Barack Obama love affair with Google ends

President Obama faces calls to crack down on the dominance of the search giant that was his greatest supporter

Too good to last: Obama will have to deal with widespread concern over copyright and Google's power in the online advertising market

Last January Google threw a post-inauguration party in Washington to celebrate the election of President Barack Obama. The internet giant had good reason to be happy. Google’s top executives had been early backers of Obama’s campaign and Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, was one of four Googlers on the president’s transition team.

As if to underline their closeness, Obama even used Google’s YouTube to address the nation before his inauguration. At the party, A-list geeks such as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Craigslist’s Craig Newmark mixed with B-list celebrities Jessica Alba and John Cusack and raved it up to 1980s tunes.
Until a few years ago Google had largely ignored Washington. Now Schmidt is one of the few chief executives still welcome in the White House. But the honeymoon period may soon be over. In the coming months Google will face a series of challenges as its rivals and critics lobby against its enormous dominance on the net and its ambitions elsewhere. The first test comes next week over Google’s controversial plans to build the world’s biggest online library.

Google’s self-avowed mission is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. To that end it has been scanning library books and has so far amassed digital copies of more than 10m titles — including 500,000 volumes held by the Bodleian in Oxford. In 2005 the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued for “massive copyright infringement”. The two sides reached agreement in October 2008, with Google promising to pay the Authors Guild $125m (£76m) to set up a way of sharing profits made by Google Books with copyright owners and offer an opt-out to objecting authors and publishers. Read More..

Source: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/