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Google's Action Makes A Mockery Of Its Values
Jason Jardine linked us to a well written piece discussing how Google has thus far promised to Do No Evil, but their recent decisions regarding censorship in china
make a mockery of those values. We've been following this story all along, but I thought this article makes good food for thought.
There's an excellent article or two discussing Google past, present and future in today's Guardian, as well. The second one is the better.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yeah just because the Chinese government kills a few protesters and then covers it up with the help of Google doesn't mean they're doing something evil in their culture. What they did wasn't even illegal. Get a grip, people.
China 'outstrips world' on executions.
Death penalty crimes in China:
FreeSpeech.org
The censorship completely changes history.
It's not as if Google is simply editting the whole event out of its index. Note the line on the bottom of the 2nd page you linked to:
Rough translation:
According to local laws and policies, some search results are not shown.
This line does not appear in all search results. At least Google is letting people know which search terms are being censored. That to me has to be better than simply removing all traces of the event, a la real censorship.
Fortunately, even Google can't hide everything.
FreeSpeech.org
This is just as far to the right of reality as the parent post is to the left.
Yes, it is.
My intent is not to claim that what Google is doing is akin to selling slaves. All analogies break down.
My intent was to beat the parent poster over the head with the staggeringly modern notion that just because something is legal does not mean that it is moral, and that just because the law requires that you do something does not indicate that it is ethical or moral for you to comply with it.
A law can, at *best*, only be as good as the system which produced it. In the case of China, the system that produced it is one of brutal oppression of the populace. By doing business in the form it is, Google is participating in that oppression. Now, maybe you can argue that they're not going to participate to the extent that Yahoo or MSN is, maybe you can argue that they'll do something good with the money they get, or so forth. But that doesn't change the fact that Google's hands in this matter are dirtier than they would be if they refrained from doing business in China, because they have now willingly participated in that oppression.
"This is why we ought not do do evil, that good may come: for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby."
If I enter your rich house and steal money from your bedside table, it matters not that I take that money and use it to feed orphans; in stealing from you, I have committed evil, and I am evil as a result.
Bingo!.
A corporation HAS to act evil(*). It has no choice. The only moral imperitive of a corporation is "make more money". That's it. There is nothing else (or at least everything else has to take a back seat.
* by evil I am using the biblical definition as in "love of money is the root of all evil" and "it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven then for a camel to go through the eye of a needle".
evil is as evil does
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/25/news/international /davos_fortune/?cnn=yes
He does make some valid points, although I'm not sure I buy everything he's selling...