Don’t Be Evil (just a suggestion)

So, word on the street is that Google removed it’s famous “Don’t be evil” rule from their code of conduct, coincidentally or not after some employees objected to some defense work.

I’m surprised the clause has been there all this time (and that it’s taken this long for employees to take it seriously). I wrote this years ago when Google first started operating in China:

Friday night, on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, in a segment on the impact of the Internet on China, the head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, was asked about Google’s agreement to filter (a polite euphemism for “censor”) their search results as a precondition for Google’s presence in China. He responded with that Google had to comply with local law and it was “better to provide information than not”. — he didn’t say exactly who it was better for, but I assume he meant the company line that it was better for the people of China.

To be fair, Yahoo and Microsoft should have undergone similar questioning, in particular how Yahoo feels about handing over the identity of a blogger to the Chinese government, which subsequently imprisoned the blogger for his criticism. (Microsoft has just censored bloggers, with the same justification — compliance with local laws)

But that just points out one fallacy of Google’s justification. The Official Google Blog post on the subject doesn’t mention any competitors in China at all, either the usual US rivals or the burgeoning Chinese ones. It gives the impression of “no google, no search”, although it does start off presenting the problem as a customer service issue — people in China are already using Google, but with some downtime and missing results (I assume much of that due to the Chinese government’s standard censorship mechanism — so in effect Google is offering to do a better job of that)

The central part of the blog post gets into the usual idealistic rationalization that it’s better for everyone (in this case, the world) to engage and spread this wonderful information revolution, even with compromises. It reminds me of the waning arpartheid days in South Africa when many of my classmates at MIT (but not apathetic me) demonstrated for MIT do divest its holdings there, and the administration felt it wasn’t appropriate to use moral criteria in making financial decisions (currently still echoed by Jim Cramer on Mad Money when he’s pushing a tobacco stock).

I’m sure this rationalization was sincere — my freshman adviser, David Saxon, the President of MIT, often generously invited his advisees to his penthouse dinner parties, during one of which he asked us our opinions on this matter, and he seemed genuinely conflicted over the issue. And he had been one of the academics who’d lost his job during the McCarthy years for refusing to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath and was a dean at UCLA during Vietnam War protests (he recounted at a party how Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul Jabbar, had overturned a small campus vehicle and everyone was nervous about the resulting leaking fuel).

So, OK, it’s not an easy issue, but would all those companies be so eager to spread the Digital Word in China if they didn’t think it would lead to a lot of profits in the future? At the end of the Google blog post, the word “investment” sneaks in, and mention of the how “dynamic” and “important” China is. Finally, we cut to the chase. If it was all about altruism, you’d see similar concerted efforts in regions that really need it (there are several international Official Google Blogs, but none for Africa). In math parlance (which the Google founders speak far better than I), the profit motive is a “necessary condition” — if there are no other constraints, than it is a “necessary and sufficient condition”. So I wonder which it is?

It’d be nice to have an honest statement: “We’re a publicly owned company, and even though our motto is “don’t be evil”, we have a responsibility to our shareholders, our rivals are already in China, and we’re afraid of getting left out. So we’ve agreed to comply with censhorship of our search results, but we don’t want to put people in jail, so we haven’t moved our mail and blog services over” There, was that so hard?