ARIN 6902 Internet Cultures and Governance Nicola Giusto Google as an example of protocological power in the network society The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images Debord, G. 1967 More data is better data Google engineer Och, F. 2007 What is Google? Google is essentially an algorithm that processes and gathers anonymously information in the Internet. As it is common in the history of technology, this algorithm is not interested in the content of those data rather in their topology, that is to say the form that data take in the space. Google aims to track the relations within information, deFining a detailed map of the info‐sphere and analysing the informational architecture (Wigley, M. 2006 and Toumi, I. 2002). As Randall Stross (2009) points out Google’s competitive advantage on rivals as Yahoo, in the early years on the new century, was being the only search engine perfectly working without human need: [...] digital collections of information will rely on interconnections that are created by software, without human agency. Software algorithms are created by humans, but the complexity of the end products far exceeds anything human creators could produce manually. [...] the results produced by the Algorithm should not be edited, adjusted, or touched in any way by human intervention. The only way to scale their systems to handle all of the world’s information was by automating all process. 1 Good metaphors to clarify Google’s role in the context of Internet are perhaps the idea of the map in a motorway network, or the compass in the modern voyage during the early colonial 1 Stross, R. 2009, p. 66. Al least up to 2004, when pushed by some national governments Google company chose to shut down the antisemitic web site Jewwatch.com . In 2007 ten thousand contractors work around the globe as quality control inspector.