always tended to degrade the status of pornography sites in response to generic or confusing search terms, thus making it less likely that one will stumble on explicit images while rarely blocking access to such sites entirely. So how, exactly, does Google rule the Web? Through its power to determine which sites get noticed, and thus trafficked, Google has molded certain standards into the Web. Because we focus so much on the miracles of Google, we are too often blind to the ways in which Google exerts control over its domain. And like Caesar's, Google's appeal is almost divine. Like Caesar, Google has found its mandate to rule through vast popular support, even in the absence of a referendum. Before Caesar, there was chaos and civil war, presided over by weak, ineffective leaders who failed to capture the support of the people or to make Rome livable. So Google, which rules by the power of convenience, comfort, and trust, has assumed control, much as Julius Caesar did in Rome in 48 B.C. But overall, no single state, firm, or institution in the world has as much power over Web-based activity as Google does. States such as Germany, France, Italy, and Brazil have found some ways to govern over and above Google's influence. In the People's Republic of China, the state clearly runs the Web. Still, architecture and state-generated law govern imperfectly.
Like Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Internet is not bad-it's just drawn that way. Not only does law matter online, but the specifics of the Internet's design or "architecture" influence how the Web works and how people behave with it. But we now know that the Internet is not as wild and ungoverned as we might have naively assumed back at its conception.
It was supposed to be a perfect libertarian space, free and open to all voices, unconstrained by the conventions and norms of the real world, and certainly beyond the scope of traditional powers of the state. In the early days it was easy to assume that the Web, and the Internet of which the Web is a part, was ungoverned and ungovernable. The question is whether Google's dominance is the best situation for the future of our information ecosystem. This was a quite necessary step at the time. Google just stepped into the void when no other authority was willing or able to make the Web stable, usable, and trustworthy. No state appointed Google its proxy, its proconsul, or viceroy.
There was never an election to determine the Web's rulers.
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