Media Watch - Peak Google - SearchGBT and AI - The Media's Future

The New Zealand Reporter - Media Watch, a weekly opinion (this one's late) on NZ media & its future. The NZR looks at Google's dominance, AI's impact & government's lack of action on the media front.

Today I tried to explain to my 96-year-old dad how Google dominates the internet by comparing it to Christchurch’s perhaps most well-trodden shopping centre Westfield Mall.

He grew up during World War II in Gisborne and can still recall seeing US soldiers ferrying locals on joyrides up and down the beach. In those days the world was small; he didn’t know much about it or the war; it just didn’t figure.

Minister for Media and Communications, Paul Goldsmith. Source: Radio NZ.

At lunchtime in a busy Westfield Mall, I painted a hypothetical scenario in which Westfield was the biggest mall in the city and no other mall could compete with it. That’s Google I told him. And if Westfield told the shops not to set up outside the mall or at another mall, that, I told him, is something comparable to what Google.

OpenAI appears to be Google’s near peer rival in the battle to dominate the future of the information highway.

In his boyhood, he understood the world through the radio or, as he calls it, the wireless, through comic books and what he heard at home and elsewhere in Gisborne.

Since the war, the way he has received the news has transmuted from radio to television and now YouTube. He still religiously watches the 6pm news, listens to radio news and sparingly reads the newspapers but even he has noticed the media landscape change.

Google appears to dominate the marketplace of information. (I’ve used italics for reasons that will become clear later on.) No other entity has ever had such a hold over the flow of news onto our computer screens and smartphones.

I told my dad that a search engine is like a librarian. If you asked the librarian about a the famous 20th century American writer Ernest Hemingway, they could put 20 books on a table in front of you for you to read.

But what if there were 100 books on Hemingway and the librarian had been paid to select the 20 and didn’t tell you about the other 80? I suggested that’s how Google runs its search engine. This is just conjecture on my part but the point is that if you (as a news creator) don’t show up in the newsfeed, you won’t be seen.

I illustrated to him how search works on Microsoft’s purportedly servile search platform Bing by typing “the new zealand reporter” into the search bar. To my surprise, The NZR showed up at the top of the feed. But when I clicked on the news tab, it didn’t show. The NZ Herald and Radio NZ did, alongside some other outlets. But not The NZR.

On Google Chrome, I tried the same test. This time The New Zealand Herald came up top of the search feed. A LinkedIn link to yours truly came in second-place. Under the news tab, The NZR didn’t get a mention. The entries read like a list of a who’s who in the mainstream media news cycle. Stuff came out tops, followed by RNZ, The Press (owned by Stuff), Newsroom, and the NZ Herald again. In fact, I scrolled through 8 pages of search results-The NZR didn’t feature once. But the usual suspects as mentioned did. Over and over.

Interestingly, The Spinoff, which has a contract with Google, didn’t feature on the lists. Not once.

So, in its own funny way, Google and (to a lesser) Bing’s dominance of the news airwaves has allowed for another fertile ground of dominance to develop in our news cycle, making it really hard for new outlets to build a foothold.

I asked my dad whether competition is a good thing when it comes to how we get our news. He told me it’s important Stuff and The NZ Herald have competitors so that better news is produced. That’s my dad; he’s straight to the point.

So, setting up and running a small outlet in New Zealand, could be likened to setting up a small shop off a main road, down a poorly-lit alleyway. At best, if it were a music label or band, you might call it an Indie label. At worst, you might call it a garage band that plays gigs in grungy bars.

This situation isn’t good for consumers. The big outlets need competition. Better work might be produced. New ground could be broken. Consumers might hear viewpoints or interpretations of events that aren’t heard or considered. Politicians will keep an eye over their polyester-upholstered shoulders.

My guess is that the big outlets are spending more and more money on search engine optimisation (SOE) and partnering (perhaps code or word salad for the word ‘pay’) with the tech giants to boost and maintain their position on your search lists. SOE is a time-consuming method of training Google search to identify your web of interlinking pages and sites, causing it to prioritise them on the search results lists.

But could Google’s dominance of the news airwaves and power of what news is and isn’t seen or heard be about to be broken? Have we reached peak Google?

Yes and no. Like many things in life there is no clear answer. Even Google can’t answer this one, because know one knows the future.

The short of it is that the US government and states have made a stand in the courts and tried to break Google’s hold. In a recent anti-monopoly case, a District Court judge came to the blindingly obvious conclusion that Google’s search engine is a monopoly. In another court, a judge ordered Google to open its app Playstore to competition.

Never before has Google faced so much pressure to loosen its hold on the tools of its trade and the flow of information. And money.

And all this court is happening at the right time: the rise of artificial intelligence and AI-powered search.

Bing’s Copilot serves as an example of this. It allows you to ask questions. In return Co-pilot will summarise what it finds and give you with weblinks. But more is to come. OpenAI is developing an AI-search engine called SearchGPT that could (I’m speculating here) write news articles.

Microsoft’s Copilot. Source: Microsoft.

This is one future scenario on the future shape of the information highway. It also comes with its risks, with a potential rise in misinformation and plagiarism being two of them.

Google’s AI model Gemini was a failure, after it produced erroneous results. By plagiarism, I mean I could write an article that an AI platform then grafts for content and serves up as fresh news without giving credit where it is due or paying for it.

Google and OpenAI are making hay so that presumably they will corner the future of the AI-search engine market. But the recent court battles could make this tough for Google if they force it to relinquish control and to sell Google Chrome.

That said, the whole court battle could take years to complete. Years, so don’t hold your breathe, waiting for change. And there’s a counter argument that suggests Google’s dominance is fragile and that AI platforms have already made inroads.

In the meantime, the government sits on the Fair Digital News Bargaining bill, as 50 TVNZ jobs go. And the NZ Herald says it will ax local newspapers. And The Spinoff suggests it will close. Or at least that’s how it seems.

In a strange way, it’s as if the government is holding an ax over the New Zealand media in the form of doing nothing about it. Is it paralysed, has it resulted from a disagreement between the coalition partners, or does it just want the market to work out who the winners and the losers will be? Who knows.

On 47 occasions the bill mentions ‘digital platforms’, a term that covers search engines. It says search engines “means an Internet service that allows users to search multiple Internet sites or databases and returns results…(including aggregated information and links to content)”. Whether this definition would cover AI-powered search engines like OpenAI’s is unclear.

One thing is for sure: the bill makes no mention of artificial intelligence. In a rambling press briefing in May this year, Paul Goldsmith mentioned AI once, saying that they had ruled out defining it in the new bill without explaining why.

The government can’t wait forever to legislate. Google and Open AI are in a race to control the information highway, while we stand at the side waiting. But for what?

Maybe I should ask my dad.