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Google vs. Evil
wideangle writes "'The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business. Take Brin's decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin's morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public.'"
Alcohol and cigarettes kill people.
Pornography does not.
Sexual activity is something which life itself comes about because of. Cigarettes and alcohol are (or contain, I should say) chemicals which disintegrate the body's components - with side effects from neurotic addiction to behavioral shifts. I'd say his stance on this is primarily a sound one; although differing opinions will surely arise.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not.
It is pretty hard fact that cigarettes and booze are evil as far as health is concerned. However, porn is evil only as much as ideology / morality flags it as evil.
Personally, I would legalise all kinds of drugs, however the advertising should remain limited.
And yes, call me funny, but I just love to pull my stick and can't possibly see how porn could be evil.
What's porn ever done to you personally? If you don't like it, don't look for it. You have every right not to see it, and also not see it. If it was "forced" upon you by some company and their advertising scheme, go ahead and flip out, call a lawyer, whatever.
And if anyone tries to use the "Porn is morally degrading our society... blah blah blah" argument, the same can be said of all general media. I don't think Pokemon and Friends are improving society in any way.
Pornography, i.e. sex, is just part of a normal human biological function. One that the human race depends upon for procreation. Artificial moral rules have made sexual expression in many forms a taboo thing, sadly. We're far too prudish sometimes. Okay, most of the time.
Tobacco and alcohol are drugs. They are physically harmful and can damage your body, or even kill. Simply looking at porn can do no such thing. Any argument equating drugs and pornography is simply rhetorical and nothing more.
Not everyone sees porn as "Evil".. that's largely a puritanical American ideal.
1. People who created, run and privately own Google think guns are bad.
2. Google won't advertise guns.
3. Outdoor shops who do a little gun-related bid'ness are enticed to get rid of it.
4. There is one less place to buy parts for things used to kill other people.
5. Google still makes profit, society gets a little more like creators, maintainers and private owners of Google want it to be.
Kudos to them, then, for standing behind their beliefs.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I am still amazed by the north american values that sex and nudity are BAD, and should be kept away from children at any cost, whereas violence is not...
Interesting article nonetheless, and fairly balanced. Seems Brin is using something that's in short supply nowadays - common sense. And there is (surprise surprise) a reference to Slashdot as well. To all those who generally just read the article summary and start posting, do read the article this time - it's fairly long, but it's worth it.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Last time I checked(it's been a few months), Excite would not have advertisements on their site having to do with alcohol and tobacco but gladly had porn adverts on search results(those search results had something to do with porn). So how is what Google doing any different than Excite? Or TV for that matter. You rarely see alcohol ads and never tobacco ads anymore. But go on late night TV and you'll see ads for all sorts of Adult Phone Services and for different Adult Videos. Personally, I think Google is just following the mainstream.
Google isn't successful because it's Google. It's successful because lots and lots of people like what it's doing now, the way it's doing it now. If you change too much of that in the search for profits you'll change the reason people prefer to use it, and they'll go somewhere else that does do what they prefer. And there goes the very source of your success and revenue: the users you attract.
If you want to invest in a successful company but think it needs to be changed significantly, ask yourself why you aren't investing in a successful company that already works the way you think it should. If that's because all the companies that work the way you think they should aren't successful, maybe it's what you think that should change, not what the successful company is.
I don't really care what advertising they choose to accept, because ads on Google are clearly identified as such. If they choose to lose income by not accepting advertising for certain products, that's their business. I'm much more concerned about the search results started being tainted by either paid placements or Scientology-style censorship.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The only thing I disagree with you there is having to be raised "with religion" to be a good person. I don't buy it. As long as your parents taught you decent morals, you don *have* to have to religion to be a good person.
There are two groups of people in this world when it comes to morals.
One group "gets" their morality from "God". They say all morals are determined by a supreme omnipotent being, and without him, there is no morality. In other words, you cannot be a moral person without God.
A second group of people (the group that the Google guys likely belong to) believe that morals are simply unwritten rules that govern interactions between people. If there was only one person on the planet, there would be no need for morality. Their morality is usually determined by reason and logic. For instance, it's wrong to kill people (most of the time) because a society with rampant murder has less ability to advance than a society with no murder.
Many morals overlap with laws, but that does not mean that all morals should be made into laws. Murder is both usually immoral and illegal, but cutting in a line is immoral and not illegal.
The reason not all morals should be laws is simple. Those people who belong to group #1 have morals that have no basis in logic or reason, and their sole support is a being for which they have no evidence exists, and have no support that the "moral" indeed came from this being. In other words, the 1st Amendment protects us from this... Thanks Founding Fathers!
If you belong to group #2, it's hard to come up with a reason that porn is immoral. For porn to be immoral there must be something immoral with sex... I suppose one could argue that rampant sex could spread disease and hurt a society in the long run... but I don't really see how that applies to porn.
The Reagan administration told the NSF to do a study on how porn hurts kids. After 4 years of research, the panel told the administration that it is not porn that hurts children, it is our societies illogical, irrational, and puritanical views on sex that hurts kids. Just as there is little alcoholism in countries where wine is served to children and it becomes a normal part of life, there would be no harm to children if sex was not so taboo. Oh, by the way, Reagan threw the study out and commissioned a PRIEST to redo it. Not surprisingly, the Priest said porn hurts kids... and his "study" took less than a month.
In summary, it is quite easy to defend group #2's "scientific morality"... while it is certainly not as absolute as group #1's, as it needs to change as new evidence appears, it is far more likely to be the right thing to do.
That is the nice thing about freedom.
Goodgles CEO can decide what they want to do and not do, and you get to decide if you aggree or not and use them or someone else.
The KKK websites are most likely run in a way that would favour linking to sites about similar topics and refuse to link to pages not about the topics they want and deem 'right'.
That is their choice.
Just like its my choice to not go to their website ever.
Take away googles freedom to make this choice, and you have also taken away your freedom to choose _not_ to view sites such as the KKK's or anyone elses.
That isnt something I want.
Isn't it time for us to come down our moral high horse and take refreshed look at what/who we are demonizing in our 'modern' culture? Things are so topsy-turfy especially in the U.S. media landscape one can't help but be bewildered sometimes. Violence is mostly okay - how many times there are guns being fired at people during PG-13 rated TV shows? Some blood may flow, but if some bimbo reveals one of her private parts, then we file it under 'dirty' and it'll get cut. What's the big deal about exposing the human body in its original form? Obviously sex is a daily routine on our planet which has allowed us to grow our population to over 6 billion (despite countless wars and numerous forms of genocite). Little kids grow up among many negative influences including but not limited to: beatings, lying cheating, verbal abuse, agression, road rage, Duke Nukem, Super Mario Bros. etc.. Why in the world is sex and nudity labelled as 'dirty'? It's time to relinquish those antiquated religious artifacts and enter the 21st century.
It's not hard to figure out his reasoning here. Cigs and Booze are choices that people make at the ages of 18 and 21 respectively. Both can hurt you immensely (cancer anyone?).
Now, porn on the other hand, isn't a choice made at a certain age. Sex is a part of life. And while it can hurt you (STDs, Early Age Pregnancy, Child Support, etc.), it's not likely going to kill you. Sex is part of human instinct. Every species on the planet is born with the intuition to further itself through breeding. The only reason sex is considered "evil" in the mainstream is because of Religious Zealots who want you to think it's a sin.
It looks like it's just a case of choosing the lesser of two evils. If Google were to go public, I'd buy, porn or no porn. It'd just be a sound investment. I'm a big user of Google, as many other people are, I'm sure (well, those who change their default search from MSN to Google, anyway).
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
I have depended quite a bit on google for a while. They have succeeded so far in not being evil for the most part.
But a good search engine is such a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the internet- is it really wise to continue to depend on a company that makes no promises that tomorrow they won't start charging $100/month subscription to their service and patent-attack any competitors who get too successful?
Clearly my example, although possible, is far fetched. But I feel good using Gnu-Linux because RMS, Linus and others have promised, via the GPL, not to take it away. Can/should google or one of its competitors make a similar promise?
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I, for one, have never seen a Nambla ad on google so I can only assume you're talking about the search engine. I searched for Killians and HOLY SHIT I got a reference to beer, who would've thunk.
I guess if you were to read the article, you might find out we're talking about google ads.
Yours is one of the most open, revealing, and personal comments I've ever seen on Slashdot. I wish you the best of luck with your relationship.
Sounds like you and your wife should see a therapist to discuss your feelings.
Google, as a privately owned company has as much right to hold an opinion as I do. While I might not agree with every decision (and I don't) they've ever made, I applaud that they have the courage to do so. If more companies had the courage of their convictions, the corporate landscape would have a lot less festering swamps, in my opinion, and maybe we'd have had a couple less Enrons.
It's also worth pointing out that they understand that their decisions implicate a world stage. Google isn't a mom and pop store on mainstreet, small town USA. They have a large chunk of the world looking at them, and understand that with that power, comes responsibility. I don't see any evidence that they have used that power irresponsably yet.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Seems this is the first serious reply to your post so far.. So hope it is taken with more seriousness than the previous ones.
While i aggree in part with your post, there are things that just seem wrong from the way you projected your opinions.
Porn can be bad if it is used as a teacher.
Porn itself is not bad.
For example, porn as a teacher is bad for, among other reasons:
* It teaches that women arnt beautiful unless they have D +breast and/or implants, and that they need to shave their public hair to be attractive.
Both of those are quailitys i personally hate, and feel a woman should do to her body what SHE wants, not what she feels everyone else wants.
* It teaches that sex is over once the man has an oragasm, and that female oragams isnt importaint at all.
* It teaches that foreplay is only used as preperation for intercourse, not as a source of pleasure or as a equal part of love making.
* It teaches that you must be limited in the sexual acts you can do, namley only the things done in porn, and nothing else is OK.
So if a person learns about sex from porn, and nothing else, of _course_ they will be a horible lover.
Being a good lover requires learning about your partner, what they like, what they dont like, and responding to their needs while at the same time they are doing the same to you.
My question to you is, did you try to teach your wife yourself how to be a good lover as well?
If not, then its no wonder she is how she is, and you have no room to complain about it. TEACH HER!
If so, then I would question your teaching methods, your communication with her, or possibly her love (Read: concern) about you.
I have met women who were horible lovers, but I did my best to teach them otherwise, and in most cases did so very well.
But dont blame porn for teaching poor love making anymore than you should blame the internet or TV for being a poor babysitter.
That isnt what they are for at all. But that doesnt mean they dont have good uses and still have a place in the world.
Not much. It says more about you and your reasoning.
This is about ads and making choices about who to sell them to.
I don't see google actually blocking searches for booze,guns and tobacco, they just choose not to sell adspace to those industries.
They also index sites concerning rape, murder, war, hate crimes and a lot of other generally considered evils. But they don't sell ads for them.
Your argument is a logical fallacy and detrimental to the discussion. You are the weakest link, goodbye =)
But keep in mind that your wife is a tiny, tiny minority. People also get addicted to shopping, video games, you name it. You can't just start censoring everything that a few people get unhealthily addicted to. Just because your wife has a problem (or maybe you just don't do it for her?), doesn't mean that millions of sexually healthy people should also be deprived of porn. Most sex therapists say that porn in completely healthy and normal for most relationships.
I think to make a moral parallel, you'd have to point out a NAMBLA ad. If you search for philipmorris you get philipmorris.com as the top search entry.
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."
/. poster ONOIML8, is censorship. Be it by government, religious cult group, or privately held company in the "information technology" business.
Evil, says
Yes, you may quote me on that.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
IMHO, most people do not base their decision on morals, but rather derive their morals to justify past decisions. You do what you feel is right at the time and then, if your actions are challeneged, either by others or your own consciousness, you try to justify them.
What about the argument that porn inherently degrading to women and helps to contribute to the cycle of violence in our society. There's a lot of evidence for and against that argument, and it is controversial (I, for one, tend to think that pornography is harmless) -- but we should acknowledge the argument nonetheless...
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
The comment about the pressures of big business changing your moral landscape are only half correct. As a business gets larger, it also has the proportionately larger opportunity to use the morals of it's leaders to influence society.
Take Walmart and the conservative executives of that company. We have all read about how Walmart now sells 25% of the software in this country, and how the ability to grant or deny access to that market is impacting game makers. Special "Walmart" versions of games with reduced blood and gore are the standard there.
Big companies are learning to leverage the power of their markets for social purposes, and that concerns me more than the selection of porn over guns.
By the by, anyone have any numbers on whether the porn business is bigger than the gun industry?
I disagree with their decision, but it's their decision to make -- not mine.
Google is a private company. They can make whatever assinite decisions they want to make. If they wanted to, they should be able to only hire white people over 6 feet ball with goatees. Their decision.
Is it absurd? Yes. Is it something Google should be prevented from doing? No.
They don't like guns, alcohol, and tobacco. Fine. It's their right not to have those kinds of ads on their site, or allow ads from companies which also make guns or gun parts. They like porn, so they put up ads for that.
I disagree, however, with someone elses characterization that geeks like porn. Geeks like free porn. I don't think most geeks -- especially the paranoid kind -- like porn you have to pay for with credit card, or porn that says its "free" but wants your credit-card number just to "make sure you're 21". I agree with that. I'm not going to pay for porn. I can find it for free using google images or news-groups; if I look hard enough, I can even find a few free porn websites. I also don't like porno-advertising pop-ups or banners, so I block them with my hosts. It'll be a cold day in hell before I pay $20/month to get something online that I could look at in real life for free.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
How many ads for cigarettes and booze do you typically see online? Not that many compared to the amount you see for porn. You can't transmit alcohol and smokes over data connections, and most people are too impatient to wait for their liquor to be FedExed. Probably google would lose a lot more revenue by ditching porn ads than they have for cigs/alcohol.
Accepting ads for Scientology seems like helping Evil.
It doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't matter if they deny ads for guns, for booze, for lesbians, for other search engines, for the Scientologist. They're a private business, and they charge you no money. There is no consideration involved between a transaction between you and them. They can do what they want. If they want to replace all their search results with a page that says "fuck you!", that's perfectly fine.
There was a curious point in the article, with respect to a lawsuit versus Google. The idea presented was simple: as Google (currently, right now) provides an effective monopoly on a fundamental service of the net, it could be considered a public utility. I can begin to see how this argument could be persuasive, depending on the outcome of the next five years.
Without better understanding of the long-term implications of search engines and the legaly responsibilities such bodies have to their users and corresponding linked pages, it remains unclear whether any one service will ever truly take over for an extended period of time these services. Still, the hardware, software, and more general technical knowhow and intuition required to make Google what it is today is hard to duplicate. Furthermore, the combination of extensive searching, effective sorting, and caching means that Google is rapidly becoming the generalized equivlant of the preprint server xxx.lanl.gov, something the physics community now takes for granted and indeed, treats like a public utility.
When we come to rely upon Google to back up slashdotted servers and find any particular thing on the web, and have no effective alternatives for all of these, then it behoves us to treat it as a utility. There are certain egalitarian principles behind public utilities that are supportive of the general idea of "doing good", e.g. the gas company is required to provide heating service in certain neighborhoods during the winter, even to non-paying clients.
I think we would do well to consider the ways in which the public good can be served through such a company, allowing the effective merger of both the companies money-making prerequistes and the necessity of that company's service. Maybe that could provide an alternative solution to the "either we make money and sell our morals, or vice versa" problem Google seems to be facing.
I don't want stock. I want a search engine. Anything that preserves that is a Good Thing. As soon as you have shareholders to answer to, you're ideas are owned.
A discussion of porn and society wouldn't be complete without mention of Japan.
Japanese porn is plentiful, sold almost anywhere magazines are sold. It's also quite pervereted by Western standards. Themes of violence against women, nonconsenting sex with school girls, and domination are quite common. It's perfectly acceptable to read rape-themed manga (comic books) on the subway.
Yet, across the board, crime rates in Japan are much lower than in America.
Take Brin's decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin's morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public.
Cigarettes and alcohol harm and often kill people (more so the innocent bystanders than the abusers). Porn does neither. Do you want me to draw you a picture?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
For the directors of a public company to institute any policy that does not maximise profit is actually illegal. It is not a matter of may be you shareholders won't like your anti-guns pro-porn stance, a shareholder can actually sue you for instituting a policy which does not maximise profits. This suit would be hard to prove but using the same argument on Google's advertising policy would probably be a slam dunk.
Sure you can make a convoluted argument about long term customer loyalty but why risk it. Of course the answer to this is that an IPO is likely to make Google's owners and management rich in a buy-yourself-into-orbit kind of way. But an IPO would essentially be cashing out your principles, and it seems likely that the googleguys can now afford principles (though may be not space tourism).