This article is reprinted from Bill Dembski, design theorist William Dembski’s Substack, with his permission.

First off, let me say in closing that I agree with all of Robert Epstein’s recommendations. Certainly, his monitoring of Google through “field agents” or “watchdogs” is invaluable at spotlighting its shenanigans. Also, his recommendations, insofar as they can be implemented, will help to reform Google. That said, I suspect few people will want to endure the rigors of bypassing Google in their day-to-day activities.

How easy is it to get away from Google?

Google has inveigled itself into most aspects of our internet life, and it takes concerted effort to extricate oneself from it. Take Gmail. Epstein recommends going with Protonmail in its place. I have colleagues who take seriously removing themselves from Google influence and thus subscribe to services like Protonmail and Hushmail. But it takes added effort and cost to use such services. Google’s suite of offerings is more convenient to use. What’s more, many of your correspondents, if you are with such services, will be using Gmail, so your emails will most likely still be in the Google system, even if one step removed.

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Speaking for myself, despite my intimate knowledge of Google’s shenanigans, I still generously use Google’s services (Gmail, Google maps, YouTube, etc.). True, I pride myself on being aware of its tricks and thereby rationalize my continued use. Moreover, I’m able to use alternative services when I don’t want Google to track me (such as the Tor browser). Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe Google is getting information from me that it will effectively use against me.

But excising Google from my internet life at this point seems extreme. Also, I don’t see any efforts I make at distancing myself from Google as making a palpable difference in reforming Google since the percentage of people committed to sidelining Google seems small. Nor do I see an emerging groundswell of people who will jump ship from Google in mass. So while I cheer Epstein in his online privacy recommendations contra Google, I don’t see these recommendations as constituting a solution to the problem of Google bias in search.

Epstein’s public-facing recommendations likewise all have merit, but their practicability remains for me in question. Some of his recommendations ultimately come down to raising public awareness about Google’s machinations. This is important work. But given the extent to which Google controls public awareness, raising public awareness about its bias is likely to have limited effect, especially as Google has so many goodies (Gmail, maps, YouTube) at its disposal with which to bribe users.

The legislative approach: What will work?

Looking to new laws to rein in Google could have merit if the laws can in fact be enacted and enforced. But what would those new laws be and what effect would they have in actually making Google more honest? Enhanced whistleblower protections, for instance, will only go so far. Vorhies’s depiction of Google from the inside shows an echo chamber at Google in which most employees are willing to drink the Kool-Aid and the rest are happy to pretend that they did. Moreover, Vorhies’s book Google Leaks, though causing a stir when it was published in 2021, seems not to have made much of a dent in reforming Google. True, it could be argued that Google would be an even worse actor without that book and its revelations. But even with it, Google shows no signs of repentance. Institutions with the size and power of Google can absorb plenty of criticisms and just keep chugging along.

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What about laws that Epstein would like to see enacted such as treating Google as a public commons and making its algorithm transparent? Such laws could have benefits, but only if they could be used to compel Google to improve its behavior in clearly specified ways. I could, for instance, imagine the Google algorithm being opened to the public in such a convoluted form that at the end of the day it might still be difficult to hold Google’s feet to the fire about correcting its bias. I’m reminded of the small law firm that takes on a big company in a suit and during discovery asks for certain information, only to be inundated with a warehouse of bankers’ boxes, which effectively hides the desired information like a needle in a haystack. I could see Google doing much the same.

In any case, Google’s lobbying arm is ferocious, so it’s hard to imagine Congress taking on Google in a serious way, as in advancing Epstein’s public-facing recommendations. True enough, we see members of Congress discussing the breakup of Google’s monopoly. But how does one break apart Google search? It’s all one big integrated algorithm (even if it is a pastiche with lots of jury-rigged overrides). This is not like breaking up AT&T forty years ago, when regions of the country could be assigned their own piece of the AT&T pie. In fact, I would say that everything I’ve seen from Congress in supposedly holding Google’s feet to the fire is mainly street theater, as in, “See, we’re aware of the problem, but no, we’re not going to do anything effective to resolve it.”

So where does that leave us? I would say creating new laws to regulate Google is probably a dead end. Better, in my view, is to take advantage of existing laws, regulations, and remedies. Specifically, a big-tech company like Google that claims Section 230 and DMCA protections (as discussed earlier in this essay) could be deemed in violation of these protections if it actively moderates or curates content in ways that suggest editorial control, thus acting as a publisher rather than a neutral platform, or if it fails to promptly remove infringing content after receiving valid DMCA takedown notices.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could then investigate such unfair practices, the Department of Justice (DOJ) could pursue criminal copyright infringement, the Copyright Office could challenge DMCA protections, and a president unhappy with Google could issue executive orders that attempt to remove such privileges entirely. Remedies could range from injunctions and monetary damages (statutory damages up to $150,000 per willful copyright infringement) to loss of safe harbor, potentially exposing Google to sprawling liability. Private lawsuits from rights holders or affected users could also seek compensatory or punitive damages, while antitrust scrutiny from the FTC or DOJ might address monopolistic content moderation practices. And finally, executive orders that treat Google as a threat to election integrity, as a biased form of search, and as a disruptive force in American business could give all such efforts teeth.

Can the courts provide remedies?

The US government has many levers it can pull to rein in Google. If I were to make a prediction, I see the remedy to Google’s bias coming through the courts. A generation or two ago, corporate powerhouses included the cigarette companies. They had successfully withstood lawsuit after lawsuit on the dangers of cigarettes—until one lawsuit finally succeeded, thereby puncturing their myth of invincibility. That story is masterfully recounted in the 1999 film The Insider.

I can see Google facing similar challenges in court, perhaps recounted with its own Hollywood movie. Consider the following injunctions that courts might impose on Google:

• Default to Unadapted Search. Make the default, when users do a Google search, that the search is the same for everyone. In other words, make the default unadapted search, so that what you see, everyone else sees. Likewise for autocomplete. Users would then have to opt in to experience adapted search. Unadapted search would thus set a baseline for the rest of Google search. It would tell us what Google sees when it is not trying to influence individual users.
• Organic Results First. Right now, Google inundates its search results with ads, knowledge panels, and AI generated summaries. All this is secondary to the organic results that direct users to the supposedly best places on the web to answer their queries. This injunction would put organic results first and everything else below it (“below the fold”). Google’s ad revenues would take a hit, but this move would curtail Google’s parasitizing of the web, repackaging its content without its creators getting proper credit.
• Warning Labels. We put warning labels on cigarettes, household cleaners, and medications. To the degree that Google is egregious in its bias, it would be appropriate to enforce a warning label at the top of every Google search page, such as, “WARNING: Google search is biased. To avoid being misled, consult other sources.”
• User Disclosure and Deletion. Google maintains what is essentially a digital dossier on all its users. Currently, we don’t get to see what’s in these dossiers. Google, as a matter of transparency, needs to make its user dossiers available to their respective users in a clear readable form. Moreover, users should have the option of having their Google digital dossiers deleted in an enforced act of forgetting. Many people want to turn over a new leaf, and Google needs to honor that.
• Put Algorithm Updates on Staging. Right now, when Google does an update, it simply springs the update on the world. Businesses are then often left reeling as they find their websites downranked. Because businesses depend so much on Google, major Google updates should be put on a staging site (e.g., staging.google.com) where their impact could be assessed by users as well as by governmental agencies, such as the Commerce Department. Google updates would therefore be subject to a deliberation and debate phase, and their likely impact could not just be reviewed but also measured. I suspect every major Google update has an economic impact in the tens of billions of dollars.
• Illegitimate In-Kind Political Contributions. If Google is algorithmically favoring, say, one presidential candidate over another, such an act would amount to an in-kind contribution, especially if it was deliberate, coordinated, and had a measurable impact on the election. Under federal campaign finance law, corporations are prohibited from making direct contributions to candidates, including non-monetary (in-kind) contributions like services or resources that benefit a campaign. If Google’s internal staff intentionally altered algorithms to sway voter behavior, the labor of its engineers and the platform’s algorithmic reach would constitute valuable assets provided to the campaign. A court could then impose penalties, require disclosure, or pursue enforcement if Google’s actions here were not publicly disclosed or exceeded campaign contribution limits.
• Compliance Through Shutdown. If Google is doing something illegal, a judge could require compliance to remedy the wrong. Often compliance takes the form of fines, so that every day in violation of compliance is a day that Google pays a fine. But Google makes so much money that fines typically don’t mean anything to it—fines are just a cost of doing business. What would really encourage compliance, however, is if Google had to shut down until it met compliance. Google cannot afford a shutdown. So much of its business depends on its reliability. If Google search might disappear, if Gmail might go down — even if for a brief time —users will vote with their feet to look for other equivalent services, undermining Google’s dominance.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it is representative of concrete steps that could be taken to reform Google and where its reformation would be verifiable. I encourage others to add to this list.

How evilization happens

In closing this essay, let me offer a broader perspective on Google’s evilization. Ultimately, what is responsible for Google’s turn to the dark side is its delusional belief that it is on the side of goodness and light and so must do everything it can in their service. The problem is that ever since humanity’s fall in the garden by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, even though we have since then experienced good and evil, we have been less successful at discerning between the two. Simply put, we often can’t tell the difference between what is actually good and what is actually evil.

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Not having taken this lesson to heart, Google thinks it knows the truth about what’s good and evil, and so casts itself as a valiant defender of good that must do everything in its power to help good along. Google forgets Blaise Pascal’s (1623–1662) admonition in the Pensées that people “never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Pascal wrote in an age of faith. But in this secular age, his admonition can be recast as people never doing evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from ideological conviction. Pascal’s point holds regardless of whether the ideology is religious or secular, as in the case of Google.

If you see yourself as on the moral high ground, then as an information company, your job will be to distinguish between good information and bad information. The good information must be highlighted and the bad suppressed. Bad information then gets demonized with labels such as malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation. But the problem with calling something bad information is that you may be giving it that label because you yourself have bought into bad information. And who’s to say what is good and bad information?

In posing this question, I’m not espousing epistemic or moral relativism. I’m simply underscoring human fallibility. All of us get a lot of things wrong. An information company like Google is supposed to be a platform, not a publisher. It is therefore supposed to provide an impartial forum for a diversity of views. Consequently, it should not be deciding between good and bad information. To see how Google failed spectacularly on this point, in 2021, when queried about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Google’s search results promoted the natural spillover theory, which claimed that the virus originated from animal-to-human transmission, likely involving bats. At the time, the lab leak theory was labeled as a “debunked conspiracy theory.” And yet the lab leak theory was ultimately vindicated.

Adobe Stock China censorship

Google claims that it is doing right by suppressing mal-, mis-, and disinformation. In fact, its problem is not with any of these forms of information. Its problem, rather, is with mono-information, information that’s so focused on one thing that it misses other competing items of information — like being so focused on an individual tree as to miss the forest. The answer to bad information is therefore not good information because often we don’t know which is which. Instead, the answer to bad information is more information.

The risks of narratocracy

In the spirit of our First Amendment, information needs to be set free. The truth can take care of itself provided it has open access to the marketplace of ideas. Google, unfortunately, tries to control which vendors are allowed in that marketplace. In so doing, it has proven itself a wretched caretaker of the truth. Google suppresses pluralism in perspectives. Its problem isn’t misleading information per se but rather enforced singularity of narrative. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of thought and expression. The alternative to the First Amendment is a narratocracy in which a society’s commanding institutions determine what stories are allowed and disallowed.

Narratocratic elitists who control such institutions label those who reject their considered opinions as “uninformed” or “low-information.” Invariably, however, it is these elitists themselves who are guilty of low information because they artificially limit the information they are willing to make available to the people, thereby preventing the full range of information from being known and considered. There’s still hope for Google. Its motto remains in place: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The challenge is to get Google to live up to its motto. If the past is any indication, getting Google to that place will require muscular persuasion.

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Here are all the previous instalments: The evilization of Google—and what to do about it Part 1: Understanding Google’s dominance over the internet. Nothing is totally evil. Still, there’s enough evil in Google that it is, for now, more on the side of Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The utter dependence of online businesses on Google. Part 2: An SEO business needs to please Google or else it is dead in the water. Google’s re-presentation of information created by others makes it less likely that users will visit them. Thus Google’s business expands at their expense.

A potential chink in Google’s armor: Loss of legal immunity Part 3: Currently, Google is legally protected from the consequences of frequent copyright violation. One outcome of the resulting ad clutter is that, unless you are top of the search, you’re likely wasting time trying to make money off organic search.

Becoming a slave to Google: How it happens Part 4: After an update, you always have to second guess what Google did. You become a reverse engineer who never sees under the hood. This leads to a mentality that always tries to second guess whether Google will favor some piece of content or way of expressing it.

Google’s power over online business: Monopolistic and extravagant Part 5: To help people understand Google’s power over online businesses, I ask. What if the road on which the local Walmart is located suddenly became a dirt trail? It’s as though Google is doing everything in its power to throttle organic traffic, driving that traffic to their sponsored ads, increasing its bottom line.

How Google search rank disrupted the alternative health industry Part 6: Google’s bias is as real as ever, but the firm has deflected it to an impersonal policy that gives an air of objectivity. Having a Wikipedia entry gets you instant credibility even though so much of Wikipedia is substandard and politically biased.

How Google can control and manipulate public opinion. In Part 7, Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today, offers some disturbing information on how search engines can be manipulated for political purposes. Epstein, working through web projects, also provides a sobering assessment of how much Google monitors what average Internet users are doing online.

What public policies can help us achieve a less biased internet? Part 8: Robert Epstein proposes a number of changes worth considering. Robert Epstein is the former editor of Psychology Today who, as I discussed yesterday, has studied the ways in which Google can manipulate public opinion.

and

Pulling the strands together to chart life after Google, In Part 9, we begin by looking at how the manipulation directly affects you when you search for information. After the 2016 election, Google leadership decided to prevent voters it saw as populist and low-information from deciding future presidential elections.