Zittrain Weighs In on the Google IPO

In his op-ed, Score a victory for the P in IPO, Berkman Center Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain argues that the quirks of Google's IPO mirror the technology for the search engine itself. Zittrain explains that both the IPO and the company's Page Rank system combine bottom-up results and top-down decision making. And, according to Zittrain, the unusual stock offering was only natural because it cames from an unusual company: "If Google is to lay claim to prominence not only in Web search, but also in handling the public's e-mail and indexing and unifying its hard drives... it will want to go to extraordinary lengths to be open about how its technologies work.... In other words, it will not want to behave like a normal company." Read the op-ed in this weekend's Boston Globe. Zittrain's piece was also discussed in SiliconValley.com and in this WashingtonPost.com column.