Don't Be Evil - Restoring the Public Trust in Business, Politics and the Media

Don't Be Evil - restoring the public trust in business, politics and the media


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Google is becoming a conventional company - 1/28/2006 08:56:00 AM

In Google's IPO prospectus, it confounded Wall Street with a simple message:

Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.

Wall Street read this as a sign of naiveté and bid the share price down. But Google has proven that their focus on the long term coupled with an unwavering moral compass can win marketshare and fuel extraodinary financial performance.

John Battelle blogs that Google, by "its very DNA, does not like to be an editor of content. But in China, it's doing exactly that ... deciding which sites to exclude because they might offend the Chinese government." But this is such an un-Google thing to do, it can't be what Brin and Page believe is right -- they have rationalized, or "thought themselves into it."

From the prospectus:

Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority....

Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective ....

Google is not a conventional company. Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company.

We will live up to our "don't be evil" principle by keeping user trust...

Google's values aren't just do-gooder hype -- they have made the company what it is today. As Battelle says, "there's still time to pull out, guys."

Don't be doubleplusungood - 1/27/2006 10:05:00 PM

In George Orwell's 1984 dystopia, the totalitarian government didn't just delete information they didn't like, they distorted the information to support their goals.

Google's censorship technology that they developed for the Chinese government doesn't just block sensitive search terms like [falun gong] or [tiananmen square], but it selectively shows results that support the government's position while silently blocking those that do not.

So Google's not just limiting access to "sensitive" search terms, but they're intentionally biasing the results.

That's doubleplusungood.

G**gle in China - 1/27/2006 07:41:00 PM

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on Google's dilemma:

Those sympathetic to Google's dilemma argue that adopting a "when-in-Rome" approach is better than pulling out of the mainland, even it means ethical compromises. "No one company can stand alone against Chinese censorship," argues Xiao Qiang, a Chinese Internet expert at the University of California at Berkeley.
These columns have long argued that opening China up to commerce, including the Internet, will eventually have a liberating effect on its politics. And we still believe this. But as a publishing company ourselves, we also believe in speaking out for freedom, even if it means being censored in China, or anywhere else. We understand the business dilemma that Google and the other giant Internet companies face in China, but we also hope they don't forget their larger obligation to a free society.

Google speaks out on China censorship - 1/27/2006 05:04:00 PM

Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel at Google, blogged today about the rationale behind Google's new censorship of search results in China. Kudos to Google for engaging in a thoughtful and straightforward discussion of this highly charged topic.

It's clear that Google executives struggled mightily with this decision. And to their credit, Google makes no attempt to disguise or minimize what they've done. McLaughlin clearly states that censorship compromises Google's mission.

For several years, we've debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values.

But McLaughlin rationalizes by saying that the alternative would require an even greater compromise:

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced.

Now, this isn't entirely accurate. McLaughlin's statements at the beginning of the post show that this isn't really about "failing to offer Google search at all." The main issue is the need to improve the user experience:

Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user's browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we've been able to provide in China is not something we're proud of.

McLaughlin's primary argument is that enabling the Chinese government to censor news and information allows for Google's "continued engagement," which could in the future lead to greater openness. This reasoning may allow McLaughlin to sleep at night, believing that Google can continue to prosper while being a force for good in the world.

But it appears to this observer that Google's collaboration with the Chinese government will legitimize a truly abhorent practice in China, and weaken much of Google's moral leadership in the rest of the world. Google could have done more good by adhering to its principles and setting the gold standard for the rest of the media industry. And by maintaining its pristine brand, Google might have prospered more than by joining the crowd of valueless corporations.

"Don't Be Evil" worked because it was absolute. While other companies employed moral relativism to justify evil practices, Google avoided these traps. Sadly, moral clarity at Google is now gone, and with it that special quality that made Google what it is today.

Censorship changes history - 1/26/2006 06:40:00 PM

Search Google.com for images of Tiananmen, and you'll see students standing up to tanks. Search for Tiananmen on the new, censored Chinese site and there are no tanks or protestors to be found.

Censorship changes history.

Protest at the Googleplex - 1/26/2006 03:07:00 PM

Did you ever think you'd see this?

Update 1/26 6:51 p.m. - via Google Blogoscoped.

Licking the boot that kicks them - 1/26/2006 12:25:00 PM

Debra Saunders of the SF Chronicle writes that Google can afford to have high principles when the stakes are small, but those priciples crumble when the stakes are large:

Google gives life to the Eric Hoffer observation, "People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them" ....

Google can say no to the Bushies and know that it won't lose any business, its executives won't go to jail and their children will not get run over by tanks. In the country where those things could happen, Google is a collaborator.

Thought police - 1/26/2006 06:59:00 AM

BusinessWeek has an interview with Sergey Brin on Google's decision to censor search results in China.

First, the motivator - Google needs to put servers on the ground in China, since the cost of international network connections is making it too expensive for people to search Google. Between bandwidth costs and the government's firewall blocking "subversive" queries, Google was severely handicapped:

Sergey Brin: Essentially the great firewall is sophisticated enough that it would block connections based on sensitive queries. The end result was that we weren't available to about 50 percent of the users. Universities can't afford the international bandwidth, so for example students at Tsinghua University -- and I saw this myself -- had to pay in order to use Google, and I mean pay a lot, even 25 cents a megabyte, which would be unaffordable even by American standards.
This is nothing...there's no malicious plan there, it just legitimately is a bottleneck that bandwidth is somewhat limited.
Fortune: It's probably by policy also.
Brin: I don't know. I don't want to speculate. But anyhow the net effect is that all of our services...soon we will be largely unavailable.

You don't know? Isn't this something you should know? Is the Chinese government boosting the price of international bandwidth to control information flow?

Next comes the Great Rationalization -- China is better off with Google's presence even if they're not getting the whole picture. And since Google's only censoring a small amount, who's gonna notice a few missing results here and there? But isn't that missing slice much more important, byte-for-byte, than most of the rest of the stuff? After all, the material is censored because the government doesn't want its people to know the truth - and Google's raison d'etre is to be the unbiased source of the world's information.

We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.

In previous posts, dontbeevil was skeptical that Google would be allowed to show a disclaimer on search results pages that flag when results have been censored. Brin says they're already doing this in France and Germany when government-mandated Nazi materials are censored:

In France and Germany there are Nazi material laws. One thing we do, and which we are implementing in China as well, is that if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine. "Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results." And we're doing that in China also, and that makes us transparent.

Just to try this out, I searched for [nazi] on google.de. Sure enough, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the first page of search results. Google Translate says this means, "From arguments Google removed 1 result from this side. Further information about these arguments finds you under ChillingEffects.org." It doesn't exactly say that results have been censored, but this is a pretty transparent approach. It remains to be seen if this will be tolerated in China.

The disclaimer is OK as far as it goes. But I don't buy the argument that 98% of the information is good enough, or that Google's censored presence is a lesser evil than its free absence. Google is allowing themselves to be used as an instrument of oppression, and that's just not right.

And I also don't buy the argument that Chinese censorship of information on freedom, democracy, Tiananmen and human rights is morally equivalent to the United States' prohibition on child porn or Germany's restriction on Nazi materials. Neither the US nor Germany are using Google to restrict political thought.

Google has volunteered to join China's thought police. That's evil no matter how you rationalize it.

Rationalization - 1/25/2006 06:17:00 AM

Google says they're actually taking the less-evil course by censoring search results in China:

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information -- or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information -- is more inconsistent with our mission," says Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel at Google.

Sounds like the rationalization of a lawyer.

To its credit, Google plans to be up-front with users. Company officials say they'll place a disclosure on all pages where search results have been filtered out. Google makes similar disclosures on its non-Chinese sites, whether results are removed for copyright reasons or other local laws. Other search engines aren't providing such notification inside China at this time.

If the Chinese government allows Google to display these disclaimers, it truly will be to Google's credit. But it remains to be seen if they will, or if the disclaimers will be prominent enough to make a difference.

The beautiful thing about the Don't Be Evil ethic is that it cuts through all the twisted logic and machinations that people use to justify wrong actions.

Google's rationalization that their censored presence on Chinese soil is less evil than taking a moral stand for free and unbiased information not only rings hollow, but it's doublethink and it feels evil.

Google caves in to China - 1/24/2006 05:16:00 PM

Dontbeevil.com ripped on Microsoft last June when they developed filtering technology to detect and censor subversive blog posts from China. At the time I pointed to Google's blog post on the China Problem:

For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it's clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this.

According to news reports, Google will now become the last major search engine to cave in to China's censorship demands. Google.cn will for the first time filter search results based on instructions from the Chinese government.

Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet's fastest growing market.Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google's China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time.
The service troubles have frustrated many Chinese users, hobbling Google's efforts to expand its market share in a country that expected to emerge as an Internet gold mine over the next decade.
China already has more than 100 million Web surfers and the audience is expected to swell substantially _ an alluring prospect for Google as it tries to boost its already rapidly rising profits ....

To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisons on guidance provided by Chinese government officials....
Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

And Google will not offer Gmail or Blogger services at all, in order to avoid having to comply with similar requirements or to turn over user information:

Reflecting its uneasy alliance with the Chinese government, Google isn't releasing all its services.
Neither Google's e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn't want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone's personal information.

In past discussions on its blog and in a speech given by Sergey Brin, Google has carefully parsed their censorship rationale. Google News China has censored its sources since it was launched, under the logic that to display headlines that are blocked by the government's firewall would make for an ugly user experience.

But until now, this logic didn't apply to Google Search. Google was the only big search engine to deliver uncensored results. No longer.

dontbeevil.com