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Doctorow: Rivalry Keeps Google From Doing Evil
An anonymous reader writes "Writer and activist Cory Doctorow says competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had. However, as it moves into sectors where it faces fewer rivals this may not always be the case. 'It actually seems to be a quality metric. They believe they can attract customers, independent software vendors, resellers and an ecosystem around them by not being evil,' he says. 'Where they operate in narrower, less competitive markets — like where they’ve become an Internet service provider, for example — they abandon those commitments.'"
So, they are acting like any other company when faced with the same market situation?
What else is to be said, they are not stupid, they hire the smartest, and some of the smartest are crooks.
on google Fiber? because to me, that's reasonable.
It could be that the incentive to do evil is stronger in competitive markets. It would seem the incentive to to whatever it takes to be profitable in competitive markets would be even stronger.
Whether a company decides it's a better strategy to be more competitive by trying to attract more customers by offering superior products (including ideologies like green, ethical, etc) or finding legal or illegal ways of exploiting society for higher revenue seems incidental.
I am not saying google is good or evil. I am only saying that I don;t see the rationale to necessarily be good in competitive markets and bad in noncompetitive markets. If anything being bad in any sphere would seem to nullify Google's image as an ethical company and ruin any advantages such a reputation would have in markets where ethics were it's primary selling point.
I think all companies try to be profitable and ethical. Where these 2 ideals are in conflict some companies have a higher willingness to overlook ethics in favor of profit. I don't think market competition is as relevant a factor as this article implies.
That's kind of it. Their business is in selling adwords and they do that by trawling as much data as they can about as many people as they can. All of their other businesses are either amusing side projects they haven't figured out what to do with yet, or they do evil in support of their main advertising business.
Anything that can't either boost adsense revenue or make money directly is eventually going to get cut.
Generally speaking, it's almost always more profitable in the long run to be ethical. As in most things, there are exceptions. Also, profitability has to be thought of in a broader way to accurately understand this issue. Human flourishing is the ultimate "profit" which includes wholeness in relationships which is always destroyed by being "evil".
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/30/2322253/google-argues-against-net-neutrality its a dupe. Its the same dumb points from anonymous cowards. Google want to charge businesses for attaching servers to the internet...and yet this has been twisted into a Net Neutrality argument, by changing the definition of Net Neutrality "discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality . I'm just shocked its not an Ars Technica...maybe they are still defending the iPhone launch.
Can you provide an example to back up your claim?
I am also curious about the switch you are talking about? If you are talking about their no server policy, can you provide a link to where they said servers were OK at some point and then later went back on their word?