It was with some surprise that, riding on the Tube a month ago, I saw an advert for the information revolution. As executive director of the Open Rights Group, I had been labouring under the impression that I was, so to speak, the only geek revolution in town. As the train lumbered on beneath a capital teeming with the oppressed of the information age, I resolved to check the URL that the advert was advising me to visit and investigate the revolution this clearly well-funded organisation (who else, after all, can afford advertising space on the Hammersmith and City Line?) was compelling me to join. So I tapped http://www.information-revolution.org into my browser, and took a look.
At first I was confused. Did I know, asked the site, "that more than 75 per cent of people in the UK use just one search engine to find information"? Did I know that "62 per cent of internet users don't think about which search engine they use"? "But this is 2007, not 1984," the (unnamed) authors of the site warned. "So we're speaking up before things get out of hand. Raging against the machine kind of thing. The machine of conventional wisdom if you like!"
The name Google wasn't mentioned, and it was at that point that alarm bells should have started ringing. But I was curious. The site was so poorly designed that it could not have been the work of any self-respecting geek. Who could possibly be behind it?
The answer came several comments down the first blog post. You see, every geek knows that if you want to find out who's behind a website, you go to www.whois.net, type in the URL, and find the domain name registration information. And that is what someone had done. Sure enough, the site was registered to Profero Ltd, a marketing agency whose clients include the search engine Ask (formerly known as Ask Jeeves). What was trying on the outside to look like a grass-roots anti-Google movement was in fact a PR stunt, and a not very good one at that. There's a rather lovely name for groups like Information Revolution: "astroturfers". Wearing the mantle of grass-roots activism - emotive language, blog-style websites - astroturf organisations are in fact the interventions of already powerful players in any given debate. The classic example is Hands off the Internet, a group set up by telecommunications operators in the United States during the net neutrality debate. But Information Revolution is amateur in the wrong way.
Ask has since put its insignia on the site, but the damage has been done. As one commenter put it: "Perhaps [Ask] should have thrown the cash they threw at this silly little stunt at improving their rubbish search - sorry - find (that campaign fell on its face as well, didn't it?) engine and making it as good as Google . . . Someone at a PR company somewhere needs to lay off the nose candy."
