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Google Admits Compromising Principles in China
muellerr1 writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that it had adopted 'a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with' in their Chinese activities. Though it doesn't yet sound like they're admitting to actually doing evil, it does appear that they are thinking about pulling out of China rather than compromise their 'do no evil' motto."
Google complies with the DMCA, which requires it censor certain search results (for example, "kazaalite" http://www.google.com/search?q=kazaalite will display a notice at the bottom indicating search results were removed).
Admittedly, it doesn't go as far as China's censorship, but this is a slippery slope. Why is censorship there "evil", but censorship here is not? Google is complying with the law. Yes, I think it's a bad law. But since when is obeying the law evil? Why is it up to Google to crusade against government policy? Are they some kind of political super-hero?
And yet even if they pull out of China for purly business reasons they wouldn't be doing evil. (Unless you consider successfully running a business to be evil.) "Don't be evil" != "Be good"
As far as I can tell Google continued its "Do no evil" policy in China. They didn't take anything away from Chinese users- they merely offered a new Chinese service that openly filters results. How many Chinese search engines mention that they filter results? When your alternatives are to let the Chinese filter Google for you (making your search engine slow and unusable, and hiding that results are filtered) or filter it yourself (so people actually use your search engine, and tell people you are censoring data), what would you do? Google isn't hurting the Chinese- (Unlike Yahoo!, which gives the Chinese government personal data) it just can't help them much.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I don't understand why there's anger at Google for obeying Chinese laws. Do I agree with those laws? Hell no. But business is business. Google doesn't make money from fostering democracy in foreign lands. They make money from selling ads. China is potentially a very large market, and so Google is doing what it has to as a profit-oriented venture.
If you feel the need to blame anyone, blame the dictators. Google is just doing business.
And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions.
The reaction I've seen on this site on others to Google's decision is way out of line to what was done.
I have no doubt that China will need to liberalize their government. If they want to be an effective technological power, they will need smart people and that means increasingly free access to information.
Taking a moral path is not about always being right. It is about always striving to be right & taking the care to reevaluate situations based on the current and future situations. I'm just glad there are still companies who know the M word.
There really is no externally observable difference between morality and publicity in this case. Their motto is "don't be evil." So they've set up their business so that being evil will generate a disproportionate amount of bad publicity. They've organized everything so that morality and publicity are inextricable: more so than in ordinary businesses. That in itself is admirable. But in the end, why does it matter what their internal motivations are? Why do you care? If we reward companies that do good and punish those that do bad, more will do good. If we punish those that do good with cynicism then there is no (business) reason for them to do good.
Uh? they weren't denying censoring searches, it was written in plain text (chinese though) on the frigging result pages.
What they were denying was that it was evil, or that "bringing limited informations" was a worse evil than "not bringing any information at all". And I, for one, agreed with google on that one: most chinese don't care that their search results are censored, as long as Google only censors it's chinese-based services and clearly states that the results are filtered it can only bring a better content and a better awareness to the chinese.
If tomorrow my own country decided to start filtering information, I'd be hella glad if Google kept on feeding me with (filtered) search result if it told me that the results were filtered.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler