Monthly Archive for May, 2010

From Brad Stone, The New York Times

In the 1990s, Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer, almost single-handedly brought the antitrust weight of the federal government down on that era’s high-tech heavyweight, Microsoft. Now Mr. Reback contends there is a dangerous new monopolist in the catbird seat: the search giant Google.

This month, Mr. Reback shepherded Adam and Shivaun Raff, the husband-and-wife entrepreneurs behind the London comparison shopping site Foundem, around Washington. The three held meetings with Congressional staff members and antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

Their goal was to air the Foundem couple’s complaint that in 2006, Google’s supposedly objective algorithms suddenly dropped Foundem into the netherworld of Google search results. They say Google also raised the rates Foundem had to pay to advertise alongside search results. These moves, the couple say, pushed their comparison shopping site out of view, and Google later put the spotlight on its own shopping listings.

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From Discover

In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds got annoyed. He had bought a personal computer to use at home, but he couldn’t find an operating system for it that was as robust as Unix, the system he used on the computers at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote one. He posted it online, free for anyone to download. But he required that anyone who figured out a way to make it better would have share the improvement with everyone else who used the system. Torvalds would later tell Wired that his motives were not noble. “I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work,” he said. “I wanted help.”

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From n+1

Pick up a newspaper or magazine these days and you find yourself judging its health by the quantity of advertising. Harper’s, the Nation, the New Republic—they are pitifully bare of ads. “Page” (online, of course) through an old copy of the New Yorker, look up Edmund Wilson’s essays on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and feel the self-confidence of another age: almost three pages of ads for every column of text. Reading the magazine online brings out an analogy that a physical copy would obscure—the huge ads, dominating the text, remind you of nothing so much as a flashy website.

A big mystery of the internet has been why the online editions of newspapers and magazines can’t make money when, with huge skyscraper ads covering half the homepage, their websites so closely resemble the most successful publications of the past. These aren’t regular old newspaper ads either but what amount to TV ads—all the better, you’d think, since you can click through to buy the product on offer without picking up a phone. What’s more, the New York Times has ten times as many readers online as it does in print (15 million versus 1.5 million)! Amid all the anxiety about the future of journalism it’s easy to overlook the absurdity of the situation: the Times is going bankrupt—while showing more ads to more readers than ever before.

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