When the US Federal Trade Commission slapped a fine of $22.5m on the search giant Google last week, it was easy to dismiss as relatively insignificant against a worldwide profit of nearly $3bn. But it marks an important point in a shift in perceptions of Google, once seen as a paragon of internet virtue.
在上周美联商会打了搜索引擎巨人一个2250万美元的罚款的时候，人们很容易认为相对于全球范围内30亿美元的收益，这个罚款是无足轻重的。作为曾经的虚拟网络的典范，它为转换谷歌的认知度印上了很重要的标志。
It's easy to forget the extent to which Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin were once seen as good guys. The pair met and began work on their search engine in 1995, but refused to participate in the dotcom mania which was making their peers rich on the back of half-baked ideas and hype.
在很大程度上人们容易忘记谷歌的拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林曾经被认为是两个好汉。两人相遇后开始致力于搜索引擎的开发，而拒绝了参与当时让他们的同龄人致富的表面风光实际不太完善的互联网狂热。
While others cashed in by floating prematurely on the stock market, they kept a low profile and built something profound: a complex, accurate, essentially democratic search engine which helped shrink the world as dramatically as had the compass, the telegraph and the aeroplane. Capable of indexing knowledge in a manner accessible to all, "Googling" caught on fast and the company became a byword for subtle ingenuity. We take this for granted now, but at the time it was mind-blowing, brilliant, and free.
当其他人将钞票大把大把的抛向浮动而又早熟的股票市场，他们却保持着低姿态，建立一些具有深远意义的东西：一个复杂的，精确的，民主本质的搜索引擎，它有助于戏剧性的缩小世界就像有了指南针，电报和飞机。在某种意义上使得索引知识能够被所有人访问，“谷歌一下”迅速的流行，而这家公司因为微妙的独创性而变成了一句谚语。现在我们会觉得理所当然，但是在那时却是让人兴奋，杰出的，自由的。
Yet this was just the beginning. At the "Googleplex" in Mountain View, California, Page and Brin tried to create an anti-corporate, open culture, based on trust and equality, where everyone shared the same office space and pets could come to work. Indeed, the pair distilled their ideas into a guiding principle which, while vague, was sincere: "Don't be evil." Strange how, with a slight change in inflection, the phrase can be made to sound Orwellian.
然而这只是个开端。在加利福利亚山景城的谷歌总部，佩奇和布林尝试创造一个非社团，开放式，基于信任和平等，每个人分享相同的办公空间，还可以带着宠物一起工作。的确，两人将他们的想法净化成一个原则，模糊不清时，要保持真诚：“不作恶”。奇怪的是，音调的微小转变，这个段子听起来像官腔。
Even when Google's founders took their company public in 2004, they were trying to do the right thing. The quirky Dutch auction system they used was designed to hold Google's share price at a sustainable level and avoid being gamed by the Wall Street investment banks whose actions – still little understood – had wiped out most of their youthful competitors in the dotcom sector four years earlier. The pair, along with CEO Eric Schmidt, also limited shareholders' influence and refused to issue quarterly forecasts in an attempt to avoid short-termism.
甚至在2004年谷歌创建者将公司上市时，他们也尽力做对的事情。他们设计古怪的荷兰拍卖系统，用来保持谷歌的股价在一个可承受的范围，避免被华尔街那些投资银行玩弄，这些银行不被了解的行为抹杀了四年前年轻朝气的互联网行业竞争者。两人和执行总裁一起，也限制了股东的影响并拒绝发布季度预测，以尝试避免短期主义。
Last week's fine is the largest the FTC has yet levied. Google was judged to have misled users of Apple devices as to the efficacy of the privacy protection settings on Safari browsers, enabling search history to be tracked and logged. On the back of the corporation's recent admission that it had failed to erase personal data collected illegally by its Street View in 2008 (not to mention the usual revelations about paltry contributions to the exchequer in the UK), August may be the month in which Google's astonishing slide from the light to the dark side in the eyes of the public becomes irreversible. Examine their problems in the round, though, and a pattern appears – one which we need to understand if we're to make sense of the world we're creating.
上周的罚款是美联商会最大的一笔。美联商会判决谷歌就苹果浏览器的隐私保护设置的有效性方面误导了使用苹果设备的用户，让搜索历史记录可以被追踪和登录。紧跟着企业近期承认在2008年谷歌街景未能消除非法收集的私人数据（更不用提关于为英国国库提供微不足道的贡献的通常的启示），8月可能是谷歌这项惊人举动之后，在民众的眼中不可逆转的从光鲜滑动到暗淡的一个月。全面的检验他们的问题，尽管，出现了一种模式，这个模式使我们需要明白在我们创新的时候是否有益于世界。
When Google was incorporated in 1998, Page and Brin thought profit would come from licensing their technology to other companies. But in 2000 they became the first people to make online advertising pay, by tearing up the old rulebook. The AdWords system worked by charging advertisers according to how many people clicked through to their website upon being presented with Google search results. Most of the company's profit now accrues in this way.
1998年谷歌合并的时候，佩奇和布林认为盈利是来自给其他公司的技术许可证。但在2000年他们撕毁了旧规则手册，变成创造在线广告支付的第一批人。关键字系统根据谷歌搜索结果点击网站广告来收取广告费。公司的大部分盈利都是以这种方式来累计的。
Here's the thing, though. If an entity such as Google were free to log and analyse our specific habits and proclivities as revealed in search history, social networking and email, it would be able to sell ads targeted tightly at us, with a greater chance of success and incalculably greater value. If Google is wealthy and powerful now, imagine how much wealthier and more powerful it – or, chillingly for them, someone else – could be if armed with this extra information.
尽管，这里还有一件事。要是一个实体比如谷歌可以免费登录并根据显示的搜索历史，社交网络和电子邮件来分析我们特殊的习惯和癖性，我们被紧密的锁定为目标，以这种极大的成功几率和无与伦比的巨大的价值，使得销售广告变得可能。如果现在谷歌很富有和很强大，可以想象它有多富有和强大，或者，有人会为他们感到寒心，如果拥有了这些额外的信息。
Last week's fine was directed specifically at Google's advertising arm, DoubleClick, which began as one of the first and most storied internet businesses in New York, prior to being snapped up by Google after the tech sector crash of 2000. When, back in 1998, the company's founding CEO Kevin Ryan declared that "personal information is the oil of the 21st century", very few people understood. But we're beginning to get it now. The battle lines have been drawn.
上周的罚款直接定向了谷歌的广告部，双击，以纽约其中的第一个和最传奇的互联网企业，在2000年的科技行业的崩溃后，这个企业在之前被谷歌一抢而空。回溯到1998年，这个公司的创始CEO凯文·瑞安声明“私人信息是21世纪的石油”，很少人能明白。但是我们现在开始明白了。战线已经被描绘出来了。
|
