Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Canny planning or dangerous compromise?

Matt Brittin takes the hotseat at a pivotal moment
Opinion The BBC has a new head honcho in waiting, the Director-General designate Matt Brittin.

His job: helming one of the world's most famous and oldest international media brands, one with a vast and sensitive domestic position.

His last job: President of EMEA Business and Operations at Google.

You can imagine a greater culture clash, but you'll have to work at it.

It is far too early to predict how Brittin will steer the largely unsteerable BBC, an organization in perpetual crisis in a rapidly mutating media, political, and economic hellscape.

Some say his decades of experience in Google and impeccable institutional background make him the ideal guide and defender for the Corporation, which until very recently didn't even have a YouTube policy.

Others point out his complete lack of broadcast, editorial, or media managerial experience, his lack of presence in the Google C-suite, and Google's role as a predatory destroyer of journalism.

Google, of course, is evil.

Like a fallen angel, it started out in the belief that it does well by doing good, by becoming a telescope that made the world's knowledge available to all and focusing advertising through the same lens.

"Don't be evil." Over time, the money outshone the truth.

"Don't be evil" was phased out, and Google has just been found guilty of wiring its algorithm to feed off vulnerable people's mental health .

Brittin's role as head of Google in Europe appears to have been largely one of going around persuading important people that the company was in fact not evil, the results of which we can see for ourselves.

The BBC is not evil.

It is many unfortunate and fortunate things, but its own "Don't be evil" has never been rescinded.

This is in the form of a renewable ten-year Royal Charter, which sets out the job of the BBC as a public service organization with strict rules of impartiality and accountability.

In exchange, it has legally enforced funding directly from the public, rather than from taxation.

This in theory and somewhat in practice gives it some protection against political influence and commercial pressures.

It's all a glorious box of British political fudge, but the key point is that the Charter will be renewed at the start of 2028, before the next General Election.

It will thus be the main defense if the Trumpian Reform Party gets in, which feels much as you might expect about impartiality and accountability.

It is widely assumed that Brittin has been chosen to counter this existential threat by shrewdly negotiating the Charter to be as bomb-proof as possible.

Which is probably necessary, but a crying shame.

More public service, not less, would detoxify tech in all the areas where its toxicity feels most threatening.

One of the many factors behind the creation of the BBC in the 1920s as a body with unique rights and responsibilities was the perception of broadcasting as a new information technology of potentially revolutionary but unpredictable power.

The BBC was a heavily regulated monopoly with strict limits on how it could compete with newspaper publishers and others, but which kept its promises to the public well enough that it survived and thrived once its monopoly was gone, and again when the apparently profoundly non-monopolistic new world of the web came along.

However, it could not do what many wanted it to do, which was to extend its public service ethos into the newest of new media, web search.

It was easy to say that there was no need for a public service search engine, that it would be a waste of limited resources when the proto-bros were promising and delivering a free and unbiased public service anyway.

And it was perfectly understandable that the algorithm had to be kept secret to prevent commercial interests from gaming it.

By the time it became apparent that the commercial interests gaming the secret algorithms were the algorithms' owners, it was too late.

But if the BBC, in conjunction with the right expertise, had been there from the start, with an open algorithm and regulations defining the primacy of fairness, what a more diverse, moderate, and exciting future there might have been.

For those who doubt such a thing is even possible, consider the pathway by which the BBC, in the name of public service, catalyzed the ending decades later of Intel's monopoly .

Just one factor, but essential.

The AI-accelerated perversion of the digital world, its mix of services, data, and control, is too far gone to retrospectively refit public service as a moderating and creative force.

Civil society has only just begun to try and claw back some measure of control over the algorithm, with Google remaining in bitter opposition.

It'll be hard to argue for the essential nature of public service when you've been deeply embedded in denying it for so long, but the ability of the British establishment to take a massive volte-face in its stride should not be underestimated.

The massive incongruity of a Google manager taking over as the head of the BBC may not clarify the future, but as a way to understand the present, it's hard to beat.

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