The search engine is a ubiquitous and vital tool that assists us in our daily lives with seamlessly instant results; however, this plain search box, used by billions of people around the world, also conceals the most complex changes in the global political economy and geopolitics today.
Google (which is held by Alphabet, Inc.), one of the most popular entry points to the Internet is one of the leading Internet companies and an emblem of the “new” economy. For simplicity's sake, I will refer to it as Google in this book. Search as an entry point to the Internet has become a nexus of the power struggle among state, national, and transnational capital, labor, and other social actors as the Internet has become a new transnational marketplace and driving force for capitalist development and expansion. The goal of this book is to unbox search and show the broader structural changes that are occurring in global capitalism, dynamically intertwined with the political economy of the Internet.
In 2021 Google generated more than $257 billion in revenue, with $76 billion in net income, trailing just behind Apple and Amazon and ahead of Microsoft and Facebook. At that time the company held over $139 billion in cash reserves.1 To put this in perspective, a $25 billion investment can produce enough COVID vaccines for all low- and middle- income countries.2 If Google were compared to a country, based on its revenue, it would rank fiftieth in the world in terms of GDP, tied with New Zealand. How and under what conditions was the search function on the Internet able to generate this enormous wealth, drawn from basic daily information-seeking activities around the world, and restructure existing global information and communication domains?
Since its initial public offering on August 19, 2004, Google has been Wall Street's darling for reinvigorating the market after the 2000 dot-com bubble burst; at the same time, the company was also beloved by the public, academics, librarians, and politicians, who saw the search engine as a tool for the democratization of information and empowerment of citizens. Many believed in the compatibility of Wall Street and democracy because Google seemed a harbinger of a gentler and more benign and democratic capitalist system. Less than two decades later, however, Google has turned from being the “people's company” to being a new corporate behemoth and a symbol of a modern-day robber baron infamous for exercising political economic power around the globe, exploiting massive amounts of private data mined from its surveillance business model, using a profit-biased algorithm, destroying journalism and gentrifying local communities, with an undemocratic corporate culture and labor exploitation that relies on union busting and a large number of contract workers.
In response to these developments, domestic policy makers, scholars, and the public have increasingly demanded social responsibility and called for reining in the swelling concentration of power and wealth of Google and other tech companies, urging the federal government to increase regulations on those companies and across the sector. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced several bills including the American Innovation and Choice Online Act3 and Open App Markets Act,4 aiming to curb the power of the tech giants and create a more competitive market. Legal scholar Tim Wu, who was named by the Biden administration to the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, has suggested creating a new regulatory body and breaking up large portions of the big tech companies.5 Outside the United States, Google, along with its US competitors Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, is under fire for controlling the Internet, as alleged in a series of antitrust investigations by multiple nation-states including the European Union (EU), while the company has struggled to gain a foothold in China—the largest Internet market. These intensifying geopolitical tensions are reshaping the Internet.
As the search engine has become the major gateway to the Internet and the main mode of daily information seeking, there has been growing interest among journalists and scholars from a range of fields in its implications of the social, political, and technical functions. A significant number of scholars have rightly questioned and refuted the popular belief that the search engine is a neutral medium or a new democratizing force that makes room for new and diverse voices. They point out that search engines often reinforce dominant cultures, political power, and social hierarchies, drawing attention to the growing power of search engines and how they function in and have consequences for social, cultural, and political life.6 In the political economic field are several works that focus on Google, addressing issues concerning ownership structure, surveillance, monopoly, and algorithm use.7
The purpose of this book is not to be redundant but to build and expand on this existing work by extending questions about how and under what conditions basic human information-seeking activities have been commodified and subordinated to capital in the first place, how search has transformed into a global industry that has accelerated the commodification and commercialization of the Internet and the accumulation of capital, and how it was turned into a new geopolitical focal point of the Internet. I hope that such a political economy of search will offer a broader understanding of today's global capitalism—which is absorbing and predicated upon digital technologies to an ever-increasing extent. I begin with situating search, represented by Google, within its political economic and geopolitical contexts. Although Google dominates the global search market, it is important to note that the search function is no longer exclusively taking place through the traditional search engine. Besides Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex, and Naver, there are numerous vertically integrated search engines such as Amazon and Facebook, as well as mobile and voice search. Moreover, the search giants intersect with every media and internet business, and increasingly, sectoral lines have blurred as the Internet giants have extended their businesses across the Internet and beyond. Search is about more than the search engine per se; it is about a focal point of controlling and shaping the Internet as a marketplace. Thus, while this book is about search and centered on Google, it also covers the intersection between search and the major Internet sectors that drive the dynamics of the political economy of the Internet.
As of January 2021 there were 4.66 billion Internet users around the world, representing a penetration rate of 59.5 percent of the total global population.8 Google is the most popular site on the Internet with 86.9 billion total monthly visits, with YouTube (also owned by Alphabet) coming in second at 22.8 billion visits.9 In 2020 the digital advertising market reached over $378 billion, accounting for over 50 percent of total global advertising.10 In that same year, Google's ad revenues amounted to almost $147 billion, and its search advertising revenue was over $104 billion.11 Microsoft Bing was second, garnering a little over $7.7 billion, followed by Yahoo! and the Chinese search engine Baidu.12 Google remains the largest digital advertising seller, with a whopping 30 percent or more of worldwide ad spending.
Google handles millions of searches per minute on average as people search for everything from how to avoid coronavirus infection to how to apply for unemployment, where and for whom to vote, find jobs, items to buy, entertainment, health advice, research for work and school requirements, and information to fulfill myriad curiosities. The search function has wired and rewired our fundamental social, political, and economic lives. The search engine industry has turned the Internet into the most profitable capitalist marketplace, as it is strategically woven into the political economy of the Internet and reaches across economic sectors. Thus, if we are to understand the industry, it needs to be situated within the broader capitalist political economy, in which global capitalism's developmental growth increasingly hinges on the growth pole of the Internet sector. This was made clear in the 2008 global crisis.
In 2008, in the blink of an eye, the economic crisis and the collapse of the world financial system reverberated around the globe. Ben Bernanke, the head of the US Federal Reserve, succinctly noted that “the financial crisis was the worst in global history, surpassing even the Great Depression.”13 Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, noted that “the percentage of household wealth lost would be more than five times worse than 1929.”14 Facing a rapidly escalating global and domestic economic meltdown, President-Elect Barack Obama promised to rebuild the US economy and create millions of new jobs by investing in infrastructure and building an information superhighway. In a December speech about his economic recovery plan, Obama, vowing to create prosperity for all, stated, “Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I'm President—because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world.”15
This was followed by his visit to Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the new economy, to meet with high tech industry CEOs including Steve Jobs of Apple, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Google's Eric Schmidt, Yahoo!'s Carol Bartz, Cisco Systems's John Chambers, Twitter's Dick Costolo, and Netflix's Reed Hastings.16 Obama's visit was not merely to express his gratitude to the tech giants, which were the largest of his presidential campaign contributors, but was also to discuss a “partnership” between the public and private sectors to reboot the process of capital accumulation17 through the Internet sector in order to shore up the depressed economic system. The search engine industry as a strategic growth industry occupied the center of this broader renewal effort.
Fresh capital was funneled into the Internet sector. As millions of people were losing jobs, homes, pensions, and social welfare rights around the world, the Obama administration, as part of its 2009 stimulus package, injected billions of dollars into incorporating and expanding new Internet-based technologies, with the promise to the American people of economic recovery, prosperity, creation of quality jobs, transparency, and a more democratic society.18
With the enhancement of US economic competitiveness, there was a new push for the digitization of the US economy through a series of “public and private” initiatives, interlinking information technologies with strategic sectors. These included a project called Digital Promise backed by the Department of Education, academia, and the tech industry to create “smart demand” in order to move the education system further toward being an appendage of the market;19 electronic medical records’ being mandated by the federal government to open up a new billion-dollar health IT market;20 promotion of a smart grid by the Department of Energy for trade and investment around the world; the boosting of American economic output by further integrating computer technologies within manufacturing processes; and, all in the name of transparency, the White House's open data policy, which required government agencies to release government data and, in effect, turn over valuable weather, climate, health, and geographic data collected at taxpayer expense to the information market. For decades, the United States has been aggressively reorienting its domestic economy to aid the Internet sector and organizing it into a new economic growth zone.
As the United States continued this effort, the government undertook a new self-serving trade agenda called “digital trade” (commerce conducted over the Internet) and mobilized agencies including the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, and the International Trade Commission in order to remove a range of obstacles so that US digital goods and services could reach global markets over the Internet. The US digital political economic agenda could be seen in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a 2016 trade agreement between the United States and eleven other countries, which was set to be the largest free trade deal in the world and to expand digital trade. It was one of the focal pieces of President Obama's strategic trade policy—a “pivot to Asia”—targeted toward integrating the Asia-Pacific economy while strategically excluding China. The TPP, which was supposed to comprise 40 percent of global trade, included strong digital trade provisions to serve the interests of the US tech sectors. In regard to the TPP, Obama stated, “My top priority as President is making sure more hardworking Americans have a chance to get ahead. That's why we have to make sure the United States—and not countries like China—is the one writing this century's rules for the world's economy.”21 In 2017, however, the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement.
In a January 2017 report published by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Obama administration warned that China was a threat to the US semiconductor industry.22 In order to curb China's tech power, the council recommended that the US government intervene and protect US tech sectors including the semiconductor industry, increase government spending on research and development, tighten up US protections against intellectual property “theft,” and reshape national security to deter the use of Chinese technologies in US government procurement. The members of the council included former Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt and former Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie, and the working group members included former Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jacobs, and Stanford University President Emeritus John Hennessy (now chairman of Alphabet).
Subsequently, the Trump administration's schizophrenic economic, social, and foreign policies seemed to diverge from the Obama administration's policies, as they were sometimes at odds with the interests of the US tech sector. Yet the fundamental principle, that of maintaining US-led global capitalism, was still intact, even if the administration's tactics had shifted from being multilateral to unilateral in orientation. Despite the change in strategy, this was not an exception in the sense that the US government has long been trying to curtail the growing power of the Chinese tech sector as well as the country as a whole. The Obama administration understood the geopolitical and economic changes—that the global order was no longer unipolar with the United States alone at the top—and tried to maintain its power by managing a multipolar global order. According to the US National Intelligence Council's 2012 report,
By 2030, no country—whether the US, China, or any other large country—will be a hegemonic power. The empowerment of individuals and diffusion of power among states and from states to informal networks will have a dramatic impact, largely reversing the historic rise of the West since 1750, restoring Asia's weight in the global economy, and ushering in a new era of “democratization” at the international and domestic level.23
The US-led geopolitical economic order in place since World War II is being reshuffled. As historian Vijay Prashad points out, the United States can't accept this new reality and continues to push for global supremacy through economic coercion backed by its diplomatic and military power.24 In fact, the Trump administration's unilateral moves unmasked the changing order, because the technology industry is at the center of global power struggles between major political economic rivals (the United States, China, and Europe) in which transnational capital is trying to cope with a new and rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape.
Having a cozy relationship with the US government during the Obama administration, the US Internet sector was able to coordinate with it to maneuver the changing global political landscape. However, the Trump administration's blatant assertion of unilateral power in the global arena, in particular with regard to China, put US tech companies at risk. Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, stated, “In confronting China, we must have a clear understanding about the consequences of our actions and where there will be costs to ourselves…. The challenge is that the US's and Chinese technology developments, supply chains, commercial markets are tightly intertwined.”25
In 2018, with the escalating trade war, the US government placed the Chinese tech giant Huawei, the world's biggest telecom provider and second-largest smartphone company, on its blacklist, banning the company from working with US companies and purchasing US-made chips and software. The intent behind this move was to curtail China's technological advances; by dislodging Chinese tech companies, however, it also damaged US tech suppliers by cutting access to the burgeoning Chinese market. Google's cutting off of Huawei cost the company as much as $425 million in annual revenue.26
As of now, the US tech sector is still ahead of China's in the areas of Internet services and software where Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple operate, and also has the upper hand in the global market in critical technology value chains in semiconductors;27 however, China is rapidly gaining ground. Huawei is struggling to survive, having lost market share outside China to its Western rivals Ericsson and Nokia after the imposition of US trade sanctions, but the company is still the biggest provider of 5G networking equipment in the world and also is working on next-generation 6G networks. Chinese Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are competing against the US tech sector in the areas of AI, cloud, autonomous cars, mobile payments, and e-commerce. The current contention between the United States and China has accelerated China's efforts to wean itself from US technology and move up the value chain. China has unveiled an industrial policy, Made in China 2025, with which it aims to manufacture 70 percent of its semiconductors domestically by 2025. In 2020 China announced its fourteenth five-year plan, in which self-reliance in technology was front and center in its economic development.28
The US government and tech sectors are extremely uneasy with China's pursuit of tech power that could outpace that of the United States and break its dependence on key US technologies, and they are trying to contain China's technical advances by attacking it for IP theft as well as on the ground of being a national security threat. While the Biden administration touted the differences between its approaches and those of the Trump administration, its China strategy has been consistent with those of its predecessors. As an offensive move, the Biden administration is pushing expansive industrial policy legislation. The US Senate passed a $250 billion spending bill called the US Innovation and Competition Act of 2021.29 In February 2022, the House approved its own version, originally called the America Competes Act of 2022, with a $350 billion spending plan.30 Both bills were designed to strengthen America's competitive edge against China by funding US tech sectors and national research and development.
While these two nations are engaged in a tug of war, the European Union is renewing its on-again, off-again efforts to insert its—mostly regulatory—power, both to influence the development and use of digital technologies and, perhaps, to curb US and Chinese dominance in the information sector. According to Politico, a leaked document suggested that Europe would take more hardline trade measures against the United States and China and also fund the European tech sector to create European-based digital champions.31 The document mentioned Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent as firms against which Europe needed to compete. There is no European version of tech giants, so European lawmakers have been using aggressive regulatory devices ranging from privacy and competition law to trade in order to stave off the US and Chinese tech giants’ encroachment on EU's nascent tech sector.
The European Union has long been in a battle with Google because that firm has greatly profited from the European market. Since 2017, the European Union's European Commission (EC) has imposed a total of $9.5 billion in fines in its several antitrust cases against Google search. In 2021 the EC launched another investigation of Google over its role in the advertising tech sector. Google thus constitutes one of the flash points of an intensifying global geopolitical struggle over the burgeoning Internet market. This is the political economic and geopolitical context in which search is located.
Behind the seemingly clean and simple interface of the search box is an immense and swiftly changing global political economy of information and communication. To clarify the political economy of search, one must explicate how Google and its competitors operate within this milieu: how they are organized and structured, and under what principles they operate and expand across territories.
This raises several critical questions: How did the search engine, which interacts with and intersects a basic human activity, evolve into a ubiquitous commercial service and a key component of today's dynamic global information business, which is restructuring both the wider information industry and our very social lives? How, for what purposes, and by whom is search technology being designed and used? Who is actually laboring behind this enormously profitable information industry—is it only engineers and computer programmers, or is the “reserve army of labor” needed for search to become larger and more heterogeneous? Given that the search industry operates transnationally, what is the role of geopolitics in shaping this most dynamic sector? By engaging with these questions, this book provides a systematic critical analysis of the political economy of search, within the greater context of the dynamic relation between information and capitalism's overall developmental processes.
To that end, the book draws from the critical tradition of the political economy of communication (PEC) to shed light on the links between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and capitalism today and to uncover important ongoing structural changes within a rapidly evolving system of information provision. The political economy of communication is rooted in radical critiques of the nature of capitalism, which reproduces domination, exploitation, injustice, and inequality.32 It looks at ICTs as integral parts of the economy and at the relation between ICTs and broader structural changes and evolving global capitalism. In particular, Vincent Mosco's and Andrew Herman's foundational work on critical theory is instructive because they lay out a critical political economic research agenda as an alternative to mainstream theoretical social research.33 They offer four critical themes in which this book is grounded: a world system theory that addresses the unequal social and economic structures of capitalism as a global system, the role of states in capitalist development, technology and labor processes, and an alienated culture that reproduces capitalist social relations. The political economy of communication has returned to these recurrently, in different guises, and scholars in the field have also enlarged on these themes to foreground the conceptual importance of commodification, commercialization, and the diversification and concentration of the communication and information industry.34
In recent years a rich body of scholarly work concerning contemporary capitalism and its relationship with the Internet industry has been published. The political economy's eager embrace of digital technologies is described by many scholars who use terms such as “surveillance capitalism,” “cognitive capitalism,” “informational capitalism,” and “platform capitalism.”35 One of the commonalities between these concepts is the idea that today's capitalism is of a new kind that has broken from industrial capitalism with radical technological changes. This book, however, is located within Dan Schiller's concept of digital capitalism, which emphasizes the continuity from the early history of agricultural and industrial capitalism, because digital capitalism is firmly situated within the compulsions, imperatives, and crisis tendencies of this type of political economy.36 Schiller echoes historian Ellen Wood, who rejects the conceptualization of today's capitalism as a new kind by emphasizing that capitalism is dynamic by definition and constantly changes with new technologies, business strategies, cyclical crises, and so on. Wood writes that capitalism is “a system in which all major economic actors are dependent on the market for their basic requirements of life…only in capitalism is market dependence the fundamental condition of life for everyone.”37 This definition still applies to today's capitalism. The integration of new digital technologies doesn't represent an epochal shift in capitalism; rather, as Wood argues, it attests that capitalism continues and extends the market imperative and affects the “types of work that [were] little touched or untouched before.”38
The current massive absorption of ICTs across economic sectors should be understood within a context in which capitalism is prone to crises as a result of its imperative of continuing accumulation, which drives periodic overproduction—a condition that occurs when surplus capital reaches market absorption capacity, resulting in a falling rate of profit.39 Since the 1970s, global capitalism has experienced continuous full-scale crises and what Robert Brenner describes as a long downturn driven by capitalist competition characterized by “persistent stagnation” in the advanced capitalist economies.40 In order to survive and overcome the crises that result, David Harvey argues, capital has an imperative to develop new markets—what he calls a “spatio-temporal fix,” which refers to a temporary fix for capitalist crises. Harvey explains that geographical expansion and spatial restructuring are options for absorbing surplus.41
Drawing on Harvey's work, Schiller posits that in response to the economic downturn, the US political economy further pivoted to ICTs as a spatio-temporal fix in order to restructure the economy by creating networked information systems to expand business processes as well as to renew profitable growth.42 Within this theoretical framework, this book demonstrates that the Internet is a new site of growth and spatio-temporal fix in which tech companies are driving capitalist restructuring to renew growth through the most dynamic economic sector: the web.
The rise of the Internet giants and their growing power has drawn political economists to the theory of monopoly capital. Robert McChesney and John Bellamy-Foster of the Monthly Review School illustrate how capitalism has shaped the Internet, revealing the long-term dynamics of monopoly capital.43 The concept of monopoly capital, first articulated in the tradition of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in 1966, foregrounds the theory of accumulation and the rise of a few dominant corporate giants in each industrial sector during the twentieth century.44 These large and concentrated units of capital are typically able to exert control over prices, productive resources, labor processes, and politics. According to one important variant of this theory, as they had done before with steel, rubber, electrical products, and auto manufacturing, giant companies also quickly acquired primacy over the Internet sector, suppressing competition and following the general trend of modern capitalism. The concept of monopoly capital is important for understanding the roles of the tech giants in shaping the Internet.
Yet the theory of monopoly capital often mutes the role of competition, despite the persistence of competition between the major Internet companies with respect to new markets and at the edges of each big company's existing market turf. The search industry constitutes a revealing concentration of capital, but monopoly isn't devoid of competition because the industry operates across sectors and internationally. Challenging the monopoly school, Anwar Shaikh, Howard Botwinick, and others emphasize the intensification of competition in contemporary capitalism.45 Rhys Jenkins posits that competition is not simply about the number of firms and their market power but relates to the ability to sustain growth and reproduce surplus value.46 This doesn't mean that scholars like Shaikh and Botwinick, who challenge the theory of monopoly capital, undermine or discount capital's tendency to control and concentrate; rather, monopoly needs to be located within the context of competition. The two are often seen an oppositional; however, market concentration needs to be understood as a form of competition.47
Tech companies’ attempts to control the Internet and their competitive pressure are expressed in their division of labor and labor control. The current rapid digitization of the global economy, combined with a new wave of automation enabled by network technologies, has renewed debates among scholars and policy makers about technology's impact on labor and the future of work.48 The search engine industry as a highly automated sector reflects this changing labor process. While there are few studies specifically concerning labor in the search industry per se, there has been a plethora of studies looking to understand seemingly new forms of work that are enabled by and performed over network computer technologies and, in particular, those under the concept of digital labor—a concept that has, thankfully, reignited interest in labor writ large.49 Particular attention has been paid to workers for tech companies such as Uber, TaskRabbit, Door Dash, and Upwork, whose business models rely on online platforms to supply and organize labor markets. Their precarious, exploitative, and alienating work practices are encapsulated by broad terms such as gig economy, demand economy, and sharing economy. These works provide valuable local insights into issues affecting the Internet industry.
This book, however, breaks from the concept of digital labor by arguing that, in order to understand the place of labor in the Internet industry, a different conceptual starting point is necessary. Instead of artificially abstracting a supposedly separate digital realm demarcated by the experience of working online, the book situates search industry labor within the wage and occupational structure of the overall political economy. This is because ICTs and telecom networks are embedded in virtually every industrial sector and occupation; the implementation of ICTs is not limited to the Internet sector.50 For instance, in 2018 Walmart was the largest IT spender behind Amazon and Google, at $11.7 billion, followed by JPMorgan Chase at $11 billion.51 As Ursula Huws, Dan Schiller, and a few other scholars have emphasized, those who labor with computers need to be analyzed by way of comparison and contrast with each other and with other employees.52
This view challenges autonomist Marxist scholars such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, who deploy a concept of immaterial labor, considered one of the characteristics of a post-industrial society and distinguished from “physical” labor that produces material goods.53 Tiziana Terranova's influential work associates immaterial labor with free labor on the web as a distinctive form of labor in the digital economy that builds websites, produces content, offers feedback, and is appropriated for creating value for capital.54 This book argues that if one only focuses on the concept of digital labor, one undermines the complexity and multifaceted range of the actual division of labor that attends the deployment of network technologies—notably in the search industry—and neglects the other kinds of labor that are concurrently involved in constructing it.
In order to move the conversation beyond local conditions of labor in the Internet industry and engage labor under capitalism in general, Harry Braverman's work—which renewed attention to capitalist labor processes—remains relevant, for it discusses the essential characteristics of labor control and the effect of technology on the nature of work in capitalism. As Mosco and Herman explicate, Braverman's seminal work Labor and Monopoly Capital challenged post-industrial theorists and refuted the common claim that modern work, owing to the deployment of new science-based technologies and automation, would result in more “white-collar” jobs requiring higher levels of education and training that would involve more intense intellectual work by employees while diminishing low-skilled production jobs.55 By analyzing occupational structures from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century in the United States, Braverman identified a general trend of growth in the number of low-wage workers in service and retail sectors as new occupations while employment in industrial sectors with above-average wages had actually decreased.56 With the introduction of advanced technologies and scientific management under capitalism, Braverman argued, even initially highly skilled work such as clerical work had become mechanized, rationalized, and routinized. There was a strong tendency toward mechanization and use of Tayloristic scientific management to bring about a systematic deskilling and degrading of many working-class—as well as white-collar—jobs by breaking down work into smaller mechanized tasks with the implementation of technologies. Critics such as Michael Burawoy and P. K. Edwards argue that Braverman undermined the class struggle and workers’ resistance; however, in reality, his work provides a mechanism for labor to resist control and rationalization.57
Historians Lizabeth Cohen, Sanford Jacoby, Stuart Brandes, and others have revealed that within this despotic form of labor control, corporate-sponsored welfare programs such as pensions, healthcare, education, and housing—so-called welfare capitalism—was also deployed by large industrial enterprises such as Ford Motor Company, National Cash Register, and IBM as a management strategy to counter the rise of labor unions in the twentieth century, and they show how it managed to survive over time.58 There is a striking similarity between these and the contemporary Internet giants, in which corporate welfare programs have been renewed for select skilled workers; the firms provide extensive perks and benefits such as family care, free food, a full year of paid maternity and paternity leave, and paid vacations. While this can be viewed as a new kind of relation between labor and capital, by contextualizing labor control and management within the longer historical trajectory of capitalism, this book shows that industrial labor control techniques are clearly manifested in the contemporary Internet industry.
The search engine industry is expanding outward. Its expansion across national boundaries hinges not only on technical capacity and business strategies but also on geopolitics. In the 1980s, Herbert Schiller illuminated how information technologies had become central in the global political economy, noting that “the information industrial power has become a vital determinant of existing and future power relations within and between nations.”59 Anthony Smith reaffirms the idea that information cannot be separated from other political economic conflicts.60 While witnessing the movement for a new international information order, Smith warned that new electronics could be a greater threat to the national sovereignty of developing countries than colonialism itself. Geopolitics and global political economy have radically changed since Smith was writing more than forty years ago. Yet geopolitical struggles over global network infrastructure have only been heightened with the new geopolitics coupled with the emergence of the Internet as a site of capitalist development.
In particular, China's reentry into the global capitalist system and the rise of its Internet industry have drawn the attention of many academics, policy makers, and businesses. The mainstream argument is that the People's Republic of China (PRC), an authoritarian regime, is an emerging imperial power striving against Western democracy.61 Yet scholars of critical political economy such as Yuezhi Zhao, Yu Hong, Min Tang, and Hong Shen argue that this approach pays scant attention to the fact that a multifaceted Chinese Internet is a vector of China's transnationalization and structural integration into US-led digital capitalism.62 They clarify that this new geopolitical dynamism is reorganizing digital capitalism today.
The common analysis situates ICTs as tools for territorial and political expansion within traditional interstate rivalries in the framework of classical imperialism.63 This book, however, challenges the idea that territorial expansion is the main axis of geopolitical conflict; rather, it deploys Wood's concept of capitalist imperialism, which brings nation-states under the capitalist economy and is governed by economic imperatives rather than territorial logics.64 Capitalist imperialism consists of a system of hierarchies and complexities surrounding multiple capitalist states; each state within the system has had to interact with the United States, the current capitalist imperial power, and its allies while also having to respond to its own domestic pressures, and its own capitalist logics, and also having to create and exist within conditions of a global capitalist system.65 Within this analytical framework, this book looks at the current contention over the Internet, particularly among the major economic power blocs of the United States, China, and the European Union. It scrutinizes the relations and the dynamics between global capital and nation-states within an increasingly transnationalizing capitalist system.
The extraterritorial nature of the Internet is intertwined with the global political economy and has turned into a vital site for profit making and an axis of expansion for capital. Thus, as control over the Internet is crucial for gaining political economic power, the Internet has become a place of battle among states, different units of capital, and various social actors. The world is undergoing a radical transformation of information technologies and international information provision—one that is still taking shape as the Internet has begun to more fully unleash its explosive potential for capital. Facing an economic crisis compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, the global power centers are waging a new political fight over the Internet while the United States is trying to ensure its continuing leadership of the global capitalist system. Search is at the fulcrum of this conflict. With this as background, this book's argument proceeds as follows.
This book relies on a new and far-reaching conception of the political economy of the Internet in general and of search in particular. The human activity of information seeking originated eons before our era of capitalist development, and it is not intrinsically commercial. Chapter 1 takes the reader through the history of search engine development and shows that search engine technology itself did not inherently have economic value. Initially, search technology was developed in noncommercial academic spaces, and users and some early search engine firms vehemently opposed the idea of advertising-based search engines, believing that search results should not be influenced by commerce. How, then, has the shift to an ad-based business model occurred? What factors and conditions have driven search engine technologies that were outside the money economy into the marketplace?
To answer these questions, the chapter examines the process of commodification of search and the role of government in creating conditions for capital. It discusses how early search engine firms—in the 1990s, when the Internet was being rapidly commercialized—evolved and experimented with various business models from subscription to licensing to advertising, and under what conditions they finally alighted on the ad-based model and configured the advertising system and its infrastructure beneath the search engine.
Today, the crucial function of search on an Internet served by and for the marketplace seems naturalized and accepted with no alternatives and nary a blink of an eye. By looking at its history, however, the chapter shows that this has been a long march for capital, hand in hand with the US government's policy efforts, to transform information activities into a marketplace.
Chapter 2 situates search within a broader political economy of the Internet. It illustrates how the search engine market is dominated by Google but also how it is under extreme competitive pressures. Within the dynamics governing a monopolistic tendency and competition, the search engine industry is moving beyond simply competing with the major tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft to also ally and work with those companies across economic sectors. This has driven a new wave of capital accumulation by restructuring the political economy. To maintain their existing profit centers and cultivate new profit opportunities and geographical expansion, the Internet companies are also configuring and reconfiguring global network infrastructures. Google is known for its search engine, which facilitates the effortless user experience that the company claims is rooted in its intricate algorithm; however, underneath Google's myriad services is a colossal physical base that consists of massive numbers of customized servers, mega data centers, fiber optic and submarine cable systems, and terrestrial networks connecting spatially dispersed markets. This chapter reveals how the Internet giants are constructing the global network infrastructure, which is a key site of control and competition.
Driven by competition, control, and expansionary pressure, the search engine industry not only occupies network infrastructure but also impels efforts to establish distinctive labor processes that maximize profitability. Chapter 3 uncovers a wide array of labor organization behind the search engine, all of which underlies and enables the generation of profit, and offers a glimpse of the realities of labor processes within today's capitalism.
This chapter explicates the organization of labor under capitalism and challenges the pervasive myth of the Internet companies as exclusively or generally reliant on young, highly paid and educated workers. Rather, it identifies four interlocking categories of work that support the search engine industry: a reserve army of labor that consists of the unemployed and underemployed and is generated by capitalism's constant restructuring process; a cadre of highly skilled full-time workers; and below that, propping it all up, legions of contract and process workers as well as unpaid consumer and volunteer labor that supports capital accumulation projects. The chapter proceeds in light of historical scholarship and holds that unwaged labor is deeply rooted in capitalism and has been a vital part of capitalist development. By tracing the current labor structures in the search engine industry within historical context, the chapter shows that today's hierarchical and fragmented organization of labor challenges the building of solidarity among workers.
While Chapter 3 examines the division of labor underlying search, Chapter 4 extends the analysis of the labor process to an examination of the methods of labor management and control employed by Google, which sets the trends for the wider industry. Google is known for maintaining a productive workforce through the provision of its unusual working environment, where its highly paid workers are given unprecedented freedom and have a voice in the company, and employee benefits are applied by means of a data-driven labor management strategy. The company is often portrayed in media as genuinely exceptional and is setting new trends in labor management techniques based on data. On the surface, Google seems to defy traditional exploitative capital-labor relations and goes against their capital logic; however, the chapter demonstrates that Google's current labor control techniques and its labor management strategies stem from an earlier era of industrial economy. Here again, the book contributes a historically grounded conception of today's Internet economy.
In particular, this chapter compares Google's labor control processes to those of an earlier industrial era. It looks at such major firms as Ford Motor Company, National Cash Register, Western Union, and AT&T, which were the pioneers of new kinds of labor control including company programs that gave workers a variety of benefits such as pensions and stock shares along with the bureaucratic management of these programs. As part of corporate management strategy, welfare programs were a way to increase productivity, curtail the tensions between labor and capital, and stem the tide of labor unions. This was strikingly different from Taylorist techniques, in which workers were treated as parts of the factory's machinery. Labor historians refer to the more “humane” labor management that emerged in the late nineteenth century as welfare capitalism, or industrial paternalism. By contextualizing Google's current labor control and management practices within the historical continuum of capitalist development, Chapter 4 posits that welfare capitalism and scientific management—the marks of an industrial economy—are reemerging in the era of the information economy.
Finally, Chapter 5 explicates the transnational nature of Internet industries and the role of geopolitics in organizing the search engine industry and in animating the dynamics of transnational capitalism. Specifically, this chapter examines the People's Republic of China and the European Union, where the US-based Internet giants are facing the most serious opposition. China constitutes an especially significant exception to Google's market dominance, not only because it is the world's largest Internet market by number of subscribers and the world's most significant economic growth zone, but also because its reentry into the US-led global capitalist system is changing the geopolitical landscape. Meanwhile, Europe, a longtime US ally, has been attempting to bolster its own information economy, and tension over the control of information has once again been reignited with the emergence of the Internet. Motived by the deep-seated fear over US information dominance in Europe and the ascendance of the Chinese Internet industry, Europe is reasserting its political economic power over the Internet by setting rules and regulations and fostering the European digital economy. By analyzing these two different conflict zones, this chapter illuminates the role of geopolitics in the dynamics of today's transnational capitalism with respect to the Internet industry.