Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Internet Illiterate

By Brandon K. Thorp Thu., Apr. 21 2011 at 6:10 AM

Wasserman Schultz: Are your algorithms... magic?

There are 7 billion people in the world. A little more than a quarter of them are connected to the internet. Of those, most could slap together a simple website if they really wanted to. Many have.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the comely congresswoman from Florida's 20th, thinks Google should closely monitor the activities of these ambitious souls and avoid driving traffic to websites that do nasty, illegal things -- which in this case means offering free streaming copyrighted video and audio or selling bootlegs and knockoff products.

Wasserman Schultz is hardly the only politico concerned about internet pirates. According to David G. Savage of Tribune's Washington bureau, for several months, Democrats and Republicans have quietly set aside their differences to wage war against e-piracy. Savage's Monday column -- readable here at the Bellingham Herald -- quoted Lamar Smith (R-Texas), Howard Berman (D-California), and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) as well as Wasserman Schultz, and all expressed noble antipiracy sentiments. Indeed, piracy is wrong. But Wasserman Schultz, in an ill-advised bit of posturing, decided to lay blame for piracy's ubiquity at the feet of Google, whose lawyers she told:

You're Google. You helped overthrow the head of a country in a weekend. It's more a lack of will.

Wasserman Schultz ought to know that Google, while awesome, isn't magic.

Google helps facilitate rebellion in oppressed lands by easing the flow of important information with the help of its brilliant web-crawling, page-ranking algorithms. In other words, it helps by doing what it's designed to do. What Google is not designed to do, and perhaps cannot do in the near future, is act as an e-nanny.

Consider: Unless websites that proffer copyrighted audio and visual content adorn their websites with large tags reading "Piracy practiced here!", Google's algorithms have no way of discriminating between good pages and bad ones. To an algorithm, all pages look more or less alike. Unless all legitimate multimedia sites and venders are forced to apply for and display tough-to-forge e-licenses of some kind, all censoring of Google's links would have to be conducted by Google employees.

In 2008, Google passed a significant benchmark when it documented the existence of 1 trillion simultaneous pages on the World Wide Web. As of 2011, Google itself employs a little less than 25,000 workers. If neither number has changed and if the web were to remain static from this moment forth, then each Google employee would have to screen 40 million pages for illegal activity to live up to Wasserman Schultz's expectations. If each employee were to screen 1,000 pages a day, which seems optimistic, and if they were to take no vacation days, weekends, or sick leaves, they would finish screening the World Wide Web in just shy of 110 years.

Which isn't to say that one day a supersmart algorithm won't emerge from the Googleplex to do the work Wasserman Schultz yearns to see done. It's just to say that accusing Google of a "lack of will" is a little silly. Google is powerful, but not so powerful that it doesn't wish to stay on the good side of the United States government.

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Tags:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, piracy

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Randi Krotch

Re Debbie Does DC: From photo-opping the loss of her boobs to grabbing Network Face Time following the shooting of an Arizona congresswoman, this it's-all-about-me shtarker is well on her way to becoming the Media Whore of the 21st Century!

Sgt. Schultz

Describing this bitch comely is an insult to the english language...misprint..should read Homely...U should see her without her warpaint on...Yeeech..

Bap1346

Maybe if big government regulators just let the Wall Street businesses police themselves, we could have avoided the entire mess. The market always corrects itself if left long enough. Child porn and human trafficking don't exist anymore because there is no demand because no company wants to get caught with illegals working there. The drug market is free and takes care of itself. I bet you won't be stealing from any drug dealers anytime soon because they will take care of that shit the way the market dictates. Same with the oil industry. (There haven't been any spills since BP learned that wasn't good for business, have there?)

Guest

Bap, you are either completely fucking insane or pure genius. Whatever it is, you are officially my new favorite commenter.

Bap1346

Finally someone has the guts to point out that most dems don't even know how to use the internet. Shultz wants to blame the big corporations like google for all the bad things in the world like piracy and abortions. But if the government would just let the market take care of itself all of those things would go away. (Remember Crystal Pepsi? Didn't need Debbie to get rid of that, did we?) The only part of the government Little Debbie and her little friends haven't gotten their sharp teeth into yet is the defense department, and just think what would happen if someone got caught stealing something from the military? They'd go KABLOOEY for sure. Thank you, Brandon Thorpe for having the guts to call a spade a spade.

Markal36

One question: Do you believe the market always takes care of itself? How about child pornography, drug trade, human slavery, etc. These are all big money making markets. Should we allow them to take care of themselves? (I lied - 2 questions). How about Wall Street? It was taking care of itself to all of our detriment. (Again I lied - 3 questions)

Guest

I will not agree with anything you question. Wall Street? How do we know they are the blame? Oh, that's right, the politicians blamed them and the media printed it, so it must be true. Child porn and human traffican, I agree. But when states like Arizona attempt to stop the human traffican, the dems call FOUL ! I am certain it was a humanistic decsion and not one based on the fact that the vast majority of immigrants, illegal or not will vote democrats, not unlike the Tammany Party in NY greeting immagrants at the docks when hey arrived. And wall street is a private biz, no one is forced to get involved. Actually it was the banking industry that made hugh $$$$$ with credit cards without needing a social security number ( you obviously did not know when you press 2 for spanish, they don't ask that question) and giving morgages to folks that couldn't afford rent let alone a morgage ( see; CountryWide) No, I agree with Bap, free market will take care of itself...BTW, do you think DWS was told to clean herself up before or after she was named head dem?

Markal36

Politicians and posturing obviously go hand-in-hand. I think we should tell Representative Wasserman Schultz, her fellow representatives, and cohorts in the Senate to fix the economy. Since they have done such a wonderful job with everything else (tic), it must be a "lack of will" that they have not accomplished this.