This was a topic of heated debate at the American Library Association meeting that I attended in October. It’s all the more interesting now that Google has promised to help digitize the entire contents of several major research libraries.

The answer to the literal question is “no.” Google cannot be a commons because it is a corporation. A commons belongs to everyone in a community or to no one at all, whereas the ownership of a corporation is limited and proportional to an individual’s financial investment. However, the interesting question is whether the whole web, when navigated using Google’s search engine, is a commons. The web doesn’t belong to anyone–or we could say that everyone owns it. Its elements are privately owned and controlled, but it’s quite easy for anyone to add a new page to the pool. While access to (and use of) some webpages is restricted, most of the web has an open feel, just like a classic physical commons.

But what happens when we use Google to find our way through the web? The Internet itself may be unlimited, but the list of top-10 results for any given Google search is very limited and is under the company’s control. Google uses a proprietary database and search algorithm to generate results. In principle, Google’s management could block you from searching at all, or could promote a favored site to #1 for money–or for totally capricious reasons. The Google search algorithm is secret (necessarily, or else people would manipulate their websites to gain higher ranking). Google sells advertising space for cash.

None of these features sounds compatible with a “commons.” On the other hand, Google has chosen to create a space with many commons-like features. To the best of my knowledge, Google still ranks sites proportionally to the number of links from other sites. A link is a kind of gift or vote. A large number of incoming links does not indicate quality or reliability, but it does indicate popularity within the community of website-owners. Google’s search results mirror that popularity. To be sure, money can buy popularity, yet there are many cheap sites that have become major nodes on the web.

In theory, Google could start charging for placement (not only for the advertisements that appear on the right side of the screen, but also for basic search results). However, that would be a risky move for the company, since its popularity comes from its commons-like feel. Besides, Google’s capacity to destroy the commons does not prove that there is no commons on its site right now. Every commons is subject to destruction and/or control. The Alaska wilderness is a commons (I think), yet the state and federal government could suddenly decide to charge large fees for access. Thus the question is not whether Google must create and preserve a commons, but whether it has done so to date.

Some people feel that corporations are fundamentally incompatible with a commons. They may be attracted to the idea of the commons in the first place because they are hostile to corporate capitalism. It’s worth asking, however, exactly what’s wrong with corporations. Do they promote consumerism? Google is a portal to many political, civic, spiritual, and environmental pursuits as well as e-commerce. Are corporations undemocratic? Google has made money by using a fairly democratic system for ranking its search results. Its system is not perfectly equitable, but neither is any conceivable government. Are corporations greedy? Sometimes private vice brings public benefit.

To me, the best question is: Compared to what? Google has created a tenuous kind of commons, with secret rules and concentrated power. But democratic governments tend to create commons with similar problems. And anarchic commons, such as the high seas, are easily destroyed by individuals’ greed. I’d say that Google is about as good a large-scale commons as we have seen, although we’ll have to keep a close eye on it. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, even in the 21st century.

This is a topic that I would write about if I suddenly had three free months and could actually study the facts of the matter. Lacking those months (but having a blog), I hereby offer my untotored thoughts …

For centuries, companies and entrepreneurs have negotiated voluntary standards that spread throughout industries, so that (for example), you can buy a lightbulb and know that it will fit into your lamp back home: the sizes and shapes are standardized. Traditionally, the precise choice of a standard has been arbitrary–it doesn’t matter how many milimeters wide lightbulbs are, as long as they’re the same. To the extent that traditional standards raise issues of public concern, the main ones are safety (a really dumb standard can be dangerous) and antitrust (incumbent industries can deliberately create standards that are unnecessarily hard for competitors to replicate).

In the new world of networked computers, antitrust remains a concern, but there are many additional issues of great importance. Since standards are what allow computers to communicate and software to run on multiple “platforms,” they must be very detailed. It is in the standards process that the key design choices are made that shape email, webpages, document formats, and digital movies. Just for example, I once heard Tim Berners-Lee speak in Washington, and he said that he wished he had written the standards for the World Wide Web so that no information could be transmitted from visitors to owners of websites. That choice would have prevented privacy violations, but it also would have blocked many useful functions, including virtually all e-commerce. So I suspect we’re better off with the standards that Berners-Lee actually created. In any case, his choice to allow two-way communications had enormous consequences.

Market libertarians may view any standards as acceptable, since they result from voluntary negotiations. But even free-marketers should worry when monopoly companies dominate the standards process. Civil libertarians should want standards to protect constitutional values like privacy and free expression. Following Lawrence Lessig, they should view computer “code” as parallel to legal “code”; either one can abridge freedoms. Communitarians may see standards as opportunities to protect community interests, for example, by preventing viruses and terrorists’ messages from being encoded in picture files. Strong democrats may distrust a powerful process that isn’t overseen by elected governments. Advocates of the commons may view voluntary standards (which are “contributed” by hard-working code-writers) as a form of common property, except when standards are designed to protect narrow economic interests. And all observers should be interested that today’s standards often pay explicit attention to two issues–disabilities and privacy–but not to any other normative questions.

I recently published an article in which I described the following “troubling example”:

In June 2004, if you went online to learn about ?cholesterol,? you might have typed that word into Google, the world?s most heavily used search engine. Google would have quickly returned a list of more than five million websites containing the word ?cholesterol.?

The first ten websites would appear immediately before you; the remaining five million would take progressively more time and patience to find. The eighth result would be a page within MedlinePlus. This is an elaborate website created by the National Library of Medicine, a department of the United States government that has an annual budget of US $250 million, a mandate from Congress to inform the public about medical issues, more than a century of experience, and a highly professional staff of scientists and librarians. …

Somewhat higher up on the Google listing, at number five, was a site written by Uffe Ravnskov , MD and PhD, who described himself as the ?spokesman of THINCS, The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics.? His site announced: ?The idea that too much animal fat and high cholesterol are dangerous to your heart and vessels is nothing but a myth. ? If you think this is written by another internet crackpot, take a look at Dr. Ravnskov?s credentials and the reviews of his book??which was for sale on the site.

I am not competent to judge whether Dr. Ravnskov?s claims about cholesterol or his own credentials are accurate. However, it is remarkable that an individual with a low-budget website?registered to the ?.nu? domain, which belongs to the New Zealand protectorate of Niue in the South Pacific?should be able to beat the National Library of Medicine of the United States in the competition for prominence on Google.

Dr Ravsnkov has, understandably, sent me an email complaining of his treatment in my article. I went back to his personal page and the Thincs website. To me, they raise interesting, complex, and ambiguous issues. Indeed, I meant to explore those issues in my article, although I confess that my tone was disparaging toward Dr. Ravnskov. These are the points that “trouble” me:

1) None of us can tell directly whether “animal fat and high cholesterol are dangerous to your heart and vessels.” We all rely on trusted authorities. People like me are completely dependent on others’ expertise. But even a scientific specialist in this field would have to trust the instruments he or she used and the reliability of past research. So the issue is not whether Dr. Ravnskov’s argument is right (I’m not qualified to judge that), but rather whether we should trust him or the medical orthodoxy that he is challenging.

2) In general, there are some good reasons to trust medical orthodoxy. Scientific method makes sense. Randomized, double-blind, clinical trials really are the “gold standard” of research. Not only that, but academic and government-paid researchers are supposed to work for institutions with integrity that reward truth and not profit. It worries me that anyone can create a website and say anything at odds with the medical establishment, and potentially convince lots of people to ignore the standard advice.

3) On the other hand, it is perfectly plausible that all those white-coated folks at NIH could be wrong about a particular topic. “Group-think” could have set in. Worse, they could have been more or less corrupted by the pharmaceutical companies that are making huge amounts of money from anti-cholesterol drugs. Newspapers and medical journals are full of distressing stories about distorted medical research.

4) Dr. Ravnskov’s websites look a little amateurish, and they advertise a book that he is selling. They list articles and other books in support of his position; but many are not peer-reviewed. Facts like these are sometimes taken as signs that a website is untrustworthy. However, some of the articles he cites are peer-reviewed. More importantly, the conventional signs could be misleading. Maybe Dr. Ravnskov’s sites look amateurish because they are low-budget; and they are low-budget because he has integrity. Maybe MedlinePlus isn’t more reliable, just more slick.

4) I feel that if I were worried about cholesterol (which I’m not, especially), then I could look into the issue and decide which sources are really credible. I could take the time to read the links on Medline and on Dr. Ravnskov’s page, and I believe I could make decent judgments. However, I (arrogantly) assume that I have better-than-average skills in the interpretation of research. How should we tell a 9th-grader to sort out reliable and unreliable claims?

All of this underlines the deep importance of ethics in medical research. I would quickly dismiss a critic of medical orthodoxy if it weren’t for all those stories about financial conflicts-of-interest.