Motivation News

BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal

Label: Business

The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that prompted the BBC to cancel a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a BBC fixture who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.

While the scandal led to the resignation and reassignment of several top executives — including George Entwistle, just two months into his tenure in the BBC’s top job as director general — Mr. Pollard absolved top management of applying “undue pressure” in the decision to stop the broadcast.

The report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation and was unaware of the sexual abuse accusations until he left the BBC this September. Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.

The report traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Its central conclusion was that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile segment on “Newsnight,” an investigative program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the segment was scheduled to run.

“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after a rival channel, ITV, broadcast its own exposé in October 2012.

That segment presented the accounts of five women who said they had been sexually abused as teenagers by Mr. Savile, the report said. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”

Mr. Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, dismissed a widely circulated theory that BBC News executives or their superiors pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment to avoid embarrassing the BBC. Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, said that he canceled the report because he thought the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile were inadequately substantiated.

“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he does not believe that they went beyond journalistic considerations.

After publication of the report, Tim Davie, the BBC’s acting director general, said that Stephen Mitchell, the deputy director of news, would be taking early retirement and that Mr. Rippon would be moved to another job. Helen Boaden, director of the news division, who along with Mr. Rippon and Mr. Mitchell was suspended while the nine-week Pollard inquiry was in progress, will return to her job, overseeing new editorial leadership at “Newsnight.”

In a statement, the BBC Trust, which oversees the broadcaster, said the report made clear the need for major changes in the BBC’s operation. It said top executives must take initiative and responsibility, share information and embrace criticism, and persuade employees to rid the company of the “insularity and distrust” revealed in the report.

“The BBC portrayed by the Pollard review is not fundamentally flawed, but has been chaotic,” it said. “That now needs to change.”

The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile program, including Mr. Rippon and the top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Ms. Boaden and Mr. Mitchell, saying they had reached a “flawed” conclusion in canceling the “Newsnight” segment that overrode the “cogent evidence” against Mr. Savile that the “Newsnight” team had gathered.

But it paid scant attention to the role of the former director general, Mr. Thompson, and did not fault him for missing opportunities to learn the details of the allegations against Mr. Savile.

After Mr. Thompson was told about the scuttled segment by a BBC reporter at a reception in late December 2011, he said, he asked his news executives about it. According to his testimony to the Pollard inquiry, he “received reassurances” that it had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons” and “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”

Matthew Purdy contributed reporting from New York.

U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers

Label: Health

B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed eight polio workers over three days.

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here make for easy targets. They wear no uniform but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers

Label: Lifestyle

B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed eight polio workers over three days.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

State of the Art: Android Cameras From Nikon and Samsung Go Beyond Cellphones - Review

Label: Technology

60 Seconds With Pogue: Android Cameras:
David Pogue reviews the Nikon Coolpix S800C and the Samsung Galaxy Camera.

“Android camera.” Wow, that has a weird ring, doesn’t it? You just don’t think of a camera as having an operating system. It’s like saying “Windows toaster” or “Unix jump rope.”

But yes, that’s what it has come to. Ever since cellphone cameras got good enough for everyday snapshots, camera sales have been dropping. For millions of people, the ability to share a fresh photo wirelessly — Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, text message — is so tempting, they’re willing to sacrifice a lot of real-camera goodness.

That’s an awfully big convenience/photo-quality swap. A real camera teems with compelling features that most phones lack: optical zoom, big sensor, image stabilization, removable memory cards, removable batteries and decent ergonomics. (A four-inch, featureless glass slab is not exactly optimally shaped for a hand-held photographic instrument.)

But the camera makers aren’t taking the cellphone invasion lying down. New models from Nikon and Samsung are obvious graduates of the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” school. The Nikon Coolpix S800C ($300) and Samsung’s Galaxy Camera ($500 from AT&T, $550 from Verizon) are fascinating hybrids. They merge elements of the cellphone and the camera into something entirely new and — if these flawed 1.0 versions are any indication — very promising.

From the back, you could mistake both of these cameras for Android phones. The big black multitouch screen is filled with app icons. Yes, app icons. These cameras can run Angry Birds, Flipboard, Instapaper, Pandora, Firefox, GPS navigation programs and so on. You download and run them exactly the same way. (That’s right, a GPS function. “What’s the address, honey? I’ll plug it into my camera.”)

But the real reason you’d want an Android camera is wirelessness. Now you can take a real photo with a real camera — and post it or send it online instantly. You eliminate the whole “get home and transfer it to the computer” step.

And as long as your camera can get online, why stop there? These cameras also do a fine job of handling Web surfing, e-mail, YouTube videos, Facebook feeds and other online tasks. Well, as fine a job as a phone could do, anyway.

You can even make Skype video calls, although you won’t be able to see your conversation partner; the lens has to be pointing toward you.

Both cameras get online using Wi-Fi hot spots. The Samsung model can also get online over the cellular networks, just like a phone, so you can upload almost anywhere.

Of course, there’s a price for that luxury. Verizon charges at least $30 a month if you don’t have a Verizon plan, or $5 if you have a Verizon Share Everything plan. AT&T charges $50 a month or more for the camera alone, or $10 more if you already have a Mobile Share plan.

If you have a choice, Verizon is the way to go. Not only is $5 a month much more realistic than $10 a month, but Verizon’s 4G LTE network is far faster than AT&T’s 4G network. That’s an important consideration, since what you’ll mostly be doing with your 4G cellular camera is uploading big photo files. (Wow. Did I just write “4G cellular camera?”)

These cameras offer a second big attraction, though: freedom of photo software. The Android store overflows with photography apps. Mix and match. Take a shot with one app, crop, degrade and post it with Instagram.

Just beware that most of them are intended for cellphones, so they don’t recognize these actual cameras’ optical zoom controls. Some of the photo-editing apps can’t handle these cameras’ big 16-megapixel files, either. Unfortunately, you won’t really know until you pay the $1.50 or $4 to download these apps.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

India Ink: Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?

Label: World

AT the end of this month, high school seniors will submit their college applications and begin waiting to hear where they will spend the next four years of their lives. More than they might realize, the outcome will depend on race. If you are Asian, your chances of getting into the most selective colleges and universities will almost certainly be lower than if you are white.

Asian-Americans constitute 5.6 percent of the nation’s population but 12 to 18 percent of the student body at Ivy League schools. But if judged on their merits — grades, test scores, academic honors and extracurricular activities — Asian-Americans are underrepresented at these schools. Consider that Asians make up anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the student population at top public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City, Lowell in San Francisco and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va., where admissions are largely based on exams and grades.

In a 2009 study of more than 9,000 students who applied to selective universities, the sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that white students were three times more likely to be admitted than Asians with the same academic record.

Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with WASP prep schoolers, Ivy League schools started asking about family background and sought vague qualities like “character,” “vigor,” “manliness” and “leadership” to cap Jewish enrollment. These unofficial Jewish quotas weren’t lifted until the early 1960s, as the sociologist Jerome Karabel found in his 2005 history of admissions practices at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

In the 1920s, people asked: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Jews? Today we ask: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Asians? Yale’s student population is 58 percent white and 18 percent Asian. Would it be such a calamity if those numbers were reversed?

As the journalist Daniel Golden revealed in his 2006 book “The Price of Admission,” far more attention has been devoted to race-conscious affirmative action at public universities (which the Supreme Court has scaled back and might soon eliminate altogether) than to the special preferences elite universities afford to the children of (overwhelmingly white) donors and alumni.

For middle-class and affluent whites, overachieving Asian-Americans pose thorny questions about privilege and power, merit and opportunity. Some white parents have reportedly shied away from selective public schools that have become “too Asian,” fearing that their children will be outmatched. Many whites who can afford it flock to private schools that promote “progressive” educational philosophies, don’t “teach to the test” and offer programs in art and music (but not “Asian instruments,” like piano and violin). At some of these top-tier private schools, too, Asian kids find it hard to get in.

At highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are the psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students tell me that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers chalk it up to “being Asian.” They are too smart and hard-working for their own good.

Since the 1965 overhaul of immigration law, the United States has lured millions of highly educated, ambitious immigrants from places like Taiwan, South Korea and India. We welcomed these immigrants precisely because they outperformed and overachieved. Yet now we are stigmatizing their children for inheriting their parents’ work ethic and faith in a good education. How self-defeating.

To be clear, I do not seek to perpetuate the “model minority” myth — Asian-Americans are a diverse group, including undocumented restaurant workers and resettled refugees as well as the more familiar doctors and engineers. Nor do I endorse the law professor Amy Chua’s pernicious “Tiger Mother” stereotype, which has set back Asian kids by attributing their successes to overzealous (and even pathological) parenting rather than individual effort.

Some educators, parents and students worry that if admissions are based purely on academic merit, selective universities will be dominated by whites and Asians and admit few blacks and Latinos, as a result of socioeconomic factors and an enduring test-score gap. We still need affirmative action for underrepresented groups, including blacks, Latinos, American Indians and Southeast Asian Americans and low-income students of all backgrounds.

But for white and Asian middle- and upper-income kids, the playing field should be equal. It is noteworthy that many high-achieving kids at selective public magnet schools are children of working-class immigrants, not well-educated professionals. Surnames like Kim, Singh and Wong should not trigger special scrutiny.

We want to fill our top universities with students of exceptional and wide-ranging talent, not just stellar test takers. But what worries me is the application of criteria like “individuality” and “uniqueness,” subjectively and unfairly, to the detriment of Asians, as happened to Jewish applicants in the past. I suspect that in too many college admissions offices, a white Intel Science Talent Search finalist who is a valedictorian and the concertmaster of her high school orchestra would stand out as exceptional, while an Asian-American with the same résumé (and socioeconomic background) would not.

The way we treat these children will influence the America we become. If our most renowned schools set implicit quotas for high-achieving Asian-Americans, we are sending a message to all students that hard work and good grades may be a fool’s errand.

Shopping Sites Open Brick-and-Mortar Stores

Label: Business

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Piperlime, the Gap Inc. unit that was online-only for six years, opened a SoHo store this fall.

Andy Dunn was fierce about the Internet-only model of his apparel company, Bonobos, after helping to found it in 2007. He gave a speech, “The End of Apparel as We Know It,” arguing that stores were a bad economic decision. As he told a news channel in 2009: “We keep men out of retail stores when we know that men fundamentally don’t enjoy shopping.”

How times have changed.

Recently, Mr. Dunn was looking with satisfaction around a Bonobos store in Manhattan, one of six the company opened this year. “I was pretty puritanical about e-commerce only,” he said, but found that about half of would-be customers would not order apparel online because they wanted to feel the merchandise. E-commerce is growing fast, he added, but “that doesn’t mean the offline world is going away — it just means it’s changing.”

After years of criticizing physical stores as relics, even e-commerce zealots are acknowledging there is something to a bricks-and-mortar location. EBay and Etsy are testing temporary stores, while Piperlime, the Gap Inc. unit that was online-only for six years, opened a SoHo store this fall. Bonobos plans to keep opening stores, and Warby Parker, the eyeglass brand, will soon open a physical location.

The companies say they are catering to customers who want to see what they are buying in person, and who see shopping as a social event. As they build the locations, though, the retailers are reimagining some long-established rules — carrying less inventory, having fewer staff members and embracing small and out-of-the-way locations. In the process, they are creating what could be a model for efficient in-store operations: the store as a showroom.

“Well over 90 percent of sales still happen in physical stores, so there is a huge, compelling reason to think about the physical store as a driver of sales,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research. She said Web retailers had advantages over traditional ones: they are not stuck with old cash registers and sales software, and the weak commercial real estate environment combined with their Web sales history allow them to get leases on good terms.

Faith Hope Consolo, a Manhattan retail real estate broker, said she was seeing more inquiries from online-only retailers about opening shops, particularly in smaller spaces.

“They’ll show them a few products, lure them in and hopefully have them hooked,” she said. “They feel that, yes, people are online, people have apps, but there’s nothing like the spontaneous face-to-face.” Some stores take the revised model to an extreme. An eBay pop-up store in London that opened this holiday season has no actual merchandise, just scannable screens displaying gift suggestions.

Others try to give shoppers a semitraditional experience, but without all the costs. “If you build it backwards, you rethink it,” said Mr. Dunn, the Bonobos chief executive.

Mr. Dunn said the store idea stemmed from customers’ requests to try on items before a purchase.

Though Bonobos suggested that customers order multiple sizes, that didn’t fit with the ethos of good service he wanted. “Clicking on six sizes and having them shipped to me is not a great experience,” he said.

Also, he said, “the cost of marketing a Web site and the cost of free shipping both ways was approximating a store expense,” he said.

Bonobos added two sales representatives in the lobby of its Manhattan office last year to show clothes to customers, and Mr. Dunn said that within six months, each was on track to achieve more than $250,000 in sales. Based on that, this year, Bonobos struck a deal with Nordstrom to carry its clothes in its shop, and opened its first store.

For his own stores, Mr. Dunn did not want a typical retail model that required carrying a heavy inventory, staffing for heavy foot traffic and paying for prime real estate.

Instead, he took 700 square feet in Bonobos’s existing fifth-floor office and converted it into a store, called a Guideshop. Customers make appointments, which generally last 45 minutes, so one or two employees handle the entire store at once.

Most retail stores have to carry each item in a range of colors and sizes, a significant cost, but Bonobos does not, instead using the Web site as its virtual back room. Customers do not leave the store with merchandise; instead, the employees place an online order that is delivered to the customer, often the next day.

Attackers in Pakistan Kill Anti-Polio Workers

Label: Health

Athar Hussain/Reuters

Relatives of Nasima Bibi, a worker in a polio vaccination drive, at a hospital morgue in Karachi.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead five female health workers who were immunizing children against polio on Tuesday, causing the Pakistani government to suspend vaccinations in two cities and dealing a fresh setback to an eradication campaign dogged by Taliban resistance in a country that is one of the disease’s last global strongholds.

“It is a blow, no doubt,” said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, an adviser on polio to Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. “Never before have female health workers been targeted like this in Pakistan. Clearly there will have to be more and better arrangements for security.”

No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but most suspicion focused on the Pakistani Taliban, which has previously blocked polio vaccinators and complained that the United States is using the program as a cover for espionage.

The killings were a serious reversal for the multibillion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Nonetheless, United Nations officials insisted that the drive would be revived after a period for investigation and regrouping, as it had been after previous attacks on vaccinators here, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Pakistan has made solid gains against polio, with 56 new recorded cases of the diseases in 2012, compared with 192 at the same point last year, according to the government. Worldwide, cases of death and paralysis from polio have been reduced to less than 1,000 last year, from 350,000 worldwide in 1988.

But the campaign here has been deeply shaken by Taliban threats and intimidation, though several officials said Tuesday that they had never seen such a focused and deadly attack before.

Insurgents have long been suspicious of polio vaccinators, seeing them as potential spies. But that greatly intensified after the C.I.A. used a vaccination team headed by a local doctor, Shakil Afridi, to visit Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, reportedly in an attempt to obtain DNA proof that the Bin Laden family was there before an American commando raid on it in May 2011.

In North Waziristan, one prominent warlord has banned polio vaccinations until the United States ceases drone strikes in the area.

Most new infections in Pakistan occur in the tribal belt and adjoining Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province — some of the most remote areas of the country, and also those with the strongest militant presence. People fleeing fighting in those areas have also spread the disease to Karachi, the country’s largest city, where the disease has been making a worrisome comeback in recent years.

After Tuesday’s attacks, witnesses described violence that was both disciplined and well coordinated. Five attacks occurred within an hour in different Karachi neighborhoods. In several cases, the killers traveled in pairs on motorcycle, opening fire on female health workers as they administered polio drops or moved between houses in crowded neighborhoods.

Of the five victims, three were teenagers, and some had been shot in the head, a senior government official said. Two male health workers were also wounded by gunfire; early reports incorrectly stated that one of them had died, the official said.

In Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, gunmen opened fire on two sisters participating in the polio vaccination program, killing one of them. It was unclear whether that shooting was directly linked to the Karachi attacks.

In remote parts of the northwest, the Taliban threat is exacerbated by the government’s crumbling writ. In Bannu, on the edge of the tribal belt, one polio worker, Noor Khan, said he quit work on Tuesday once news of the attacks in Karachi and Peshawar filtered in.

“We were told to stop immediately,” he said by phone.

Still, the Pakistani government has engaged considerable political and financial capital in fighting polio. President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa have been at the forefront of immunization drives. With the help of international donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they have mounted a huge vaccination campaign aimed at up to 35 million children younger than 5, usually in three-day bursts that can involve 225,000 health workers.

The plan seeks to have every child in Pakistan immunized at least four times per year, although in the hardest-hit areas one child could be reached as many as 12 times in a year.

Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.

Attackers in Pakistan Kill Anti-Polio Workers

Label: Lifestyle

Athar Hussain/Reuters

Relatives of Nasima Bibi, a worker in a polio vaccination drive, at a hospital morgue in Karachi.

But the campaign here has been deeply shaken by Taliban threats and intimidation, though several officials said Tuesday that they had never seen such a focused and deadly attack before.

In North Waziristan, one prominent warlord has banned polio vaccinations until the United States ceases drone strikes in the area.

“We were told to stop immediately,” he said by phone.

The plan seeks to have every child in Pakistan immunized at least four times per year, although in the hardest-hit areas one child could be reached as many as 12 times in a year.

Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.

Op-Ed Contributor: Why Google Has Too Much Power Over Your Private Life

Label: Technology

A FEW years after it was founded, Google adopted a list of guiding principles it titled, “Ten things we know to be true.” No. 4 was “Democracy on the Web works.”

That’s a worthy sentiment — though a bit surprising coming from the Web’s emperor.

For that, arguably, is what Google has become. Its search engine accounts for nearly 80 percent of all Web searches in the United States — and a remarkable 98 percent of searches from mobile devices. In that role, Google is not just an eponymous verb but perhaps the most central conduit of information in the nation — and, indeed, on the planet. No other search engine comes close.

News accounts suggest that the Federal Trade Commission will delay any decision on whether to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google until perhaps next year. That decision had been expected to come this week.

The F.T.C. has spent nearly two years investigating whether Google’s search engine favors the company’s own commercial endeavors over rival offerings, thereby stifling competition. And even now, some analysts believe that the commission might forgo any legal action against the company in exchange for Google’s willingness to make some modest changes in the way it uses certain consumer information.

This would be a severe setback for Internet users. It will allow Google to continue to amass unbridled control over data gathering, with grave consequences for privacy and for consumer choice. (European regulators are conducting their own antitrust inquiry into Google.)

Google has been modest about its dominance in the modern information society, asserting that competing search engines, like Yahoo or Microsoft’s Bing, are just “one click away” if people wish to use them. The Internet is an extraordinarily complex domain with equally powerful challengers, the company points out. Facebook makes Google’s own social media platform look like a joke. Far more shoppers begin their online product searches through Amazon than Google. In short, there’s enough competition out there, Google says, that consumers ought not to fear the company’s mighty role in the information economy.

But we need to look at Google’s market role — and behavior — through a different prism. Google is not just a “search engine company,” or an “online services company,” or a publisher, or an advertising platform. At its core, it’s a data collection company.

Its “market” is data by, from and about consumers — you, that is. And in that realm, its role is so dominant as to be overwhelming, and scary. Data is the engine of online markets and has become, indeed, a new asset class.

In March, when Google replaced the more than 60 privacy guidelines that governed its products and services with a single policy, it also moved to consolidate the personal data it collects. The company creates as much data in two days — roughly 5 exabytes — as the world produced from the dawn of humanity until 2003, according to a 2010 statement by Eric Schmidt, the company’s chairman, who later declared that he didn’t “believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable, and recorded by everyone all the time.”

For now, Google uses the data to sell targeted ads, but who says the company’s use of the data will be restricted to that purpose? Opt out of Google’s data collection? Sure, you can do that — but you’ll also have to delete your Gmail account and leave Google’s ecosystem. With Google’s Android operating system — which is activated in 1.3 million new mobile devices every day, and is used by more people than use Apple’s iPhone — that ecosystem is growing.

I’ve been concerned about Google’s dominant role in data collection — and the profound privacy concerns it raises — since my time at the F.T.C. When the commission approved Google’s 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick, I dissented — because I was concerned that combining the two companies’ vast troves of consumer information would allow Google, which was largely unchecked by competition, to develop invasive profiles of individuals’ Internet habits.

Now, the F.T.C. has another chance to protect consumers, promote innovation and ensure fair competition online. In making its decision, it must understand that while Google may be the runaway leader in Web search and online advertising, its most troubling dominance is in the marketplace of private consumer data. If real competition in this area can be restored, I am confident that market forces will provide the incentives necessary for companies to offer attractive services and relevant, engaging ads without violating consumer privacy.

I am no longer an F.T.C. commissioner, but a lawyer representing companies — including Microsoft — that are concerned about Google’s power as a data collector. Yes, there’s some irony in that — it wasn’t long ago that Microsoft faced its own major antitrust lawsuit and had to change its anticompetitive practices.

But then, an emperor is an emperor. And when it comes to the Web, as Google’s wise founders said, democracy works best.

Pamela Jones Harbour, a member of the Federal Trade Commission from 2003 to 2010, is a lawyer at Fulbright & Jaworski, where she represents technology companies, including Microsoft.