In The Plex, page 55
243 In an email The emails cited in this section were exhibits released in Viacom International et al, v. YouTube, Inc., et al.
244 “Response has been great” Interview with author, 2005.
245 In December 2005 Feikin’s email of December 12, 2008, had the subject header “Search Terms.”
245 “Lazy Sunday” John Biggs, “A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It,” The New York Times, February 20, 2006.
247 In an August 2005 video Another treasure from the Viacom suit, labeled SUF 50.
248 “It’s just my judgment” Schmidt deposition, May 6, 2009. The deposition was released in the Viacom litigation, but CNET’s Greg Sandoval managed to get a copy first; see Sandoval, “Schmidt: We paid $1 billion premium for YouTube,” CNET, October 6, 2009.
254 “This is all off the cuff” Thomas Goetz, “Sergey Brin’s Search for Parkinson’s Cure,” Wired, July 2010.
255 “The Axman Comes” Adam Lashinsky, “The Axman comes to Google,” Fortune, March 23, 2009.
256 This led to the closing The memo from Laszlo Bock announcing the food cutbacks was reprinted in Owen Thomas, “Food Fight,” Valleywag, September 4, 2008.
257 3 million shares Saul Hansell, “Google Earmarks $265 Million for Charity and Social Causes,” The New York Times, October 12, 2005.
261 One widely circulated report Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena, “Deep Dive into YouTube; 1Q09 Preview,” Credit Suisse, April 3, 2009.
263 “Fred” Chris Albrecht, “‘Fred’ Cranks Up the YouTube Views and Ad Dollars,” GigaOM, November 18, 2008; Ada Calhoun, “‘Fred’’s Lucas Cruikshank Building a Tween Empire,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2010.
265 Advertisers were paying for Google has always been parsimonious with YouTube’s numbers, but in 2009, it announced that every day it served a billion videos (Chad Hurley, “Y,000,000,000uTube,” YouTube Blog, October 9, 2009), and every week a billion of those were associated with paid ads (CFO Patrick Pichette at Google’s October 15, 2009, earnings call). Both those numbers doubled the next year.
265 “a million quality broadcasts” Google’s attempt to move the center of gravity to the Internet would be a culmination of a trend that had been in the making since the mid-1990s, when the Internet emerged. In an article I wrote entitled “How the Propeller Heads Stole the Internet Future” (The New York Times Magazine, September 24, 1995), I quoted Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale: “If there is a market for 500 channels,” he told me, “imagine the market for 5 million, 50 million, 500 million!” In October 2010, Google put YouTube and Kamangar in charge of Google TV in the hope of finally realizing that vision.
265 Google TV When Google TV did launch in the fall of 2010, it did not appear in Blu-Ray disk players, but it was available in Logitech devices and inside television sets, in particular a new Sony TV.
Part Six: GuGe
273 Chinese Firewall Oliver August, “The Great Firewall: China’s Misguided—and Futile—Attempt to Control What Happens Online,” Wired, November 2007; James Fallows, “The Connection Has Been Reset,” The Atlantic, March 2008; Danny Sullivan, “China’s Great Wall Against Google and AltaVista,” Search Engine Report, September 16, 2002.
273 “Pretty much every possible” Brin discussed Google’s political problems with me in 2002.
273 “Evil is what Sergey says” McHugh, “Google vs. Evil.”
274 Left unspoken Malseed, “The Story of Sergey Brin,” Moment. Some of Malseed’s work is repeated in The Google Story.
274 “Much of that time” Adam Tanner, “Google Cofounder Lives Modestly, Émigré Dad Says.”
274 “Just applying to leave” Sergey Brin, “Journey of a Lifetime,” Too (blog), October 25, 2009.
275 Jew Watch When I called Google for comment on Jew Watch in 2004, Brin got on the line himself to explain.
276 China Of several overviews of Google’s China experience, two of the most helpful were Clive Thompson, “The Big Disconnect,” The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2006; and Jason Dean and Kevin Delaney, “As Google Pushes into China, It Faces Clashes with Censors,” The Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2005.
278 “have been more like” “Google Search Fails to Throw Up Monkeys,” The Times of India, October 13, 2004.
278 CEO Robin Li held Brad Stone, “How Baidu Won China” Bloomberg Business Week, November 11, 2010.
279 “We actually did an ‘evil scale’” Stacy Cowley, “Google CEO on Censoring: ‘We Did an Evil Scale.” Computerworld, January 27, 2006.
280 “China Entry Plan” Dean and Delaney, “As Google Pushes into China.”
281 Kai-Fu Lee An extensive treatment of Kai-Fu Lee’s move from Microsoft to Google can be found in the Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang, Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates’s Plan to Win the Road Ahead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). I also drew from the unpublished English version of Kai-Fu Lee’s autobiography, Making a World of Difference: The Kai-Fu Lee Story (Beijing: China Citic Press, 2009), sent to me by Lee.
282 “Do you mind if I stretch?” Lee, Making a World of Difference.
282 “Those two kids are crazy” Ibid.
283 “Just tell me it’s not Google” Declaration of Mark Lucovsky, quoted in Ina Fried, “Court Docs: Ballmer Vowed to Kill Google,” CNET, September 5, 2005.
283 On Google’s official blog Andrew McLaughlin, “Google in China,” Official Google Blog, January 27, 2006.
284 “[T]he first page of results” Thompson, “The Big Disconnect.” Thompson’s article is an excellent overview of Google’s China experience to that point.
284 Christopher Smith I spoke to Lantos and Smith for “Google and the China Syndrome,” Newsweek, February 13, 2006, and attended the February 15 congressional hearing.
285 the Internet and China The transcript of the hearing can be found at www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/archives/109/26075.pdf.
288 In a poll Jonathan Watts, “How Google Became a Rude Word in China,” The Guardian, April 29, 2006.
288 To celebrate the new name Associated Press, “Google Defends China Policy,” Wired News, April 12, 2006.
289 “We will take” Kai-Fu Lee shared this quote in a February 1, 2008, lecture to students at Carnegie Mellon. It can be viewed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgDGNPnb124.
292 Robin Li Background of Li and Baidu drawn in part from David Baroba, “The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google),” The New York Times, September 17, 2006, and Jonathan Watts, “The Man Behind China’s Answer to Google: Accused by Critics of Piracy and Censorship,” The Guardian, December 8, 2005.
292 Its name was drawn Ruiyan Xu, “Search Engine of the Song Dynasty,” The New York Times, May 14, 2010.
297 Sanlu Group “Public Relations Company Sanlu Letter,” 21st Century Business Herald, September 13, 2008, and “Kidney Stone Gate: Fake Baby Milk Powder, Sanu & Baidu?” chinaSMACK, September 12, 2008. Though it was not covered extensively in the Western press, users of Chinese forums posted scanned letters from a Chinese PR firm advising Sanlu to use Baidu’s “corporate news and information management service” to suppress results about the “Kidney Stone Gate” scandal, along with screen grabs of Baidu results indicating that earlier Baidu search results on the issue were no longer available.
299 interactive snowstorm map Qiushuang (Autumn) Zhang, Google Lat Long Blog, January 31, 2008.
302 In September 2009, Luk told In September 2009, I visited Google’s Beijing office for a week of interviews.
304 search engines, including Microsoft’s agreed New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has made an issue of Microsoft’s worldwide Chinese-language filtering to appease the Chinese censors. Microsoft objected to Kristof’s characterization that it censored its Chinese search results worldwide, but his own testing over a period of months indicated otherwise. See his “Boycott Microsoft Bing,” The New York Times, November 20, 2009.
306 Li Changchun James Glanz and John Markoff, “Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web,” The New York Times, December 4, 2010. The Times article reported Li as the official whose name was excised in a May 9, 2009, U.S. State Department cable from the Beijing embassy to the secretary of state. This was one of several cables released to certain press sources by WikiLeaks that had relevance to Google’s activities in China, with information that confirmed, and in a few cases added to, my reporting on the difficulties between Google and the Chinese government.
308 Apparently someone had hacked into Google Google has been circumspect on the details of the attack, but Adkins shared an overview at the June 15, 2010, Forum of Incident Response Security Teams (FIRST) Conference in Miami. An account of her speech appears in Robert Westervelt, “How Google Used DNS Log Analysis to Investigate Aurora Attacks,” SearchSecurity.com, June 17, 2010. Google has implicitly acknowledged the veracity of other accounts, including that in John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” The New York Times, April 19, 2010.
310 the company invited Ellen Nakashima, “Google to Enlist NSA to Help It Ward Off Cyberattacks,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2010.
310 In interviews afterward Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Brin Drove Google’s Pullback,” The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010; Steve Lohr, “Interview: Sergey Brin on Google’s China Move,” The New York Times (Bits Blog), March 22, 2010. Brin also addressed the issue at the TED 2010 conference.
311 The next day Drummond wrote David Drummond, “A New Approach to China,” Official Google Blog, January 12, 2010.
313 “We are certainly benefiting” Baidu Inc. Q1 2010 Earnings Call Transcript, www.seekingalpha.com, April 30, 2010.
313 someone familiar with the report Glanz and Markoff, “Vast Hacking.” The New York Times source was elaborating on a report whose existence was revealed by one of the State Department cables exposed by Wikileaks.
Part Seven: Google.gov
315 “the main building” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 139.
315 “The image was mesmerizing” Ibid., pp. 140–41.
317 “Bush would not” Peter Norvig, “Hiring a President,” www.norvig.com, June 2004.
319 Google employees Information about corporate contributions from www.opensecrets.org.
320 He saw his mission Dan Siroker, “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election—Dan Siroker at Google,” presentation at Google. Available on YouTube.
321 Sonal Shah “Sonal Shah,” WhoRunsGov.com (The Washington Post), August 15, 2010.
323 By the time Obama agreed Sogol Tehranizadeh, “Obama Takes Town Hall Meeting Online,” www.examiner.com/los-angeles, March 26, 2009.
324 “Working in government” Quoted in Jake Brewer, “Bringing Local Government to the 21st Century,” Huffington Post, January 28, 2010.
326 Another was the success The work can be seen on the Data.gov website.
327 The Google Fiber for Communities project Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, “Think Big with a Gig: Our Experimental Fiber Network,” Official Google Blog, February 10, 2010.
327 The emails were innocuous Nancy Scola, “White House Deputy CTO Slapped for Gmailing with Googlers,” www.techpresident.com, May 17, 2010.
328 Italian officials filed criminal charges Matt Sucherman, “Serious Threat to the Web in Italy,” Official Google Blog, February 24, 2010.
329 In 2006, Davidson lured Arshad Mohammed and Sara Kehaulani Goo, “Google Is a Tourist in D.C., Brin Finds,” The Washington Post, June 7, 2006.
329 twelve lobbyists on staff Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “Learning from Microsoft’s Error, Google Builds a Lobbying Engine,” The Washington Post, June 20, 2007.
331 Google paid $3.1 billion Louise Story and Miguel Helft, “Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion,” The New York Times, April 14, 2007.
332 On September 17, 2007 Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred Tenth Congress, First Session, “Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust Competition Policy and Consumer Rights,” September 27, 2007.
334 “New enhancements” Rajas Moonka, “New Enhancements on the Google Content Network,” Official Google Blog, August 7, 2008.
336 “Google search,” it said Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead,” The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2010. This was part of an excellent series on web privacy. Google said that the memo was a speculative document that had not been presented to senior executives. Overall, however, Vascellaro’s reporting on Larry Page’s flip-flop on cookies conformed with my own findings.
336 interest-based advertising rollout Susan Wojcicki, “Making Ads More Interesting,” Official Google Blog, March 11, 2009.
342 the cars driving around Alan Eustace, “WiFi Data Collection: An Update,” Official Google Blog, May 14, 2010. The Street View flap led Google to strengthen its privacy controls, and Google appointed Alma Whitten as its director of privacy.
343 hostile bid made by Microsoft Steven Levy, “Yahooligans at the Window,” Newsweek, February 2, 2008.
344 Microsoft began Sam Gustin, “Microsoft’s Secret ‘Screw Google’ Meetings in D.C.,” Daily Finance, August 28, 2009.
345 “We would have ended” Nate Raymond, “Hogan’s Litvack Discusses Google/Yahoo,” The Am Law Daily, December 2, 2008.
346 One of the speakers James Rowley, “Antitrust Pick Varney Saw Google as Next Microsoft,” www.bloomberg.com, February 17, 2009.
347 Opponents called it Miguel Helft, “Google Makes a Case That It Isn’t So Big,” The New York Times, June 29, 2009.
347 “Why don’t you” Sergey Brin to author. Brin also made similar remarks to Ken Auletta, the author of Googled.
347 “search all books” General accounts of Google Books that proved useful include the chapter “Moon Shot” in Planet Google and Jeffrey Toobin, “Google’s Moon Shot,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2007.
348 several sizes Personal email from Marissa Mayer, August 17, 2010. She identified books in that session by time stamps on the scans.
349 “The sun is setting” Vincent Cartwright Vickers, The Google Book (1913; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
350 If its patents were Steven Shankland, “Patent Reveals Google’s Book-Scanning Advantage,” CNET, May 4, 2009.
355 That was the day An excellent account of the Amazon project is in Gary Wolf, “The Great Library of Amazonia,” Wired, December 2003.
355 “I think it’s an important part” Brin gave me the quote for my column about Search Inside the Book, “Welcome to History 2.0,” Newsweek, November 10, 2003.
356 “innocent arrogance” John Heilemann, “Googlephobia,” New York, December 5, 2005.
357 Page was rhapsodic Page called me at Newsweek in December 2003 to explain the project.
359 books published in 1930 Lawrence Lessig, “Copyright Law and Roasted Pig,” Red Herring, October 22, 2002.
359 Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, “The Google Library Project,” prepared for the AIE-Brookings discussion “The Google Copyright Controversy,” February 24, 2006.
360 aviation industry Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 1–3.
360 “Google saw us” Heilemann, “Googlephobia.”
363 “a path to insanity” Lawrence Lessig, “For the Love of Culture,” The New Republic, January 26, 2010.
363 “hack the Google Book Settlement” Steven Levy, “Who’s Messing with the Google Book Settlement?,” Wired.com Epicenter (blog), March 31, 2009.
364 In October 2009 Sergey Brin, “A Library to Last Forever,” The New York Times, October 8, 2009.
364 “There are many reasons” Schmidt made the remarks at a press roundtable in New York City on October 8, 2009.
365 “Google Book Settlement: Brilliant but Evil?” Pamela Samuelson, Cisco Distinguished Lecture, San Jose, California, May 13, 2010.
366 In groups of four Transcript, The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc.
Epilogue: Chasing Taillights
369 On June 8, 2007 The letter is reprinted in Justin Smith, “Insider Perspectives: Ex-Googler Justin Rosenstein on Making the Jump to Facebook,” Inside Facebook, July 9, 2007.
370 MySpace An excellent account of the history of MySpace is Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (New York: Random House, 2009).
370 Mark Zuckerberg I examined his thinking and business goals in “Facebook Grows Up,” Newsweek, August 15, 2007, and “Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists,” Wired, May 2009. The definitive book on Facebook is David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
372 Oddly, Orkut became Loren Baker, “Google’s Page and Brin Visit Brazil,” Search Engine Journal, February 9, 2006.
374 The company was run Paul Festa, “Blogger Founder Leaves Google,” CNET, October 4, 2004.
378 a February 10 posting Nicholas Carlson, “Warning: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw,” Business Insider, February 10, 2010.
378 Brin boasted Miguel Helft and Brad Stone, “With Buzz, Google Plunges into Social Networking,” The New York Times, February 9, 2010.
379 A domestic violence victim “Outraged Blogger Is Automatically Being Followed by Her Abusive Ex-Husband on Google Buzz,” Business Insider, February 12, 2010.
379 Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov Evgeny Morozov, “Wrong Kind of Buzz Around Google Buzz,” www.Foreignpolicy.com (Net.effect blog), February 11, 2010.
379 “not seen the user adoption we would have liked” Urs Hölzle, “Update on Google Wave,” Official Google Blog, August 4, 2010.
380 “The algorithm is” Steven Levy, “Inside Google’s Algorithm,” Wired, March 2010.
383 Eric Schmidt was giddily Schmidt made his comments at an August 4, 2010, press roundtable.
384 Working with one Alan Davidson, “A Joint Policy Proposal for an Open Internet,” Google Public Policy Blog, August 9, 2010. An example of the criticism is Cindy Cohn, “A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal,” Electric Frontier Foundation Deeplinks Blog, August 10, 2010.
