Don’t Be (Really) Evil
Posted by Melanie Phung on Sunday, January 29, 2006 at 10:11 pm
In defending his company’s decision — a year in the making — to offer a censored version of its search services in China, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said the move would be a lesser evil than boycotting business in the country altogether:
We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all. We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.
An “evil scale”? Is he serious? That doesn’t really work as well as a corporate motto.
If I didn’t know that Eric Schmith was a technologist (he was the CEO of Novell, CTO at SUN Microsystem, and a researcher at Xerox Palo ALto Research Center in this descending order prior to joining Google), I would have thought that Eric were a dishonest businessman with an MBA or law degree from one of the ivy leagues. How could he present Google’s capitulation to a Chinese government demand as a judgement of “evil scale”.
Eric Schmidt’s “evil scale” is called in an “ethics class” of the business program a “lack of integrity”.
Note: Eric Smidth has a B.S., M.S., and a Ph.D in computer sciences.
Will Google change its “Don’t be Evil” motto to “Be less Evil”?
Giving in on China’s limits on Internet content shows Google’s business savvy. Fighting the tentative US government’s seizing of search data demonstrates Google’s courage of standing up to the authority. Eric Schmidt knows how to deal with dictatorial powers. Censorship in China will diminish as China economy improves and new Internet technologies develop. Seizing data over the Internet searches is a more critical issue. Providing protection to minors from porn industry can be performed more efficiently and more effectively with cooperation with the leading search engine providers. Confiscating data in the name of of child protection is an act of dictatorial powers, whose use even China is trying to avoid.
Hmm. I wondered how they were reconciling that directive with their recent announcement. I’m not so sure I agree, particularly when their economic interests align so perfectly with their evil scale. Funny how a search engine ends up in the realm of philosophy, but I guess the question is if presenting a redacted view of the world is equivalent to presenting false information. If so — and I think my own morals tend in that direction — then Google has decided that false knowledge with some truth is better than no knowledge at all. I agree that that is a legitimate argument… if “no knowledge” was the actual alternative. In fact there are several home-grown Chinese search engines as well as Google’s traditional Western competitors already providing a similarly edited world view. Seems to me that the true moral high ground independent of financial considerations is to deliver the entire world’s information or none at all and let others continue to provide the Chinese government’s view of the world.