Bill Dembski is best known to many of us as an information theorist but recently he has been looking at the question of what big tech companies are doing with our information. That includes a look at the search engines we use to find information. He notes,

Google advertises itself as in the business of search. But it is not, except as by-product of its main business. To make its search work, Google has to ingest the entire web, or at least as much of it as it can access. Any information it can access, it can consume. Google is an information feeder. Its incentive is not to help users find the creators of content but to be a one-stop shopping center for all information.

As Google characterizes its mission, it is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” And how better to make it universally accessible and useful except to repackage it and present it as self-contained items of information that can ignore the creator of the information. It’s a zero-sum game: to the degree that Google is sending consumers to a creator’s website, it is missing out on what consumers can spend with them. Moreover, with the recent rise of LLMs and AI, can rationalize that it is adding value by running through content of others and enabling a chatbot like Bard or ChatGPT to rewrite and upgrade the content. “We’ll take what you did and make it better.” What’s not to like except by those who created the content in the first place.

Short of an antitrust action by the government to prevent such usurpation of Internet content, Google, like an insatiable beast, will swallow as much content as it can from websites, and then repackage it in ways that will incentivize people to look no further than what they get right off the bat. Of course, they’ll be ripping off the content (consistent with Jaron Lanier’s long-standing criticism). But even if an antitrust action finally brings Google to heel, that’s likely to be well after content sites depending on search have been decimated. I hope I’m wrong because I have a dog in this fight.

Bill Dembski, Google Overreach, December 22, 2023

We tend to assume that simply providing information is neutral, like the telephone line. But maybe not.