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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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Right, Google's problems with evil are more on the ad side. They paid extortion to the tune of $500,000,000 as a penalty to the Department of Justice to keep Larry Page out of jail when Google offended the pharmaceutical industry cartel. That amount was sufficient to match the bribes paid by the pharmaceutical industry, and since it shut down most internet pharmacies being found via google, they didn't pursue the matter further.
There, fixed that for ya.