By Patrick Sabatier
    Libération

    Tuesday 26 July 2005

    In a recent issue, Business Week imagined a world where, upon meeting someone, you would only have to consult Google via your cell phone to instantly know his name, address, telephone number, hobbies, etc. Had not Google's CEO himself once announced that "we're moving towards a Google that will know more and more about you?"

    Another nightmare: this film broadcast on the web that details the scenario by which Google will put an end to the press, Libération included, by digging through the galaxy of information and images daily poured into the Net, to allow users to do their shopping there for free.

    Inexorably, Google indexes everything that is digitized. The fears of "Googlocracy," or of a digital Big Brother, are suddenly growing as fast as Google's market value. Fears as exaggerated as Google's market value. The latter must take into account the competition from the sector's other big guns, Microsoft in the lead, but also the question of the authors and producers of content (articles, books, television programs, etc.) that Google's robots only harvest, inventory and file on their shelves.

    Google's success testifies to what critic Jeremy Rifkin describes as the passage from "the era of property to the era of access" to information. But how long will Google be able to exploit the free resources of the Net to recycle them into digitized billboards before authors and producers demand their share of the pie? And before consumers worry about the way personal data collected is used?