The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

Mayer, then an executive at Google, sat before Congress and told a bunch of mostly white, mostly old, mostly men that newspapers and magazines had a natural obligation to let information be crawlable, sliceable, query-able, and searchable . . . by Google.6 Stories provided by Google News, she said, “are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, and users can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story.”7 A thousand flowers would bloom in the ether, she implied; we’d maintain the country’s DNA of innovation, and inner-city kids would get their book reports done. It was similar to PBS hauling out Big Bird when it wanted its subsidy renewed. Who wants to kill Big Bird? Indeed, Mayer testified, Google provided “a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites.”8 She sounded disappointed that the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune weren’t thanking Google for all it had done for them. Perhaps this was because Google’s “valuable free service” was, in fact, rapidly gutting the advertising base of the American media—and rerouting all those revenues to Google.