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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.
Their bottomless pit of an appetite for people's data that can be used for Advertising is IMHO pure evil.
THen there is there slurping of data from their cars. I don't buy that their capturing of WiFi data was an accident.
When they were photographing places why did they need to detect WiFi signals? They didn't.
Google will do as must as they can to get data on the people who use their system.
The can proclaim their 'goodness' as long as they are less evil than FaceBook.
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.
Such words have varying definitions by person, your evil may be my good.
By now US is the prime example. China may be evil with its own population, but US is with the entire world's one.
Exactly. You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. That's what I learned from Star Wars.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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".
...after hiring so many people coming from other companies that never though being evil was something to be avoided?
Not to pick on Microsofties, but how many of them can you hire without turning your company into Microsoft?
And that's why is so important that a company has strong competitors. If they don't, they have fewer incentives to be ethical.
I love Android, but Google needs strong competitors so that they make it good for consumers and not only good for themselves.
When it's convenient to do so: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-fine-art-of-corporate-fibbing.html
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.
'Where they operate in narrower, less competitive markets — like where they’ve become an Internet service provider, for example — they abandon those commitments.'
...
Like where, give examples
Can we consider Google of being 'good' in the crowded market of domestic surveillance?
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished-qwest-refusing-participate-illegal-surveillance-pre-9-11
Here's the thing: when there is competition, the government can play favorites with whoever does their bidding best. Remember the whole Yahoo-China thing? China could kick Yahoo out of China so Yahoo had to roll-over so that they could keep their marketshare. And Yahoo fought against the NSA in court as well, but they lost. What did Marissa Mayer say about that again?
"Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer said she feared winding up in prison for treason if she refused to comply with U.S. spy demands for data. Her comments came after being asked what she is doing to protect Yahoo users from "tyrannical government" during an on-stage interview Wednesday afternoon at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/12/yahoo-ceo-fears-defying-nsa-could-mean-prison/
* Congrats, Cory. You've gotten on Slashdot several times in the past few weeks. Remember: it's important to keep your name in the news so that you can sell more books. Too bad your analysis is overly simplistic.
They originally hoped that they'd bring uncensored information to China. When that got silenced, they switched to telling their customers they were being censored, bringing attention to the censorship. When that was silenced, they left.
At the high level, (and from a Western viewpoint*,) those are not evil actions. The rest of their dealings with China and the Chinese market may have been less than angelic, but their overarching framework had noble foundations.
* I qualified that statement because there is a Chinese viewpoint that a harmonious society (even if it is built on polite fictions) is better than individual freedoms that lead to disruptions. We may find that dishonest, repulsive, repressive, and tyrannical, but ours aren't the only ideas on the planet.
John
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?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A couple of non-nerd friends and I were talking a few weeks ago, and the topic of various Internet services came up. Without any prompting from me, both of them (one an Android user, the other a dumbphone user) mentioned that they were trying to get away from Google services like Gmail, Google+, GTalk, and even Android because of the creepy factor with how Google is using their data these days. No mention of PRISM or the NSA or the like until after I asked about it. They were simply bothered by the fact that they were being tracked as much as they were by Google.
Now, I know an anecdote does not a trend make and that we can't extrapolate to the population at large, but still, having non-nerds both aware of and caring about this stuff enough to vocalize their desire to leave a company's products behind is pretty damning, and I was shocked to hear them volunteer that opinion, since I had thought that nerds were the only ones who cared enough about the topic to suggest taking such action.
competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had.
perhaps it's the fact that they started the company under the mantra of "don't be evil." come on, Microsoft had to compete when it started out and they did a lot of douchebag things. remember how windows 3.1 wouldnt run on DR-DOS because MS sabotaged it.
David Cole and Phil Barrett exchanged emails on 30 September 1991: " "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'"
so dont tell me that competition keeps businesses honest because it's the biggest load of bullshit i've heard in a long time. there is plenty of competition in the tech market and everyone seems to be going with the sue the competition into oblivion form of competition. microsoft has their smartphone OS but everyone is using Android so they decided to extort money from everyone.
Google is honest because it was the plan from the very start.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...whether Google behaves ethically. I frequent the BoingBoing site, so I'm used to Doctorow's inane drivel, but this probably takes the biscuit.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
No company or individual can "do no evil" when living under the thumb of "security" agencies that demand they betray the trust of their customers/friends, under penalty of treason.
What else did you expect them to do? Other than not even try, they took the only other reasonably option other than fully complying.
It's not different from the US. See how long you can operate a server that provides child pornography and methods of taking down a plane before the server is shut down and confiscated.
The law is what the law is in the country and until and unless the policy isn't enforced you're options are to not go there, to leave or to fight. And fighting is often times not viable in countries like China where the party makes the laws and enforces them.
That's not true. They don't collect the information coming down the pipe. They collect the information the same way on their network that they do on the network in general. The profit motive for them to provide the improved connections is more impressions per hour. As well as fewer people blocking ads because of slow connection speeds. And hopefully scare the other ISPs into improving the connection speeds so that it happens all over the place.
Evil versus non-evil is image, not morality. A positive image is an asset in a competitive situation, but irrelevant for a monopoly. Evil without being caught is just as good, but Google understands the Internet well enough not to try that.
Isn't this the basic fallacy of capitalism where competition keeps corporate behaviour in check.
But of course no solution is offered for when a company reaches near dominance in one area, not to mention multiple areas.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". Maybe Google just sucks at being evil?
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
I have often said that this is the hardest problem Google faces: How not to be evil, and how to make that an ongoing legacy. It's just possible as long as the founders retain control, but after that it becomes truly hard.
Assuming they take this seriously, I hope they dedicate resources to this, and do not underestimate the complexity of the problem.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Except when it comes to China., posted to Doctorow: Rivalry Keeps Google From Doing Evil, has been moderated Troll (-1).
Except when it comes to China., posted to Doctorow: Rivalry Keeps Google From Doing Evil, has been moderated Overrated (-1).
Google was willing to deal with China, a country willing to silence someone for much less than the US. In spite of that, some people may have been quite angered at having that pointed out.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The problem with that is the US has a much higher threshold for such activities - whether in the US or across the world.
That said, the US has (without apology) an empire to maintain and that it should not have to be made to submit to the world.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.