Into the future: Pros and cons of a Google world

Peter Bazalgette, media consultant, investor and former producer of Channel 4's Big Brother

As the channels of communication become more complex, and the TV schedule dies, the search to find a particular piece of content becomes more important. I'm all for less regulation, but search will be an Ofcom issue in the future. I'll be interested to see what Google does in the next two years to address society. Will it take on any additional public service responsibilities? Google is brilliant and a great public utility but don't assume it is going to be totally dominant in the future. It's going to face competition from companies that allow you to search for things in a different way. There will be increasingly sophisticated search engines that provide more informed, less broad-brush results. So Google may not be as dominant but it will still be a healthy business.

Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK

We have long-standing concerns about Google regarding the way it is betraying its own principles in going against established international norms around freedom of information. When you go on a Google search engine in London and look for a picture of Tiananmen Square, you get that iconic picture of a man standing in front of a tank. If you go to google.cn and do the same search you'll get a picture of happy smiley tourists. Specific words such as Tibet, democracy, Tiananmen Square are heavily censored. We think that filtering process should be transparent. The rest of us who know that we're using Google in an uncensored fashion have a duty to stand up for people who don't have that access.

Jeffrey Chester, director, Center for Digital Democracy, Washington

Google will be the most powerful media company in the 21st century, and they are really owed tremendous credit for that. But they are so well integrated into everyone's existence, and questions should be raised. They are expanding into mobile communications, which adds a whole new dimension - not only do they know your interests but they know where you are. Strong privacy policies enacted by the EU and the US are urgently required. Competition authorities should investigate Google's growing role as an online advertising gatekeeper. Our democratic future depends on the structure of the new media.

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive, WPP advertising group 

Copyright and fair payment for content are going to become more of an issue in the future. Also, as Google has become more and more dominant, people are becoming increasingly concerned about its market position. There are very few media owners that have 70 or 80 or 90 per cent market share, which they would if the Google-Yahoo! link in America becomes a reality. The most interesting thing is who will be the son or daughter of Google, and whether that will come from a Stanford or a Bangalore or Beijing. I think it's more likely to be the latter. Google's big challenge is the law of big numbers: can a $160bn company become a trillion dollar company?

Ashley Highfield, former director of BBC Future Media & Technology and BBC iPlayer mastermind, now CEO Kangaroo

People are terribly peripatetic in the online world; there is very little loyalty, particularly to search brands. If somebody else comes up with a better mousetrap then the audience will use that service instead of Google's. The web world shows that products do go through generations, and I think you could argue that Google's now looking quite Web 1.0 and maybe hasn't embraced a number of the emerging Web 2.0 features. The future's going to be in layering on top of Google more understanding of the context of the user and the question - the 'semantic web', without getting too cyberbollocks about the whole thing.

Adam Curtis, director of TV documentary on terrorism, The Power of Nightmares

The millions of searches that engines like Google record and store reveal the shifting desires and fears of individuals. They're leading to a new fragmented sensibility among millions of people in the way they see and experience the world. Machines like Google know something about us as human beings that we really don't want to know - that we are not individuals: 'If you like this then you will like that...'. So Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable. Out of that is going to come some very interesting political ideas of how to organise society and also new artistic ideas. The really interesting question is whether it is really a cult....