Evil Google? Can the Search Engine Be Moral? - The Trouble With Google
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Google’s guiding “do no evil” principle is a bit questionable for a couple reasons.
The first and most significant troublesome point of Google is that it has, for the last several months, been a publicly traded company. They are now responsible to stockholders as well as basic users. All the other major search engines are publicly traded as well, which raises similar concerns with them. Yet Google is the one who promised us they wouldn’t be evil, and it’s terribly difficult to believe any public company can remain pure hearted forever. The premise of the public company is that shareholders own them, the advertisers pay them, and the users are a technicality. Advertisers may mean more than users' privacy or other concerns.
The second point is that one of Google’s cofounders, Sergey Brin, carries the responsibility of watching the company’s ethics. Meanwhile the CEO, Eric Schmidt, watches the company’s finances and the other cofounder, Larry Page, works with the development team. So “evil,” as Google would have it, is really defined by one man. Whatever Brin deems as immoral is immoral, but he may have a very different view of ethics than you or me.
This means that the morals of one person can dictate the information that a world full of web browsers can easily access. It allows pornography advertisements to run rampant on the search engine and completely block any alcohol or tobacco ads. Ever try searching for “rum” then searching for “porn” and wonder why the second is the only one with sponsored links? It’s because finding naked people online is morally better than finding the best brand of rum to make a drink. Or maybe it’s because pornography is more profitable than other objectionable content. This is only an indicator of deeper concerns rooted in how Google represents information on the web.
For an example, let’s look at a news item some readers may remember that illustrates a small compromise by the search company. In 2002, the Church of Scientology convinced Google to remove links to some specific anti-Scientology sites, such as Xenu.net. The official reason: those sites provided copyrighted scientology material.
So what is wrong with this picture? Besides the fact Google appears responsible for providing copyrighted material (under copyright law from 1998, not even the DCMA), it also pegs Google as internet guardian. With so many users, Google definitely helps determine what people are able to access. If a site is excluded from Google on some "guardian principle," it better be linked from a page that is indexed or else it may as well not exist.
Removing offensive or copyrighted material almost defeats their ability to provide universal access to information. Again, compromising their "mission" is not good, even though I certainly see why they reacted how they did. This may largely be a problem with legality and the trouble with a majority of people using one search engine, but a lot of people were disappointed that Google did nothing to fight the issue. The company made no notable attempt to retain the integrity of their indexes.
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