Rage Italic against the Machine

Essay Filed in: Web Posted: May 8, 2023 1,296 words

Reaching an audience, a surprise visit from Google’s internet police, and the nuclear-robots.txt

This story doesn’t start how you expect. In fact, it starts with an adoption. Since it’s part of the story, I might as well tell the world. It’s okay, I don’t mind if you know: we’re adopting. It’s been five years, and the wait seems like it’s finally about to be over. I promise this story wraps around to be about technology: bear with me.

What Happened?

Part of our fundraising effort has been to sell individual pieces of a 1,000 piece puzzle. Each reserved piece will have a heart on it, and we plan to work the puzzle, glue it, and frame it to hang in the babies room, full of hearts from people who have helped us get to this point.

Couldn’t be simpler! I set up a simple website in a weekend and sent out an email to family and friends, thinking nothing more of it. Until a week later, when all of a sudden my website wasn’t loading anymore. Worse, I was getting a ‘deceptive website’ warning banner on all my browsers. Eventually, my home network OpenDNS router just started blocking the domain name altogether.

I got on with my host, and they explained that this was out of their hands altogether. The domain name had been blacklisted by Google, and the only way to make things right was to file an appeal via the Google Search Console.

Let’s recap: I didn’t care if Google crawled this site. In fact, I left instructions for them to not crawl the website — maybe that ran afoul of their standards. Maybe emailing a couple dozen email addresses with a link to a new domain triggered some automatic filter (despite the fact that we’ve been sending out an informal adoption newsletter to all of those addresses for nearly five years). Or, maybe, it was simply the fact that a website with a five-day-old domain name was set up to be a donations platform.

At any rate, the site is blacklisted, and the appeal will take 5-6 weeks. Little help, when our baby is due in 11 weeks. So I did what any self-respecting web developer would do: try to circumvent a billion-dollar corporation.

I repointed the site to a subdomain of this very blog. I’m wagering that the accumulated reputation of a 17-year-old domain name will do enough to keep me online this time: maybe. If you’re unable to read this post after a week, well, you’ll know what happened.

Does Google need this kind of power?

The most prominent DNS server, by the way, is run by Google. If they decide I’m not worthy of an audience, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Mind you, this is on a site I explicitly asked Google not to crawl. Doesn’t matter — they are the judge and jury of the internet: not just in terms of ‘attention’ and search result clicks, but at an even deeper level, at the very root of DNS resolution.

It’s not just because it’s affected me adversely that I’m saying: does one company need this much power? I’m all for safety on the internet, believe me. I’m no fan of dangerous websites being allowed to remain online. But all the same — why does this power rest with a private company? Why doesn’t it rest with governments, or, heaven forbid, consumers with a modicum of common sense?

Google hasn’t been an ally of the open web for a long time. They would like nothing more than to control their own fiefdom, just as Facebook does and Apple does. One could certainly argue (I would) that Google holds far too much power over all of us right now. And they want more. All the other platforms are the same.

The early web wasn’t like this. My first site, which was ‘designed’ in Macromedia Fireworks 2, featuring heavy use of Rage Italic (sadly, no images are left!), wasn’t a ‘platform.’ It wasn’t for making money. It was for sharing something with the world: using a revolutionary publishing tool to be heard. Maybe no one cares: fine. Let no one read my writing because it sucked on its own merits, and not because Google decided that it sucked for some reason (have you looked at the Archives? A ton of it is awful, but, I believe in internet posterity)

What am I going to do about it?

You see, this isn’t just an abstract ideology that I hold: I believe strongly in an independent web. I’m prepared to take a few risks to see it through. We must start agitating to create a web that’s not exclusively defined by the Googles, Amazons, Facebooks, and Apples of the world.

I, personally, am going nuclear. Starting from today, every page on intothebook.net will be instructed to block all robot crawlers. This is inconvenient. It will make my posts harder to share on social media, impossible to discover via search, and goes against every bone of ‘SEO’ common sense that is in my web developer mind.

But screw it. If the writing is good enough, people will still discover it, the same way I found Annie Dillard or Dostoevsky. ¹

I’m not here for anyone else, really. At the end of the day this is just a site for me to put stuff on the internet. If anyone else wants to look at it, fine. I don’t want any traffic from Google. More and more, the company is proving to everyone that their traffic is a poison pill. You accept Google’s traffic, you have to dance to Google’s whims, and I’m not interested in that. I won’t make an exception for Google, not for Amazon, or any of the big platforms that hold the keys to success on the modern web. There has to be another way to do it.

Doesn’t this hurt you, as an indie author publishing their first novel?

Oh, definitely. But I’m not here to pursue success at any cost. I have things to say to the world, and I’ll find other ways to make sure people are reading. It’s not worth compromising for the sake of clicks. Part of the job here will be redefining what success looks like. Unlimited clicks don’t matter if half of them are from bots. I’d rather get this novel in the hands of one person who will get something valuable out of it.

It’s time more ordinary people on the internet started telling the giant corporations to get lost. We don’t need platforms, we need people.

“We give too much of our business to the large and the powerful, […] and often, increasingly, we have hardly any choice.”
— Lydia Davis (source)

Sometimes going against the current is exactly what attracts the most attention. We’ll have to see how it goes. Maybe Into the Book won’t be online next week. But we’ll find a way. If there’s writing on here you feel needs to be shared, tell someone about it: preferably in person, over coffee, or while walking in a field full of wildflowers. After all, people certainly aren’t going to find us on Google.

(For further reading, check out last month’s post: On Publishing in 2023. See also, this excellent Verge article on Google Search’s anniversary, that I can’t help but include a quote from:)

Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale.
Nilay Patel