More on Google Books

About a month back Google announced a major settlement with publishers and the Authors Guild, in which the representatives of the publishing industry agreed that it was alright for Google to be trying to 'scan' every book ever produced, as long as they offered the copyright holders a percentage of the profits made off of the work, as well as payed them a one-time scanning fee. This is a hackneyed version of the actual 134 page agreement, but not inaccurate I don't think.
Now it appears that not everyone is happy about this. A group of interested persons, including the American Library Association, The Institute for Information Law and Policy at The New York Law School, and a consortium of lawyers are now planning on raising their objections to Google's plan. Just to give you an idea of what their knickers are all twisted about, the key words in the debate appear to be things like monopoly and anti-trust.
In my mind the problem doesn't just involve the books thing, it involves Google's position as the sometime owner of content but more often distributor and 'organizer' of content from maps to news to blogs to images to videos etcetera and etcetera. This blog, for instance, although the content belongs to me, is saved on memory that belongs to Google. My email also is all saved on a server owned by Google and is accessed through a program designed and managed by Google. Stepping back a few decades it is as if my filing cabinet belonged to someone else, and also my bookshelf, and also my photoalbum and my vhs collection!
My own very simple formulation of the problem is like this:

Google's mission statement is 'to organize the world's information'.
Organization is a form of control.
Knowledge is power.
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

We can trust Google, right? They're basically a philanthropic organization, right? Well, maybe, and no. I think I would not be amiss if I said that history teaches us that it is abject foolishness to trust anyone that has immense amounts of power. Perhaps the founders and executives of Google are in possession of ideals that I share - this is not reason enough to blindly trust them. First of all I cannot be sure beyond a doubt that my ideals are less likely to cause pain and more likely to cause universal prosperity and suffrage than others' ideals. And second of all, Google neither has these goals as its mandate nor is it a democracy (such as the common goals of the group may be upheld) - it is a frankly profit-driven corporation.
So, I think its great that we have a system in place (or at least the Americans do) that allows us to challenge things like this and also that we have people willing and interested enough to challenge them. I only wish that there was greater concern about it circulating. These are very serious issues that need to be attended to with great thoughtfulness and dexterity. The system of information is becoming dangerously unbalanced - kudos to the librarians and to the lawyers for keeping an eye on it for us.