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Fox hunting is back in Europe. There are jokes every day and even more effective ones are announced. The fox is young, cunning and runs fast, his name is Google. European bigwigs are determined to get her out of their territories. Germany is at the head of this uneditable platoon of hunters. There's a reason that isn't as trivial as it seems: it's not just about economic protectionism, behind it there are reasons linked to the history of the Germans and the European peoples that Google nerds, children of baby boomers and who grew up in a full democracy , fail not only to understand, but not even to grasp in their essentiality.
Google seems to have become the number one public danger for Germans, far more feared than Putin and his gas. The Snowden/Prism affair has greatly exacerbated the negative sentiment of Europeans and in particular of the Germans, also due to the interceptions of Merkel's smartphone, towards the technological groups of Silicon Valley and their culture à la John Wayne, among other things a much loved actor in Europe.
If only Google knew the story…
An episode of European history would be enough for everyone to demonstrate how much information collected for purely statistical or personal data purposes can indirectly harm people in particular historical circumstances that could not be foreseen at the time of data collection.
The accurate registry kept by the Dutch government was the Nazis' source for organizing the deportation and extermination of Dutch Jews and so Holland paid a very high tribute to the Shoah: of the 140 Jews registered in the country in 1941, 105 were deported and only 5 thousand survived the Nazi camps.
Of the entire Dutch Jewish population, only 27% survived the Holocaust. In neighboring Belgium, 60% of the Jewish population was saved, and in France, 75%. The excellent and efficient organization of information and the deference of the population towards the constituted authority seem to be the major causes of the enormous sacrifice of human lives suffered by Holland. So behind this European sensitivity towards data there is something much deeper than the simple concept of privacy; there is a tragic story.
The fear of data
The German mass-mediologist Alexander Pschera in a recent essay, Dataism, also translated into Italian, writes: "Our relationship with data, which has absorbed the world of politics, medicine and culture, is profoundly governed by fear". Fear indeed, Angst. According to the German scholar, because of fear, Europeans are unable to see "the productive gain that can derive for our society from reporting and analyzing data". Only ethical choices about data by their custodians can dispel this negative sentiment. But an ethical attitude is still not seen despite the fact that Google's motto is "Don't be evil" and among young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley there is an abundance of declarations that more than business they care about "making the world a better place".
Then there is the even more serious issue of tracking and classification by Google of users' browsing and purchasing behaviors, partially without their knowledge. The collection of data and its use for advertising purposes is even the most important business model of Google. This is a filing, in principle, not quite so dissimilar from that carried out by the STASI, with more primitive but equally effective methods, against some citizens in the ex-GDR. This type of espionage, also practiced in countries beyond the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, led to the discrimination, marginalization and abuse of millions of European citizens. A phenomenon that, apart from McCarthyism, the United States has known in an attenuated form.
The issue of tracking
All the tracking contention is around a checkbox that is now, by default, set to "Track me," when it should be "Do not track me." If Google unchecked this last option to make it the default, all this fuss would end without too much damage to Google's business. If correctly communicated and effectively advertised, many users would spontaneously choose the tracking option for two very simple reasons.
a) They consider tracking a sort of necessary compensation to guarantee a free service at a good level of quality. Basically they trust Google, and think that the information it can collect by tracking it is, ultimately, commercial in nature and not likely to cause significant harm to their people. The equation is: free > tracking.
b) Tracking is the basis of an important service for finding more accurate information, making more advantageous choices and saving time and energy. And, in fact, it is so and over time these services will improve more and more until they become indispensable for the customer. In this case the equation is service > discomfort. Those who value privacy more or are particularly sensitive to the issue of social control, keeping the default option, set to "Do not track me" will be able to go back to using Google, which best of the web, without fear of being spied on or having your personal data sold to the highest bidder.
If the Germans weren't so distressed
In Berlin Sigmar Gabriel, vice chancellor and social democratic minister of the economy – also coming like Merkel from the former GDR – declared that the federal government is considering the proposal to declare Google a public utility service, such as the distribution of 'water, and therefore to submit it to strict regulation that protects the public interest.
Public utility is the expression Obama used to support the concept of net neutrality, with the difference, however, that Google is not the infrastructure of the net. There is an excess in the German position. It is also known that there is a report by the European Commission to separate the search engine from Google's other commercial activities on which the European Parliament could express itself with a vote that promises to be in favor of the proposal.
At the head of the anti-Google movement is the boss of one of the most powerful European pressure groups with enormous influence on German public opinion: Mathias Döpfner, CEO and President of the Axel Springer publishing group. Recently the Berlin group has managed to influence the German government in choosing the President of the European Commission by directing it towards Jean-Claude Juncker who is notoriously hawkish towards the Silicon Valley. The Germans have also taken over the European Commissioner for the digital economy so as to be able to weigh decisively on the decisions of the European Union in these matters.
Döpfner's intentions are also commendable: he wants to defend the European market space from total enslavement to the Silicon Valley groups which have an almost unbridgeable advantage over their European competitors. One wonders, however, whether this resolution is being implemented in the right way or if instead the strategy of brutal containment conducted with protectionist laws and regulations will ultimately damage the European media and technology industry. For the moment the technological champion European of the web is Rocket Internet, a sort of aggregator that replicates services cloned from those invented in Silicon Valley in countries with a strong digital divide. Pretty depressing!
But even wanting to be benign with the strategies of the large German and European media groups, one wonders if there really is awareness of what is happening in the transition from mass media to personal media? Isn't it that a positional income is being defended? The European Parliament can break Google because it damages newspapers and organized information, as Döpfner never tires of repeating; the Bundestag can decree by law the ancillary copyright, immediately defined as the Google Tax, in force in Germany since August 2013; but what can be done against an even more profound and spontaneous phenomenon such as social media where people themselves create and recommend content, films, songs, books and articles? Other than Google News!
After Google, there is Facebook, after Facebook, there is…
Once Google's alleged threat has been annulled, there is immediately another even more insidious one. In the United States, 30% of readers of news and articles land on information sites thanks to reports that Facebook processes directly through Facebook's News Feed or through social mechanisms. What happens in this case? Do you unbundle the feed service? It simply doesn't happen that Facebook, like Twitter and Google, is doing its job well and that the service also benefits the newspapers in the end. The big American newspapers are talking to Facebook to improve the feed service, not with the US government to regulate it or limit its functionality.
It is clear that Europe's strategy towards the Silicon Valley groups must be different: first of all it is late and deferred with respect to real developments and above all it tends to consider these realities not as a resource but as a threat.
Among the great nations of continental Europe there seems to be a single government that understands the mechanics of innovation operated on the web by the big tech companies of Silicon Valley. This government is the Italian government. Its young prime minister is a daily and serial user of social media that he knows thoroughly, has words of praise for services such as Uber, is a subscriber to Amazon Prime and never fails to take a tour, his last as prime minister, in Silicon Valley. He knows that the German approach is harmful to Europe itself. Let's hope that Italian tranquility will prevail over German Angst as the mood of Europeans towards Silicon Valley, the engine of non-violent and global change. Provided, however, that the nerds of Google & Co. assimilate European history and implement consequent behaviors.
For a different opinion, this apology of the German point of view is interesting. We propose below the Italian translation of the article by Anna Sauerbrey, columnist of the "Tagenspiegel", entitled "Why Germans are afraid of Google" published on the op-ed page of the "New York Times".
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