The other day I recommended selling Google stock on moral grounds; today maybe it’s more pragmatic than that. From a Hiawatha Bray column in the Boston Globe:
Umbria Inc. a market research firm in Boulder, Colo., that tracks blog postings about businesses, has detected ”a huge peak in activity” related to Google, according to Howard Kaushansky, Umbria chief executive. Kaushansky said a sudden burst of online comments could mean trouble for the world’s leading Internet search service.
Another aspect of the Google controversy I have not seen raised very much is the issue of “modeling.” While our country goes around trumpeting democracy as the keystone of our foreign policy (and our values), our flagship companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco) wink slyly and say “just kidding – we really want to make a profit first.” There are a million rationalizations, but that’s what it comes to. The fact that there are work-arounds doesn’t cut if for me. What you do is what you are.
And now Google is getting into the radio advertising business!
http://billboardradiomonitor.com/radiomonitor/news/business/digital/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001845461
Gaggle expects us to react the same way that we react to all others that are willing to compromise freedom. A few words of concern, a bit of indignation and finally, everyone forgets.
Gaggle needs to be reminded that there are consequences to sleeping with the enemy.
DO NOT PLAY WITH GAGGLE!
Roger,
There’s a serious issue here, a serious major faultline in our society which is often papered over but which goes to the heart of the issue and the legacy media issues we always discuss. The issue is this: to what extent do for-profit companies have any sort of social obligations? Should CNN support the society that nurtures it, or should it support terrorists who will pull this society down eventually, if that leads to greater profits for the owners? Those who worship at the fount of capitalism believe the market will sort these things out. It won’t, because the markets are never so efficient in practice as they appear in the textbooks. But trying to enforce good social behavior on companies which really have no other obligation but to make profits, noble as it may sound in principle, in practice leads to enormous cans of worms so entangled that Alexander the Great couldn’t cut through them.
Guys, I’m sorry, but after my first impulse (the same as the rest of you) I think you’re wrong.
Unlike Yahoo and MSN, Google (1) isn’t providing gmail in China because they can’t do it and preserve their privacy and security principles; (2) provides a notice every time they don’t report a search item because of the restrictions (unlike Yahoo); (3) make their .com service available to .cn IP addresses, so you can always use the unrestricted service; and (4) have been completely open about what restrictions they accepted to have servers in China.
I just checked, and you can use google.com in both traditional (Taiwan, ROC) Chinese and simplified (mainland, PRC) Chinese, and search for results in both languages. The “workaround”, as far as that goes, is that when you find out that you are not getting all the results, you have to find a way around the PRC’s restrictions — which is pretty easy to do, actually — and type ‘google.com’ instead of ‘google.cn’.
Yahoo and MSN haven’t done any of those things, AND narcked on Chinese dissidents’ emails besides.
You want to boycott someone, boycott microsoft and Yahoo — Google is being relatively much better.
The difference between Google and MSN/Yahoo is that the other companies didn’t make their company motto ‘do no evil’. MSN/Yahoo may be craven, but so what- they never said they wouldn’t be.
Google, on the other hand, makes a big deal about how they are different than other companies- they don’t do ‘evil’, unlike everybody else. In my mind, that makes them worse for joining the censorship brigade.
I guess I’d respect them more if they no longer claimed ‘do no evil’ as their motto.
“Do no evil” has been the rallying cry of some of the most self-righteous–hence most evil–enterprises the world has ever seen. I’m sure the Jacobins were quite comfortable chopping off all those heads so that no evil would be done.
As far as I can tell, the evidence right now is that all the search engines are blocking things, both in China and here in the land of the free. Whereas people have been lambasting Google for a week for their hypocrisy on China, both Yahoo and MSN caved to the US government and gave them everything they wanted without even a whimper. They completely neglected to inform the public. So, on that score, Charlie is correct and Google comes out ahead. On the other hand, it would appear that Google is going far beyond the call of duty in its allegiance to Chinese censorship, blocking all sorts of things that even Microsoft hasn’t stooped to blocking. “Google’s new China search engine not only censors many Web sites that question the Chinese government, but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes.” The good news is that no personal data has been turned over the the US government by the Gang of Three. Yet.
Still, I wonder what would happen if the Chinese government leaned a little on any of these companies and asked for personal data on US citizens. I wonder how long before they cracked. Maybe they’ve already done so? All in the name of good business of course.
I think we’re kidding ourselves here. You pile up a huge pile of money in DC and you’ll find after a while that a number of snouts are poked into it. The equivalent in the modern world is data. You pile up a big pile of it in servers and sooner or later the governments of the world–the guys with guns–will come calling.
The issue is this: to what extent do for-profit companies have any sort of social obligations?…But trying to enforce good social behavior on companies which really have no other obligation but to make profits, noble as it may sound in principle, in practice leads to enormous cans of worms so entangled that Alexander the Great couldn’t cut through them.
And this exact can of worms is the one we opened when government–that’s right GOVERNMENT–created the entire idea, the entire legal fiction, of the corporation, and set up the massive set of legal rights that make multinational publicly-traded corporations possible in the first place.
Libertarians and conservatives who think that corporations are a “natural free market phenemonon” are completely mistaken. They are not. They were invented by the state, for state reasons. They continue to exist only because of state power. To state otherwise is just muddle-headed nonsense.
If there was no such thing as a corporation, we would have no problem looking at Google’s founders, and the small handful of partners in Google, and saying, “why the hell are you guys doing this?” But this LEGAL FICTION, this GOVERNMENT FICTION we call “the corporation” gets away with it because by law the only real obligation of any corporation is 1) make a profit, and 2) whatever other obligations the state mandates.
There should indeed be congressional hearings on this, because the Google Entity is NOT a free businessman engaging in free trade. It’s a state-sustained golem, an artificial creation that only has any rights at all because we the voters allow it to have rights. That being the case, we as voters have rights to make demands of it, too.
Dean, are you saying that Bill Gates is the GOVERMENT. And all this time I thought it was We the People.
Dean terrific comments. You have put into words an idea that has bothered me for quite sometime. Do yout think that if we went to a consumption tax that Corporations would die? After all aren’t corporations formed in part to escape taxes? Probably completely wrong but gotta start somewhere trying to get my head wrapped around this issue.
Regards to Google and China its my feeling that China has just shot herself in the foot in the Global market. And if Google is willing to help China do such a stupid thing as to restrict the rights of our competition to do research maybe Google should be given a medal?
Pierre
I have mixed feelings about this whole debate. I had a problem when Nixon went to China. I felt we (US) sold out our principles when we accepted them as a major trading partner. But the premise was/is, as I understand it, incremental change. The Trojan horse of capitalism would let loose the actors of freedom and democracy. IOW’s, I don’t see a lot of difference between our official policy, and its concurrent overlooking (for the most part) of China’s most harmful transgressions re the cause of freedom and the policy’s of these particular corporate entities. A foot in the door can be resisted, painfully. Push forward or retreat?
Dean, I can see your argument, but with what would you replace it?
Dean there may not have been corporations but there have always been financial empires dating back for centuries. Perhaps Google and Mircrosoft are the modern version of the European traders that came to control the world economy.
Dean Esmay
The thrust of your argument seems to be that we are unable to demand any kind of moral behavior from corporations, and that if we substituted individual people for corporations we could then make those demands of them.
In other words, that we as a society can pressure our members to behave in certain ways.
That’s a pretty radical thought, at least around these parts.
Dean, I’m not sure it’s true that a partnership with a small number of identifiable owners would behave more morally than would a public, limited-liability corporation.
In the days when slave trading was legal, I’m fairly sure that most slave ships were owned either by individuals or by partnerships.
Anyhow, some interesting historical research could be done on this subject.
I’m just having trouble seeing what the “evil” is that Google is doing. All they’ve done is set up a .cn domain in China that obeys the (admittedly repressive, deservedly abhorred) Chinese laws. They’ve done much the same thing in .de and .fr, filering neo-Nazi stuff in accordance with their laws.
They’re refusing to provide the services in country, like email, that would mean compromising people’s privacy.
They’re reporting the search results they can legally, and putting a notice in that some results are not being presented just as they do in, for example, Germany and France.
And they’re not censoring that content from anywhere else. If you can find a way, from China, to get around the Chinese Great Firewall, you can still get the information. Just like you can get neo-Nazi stuff from Germany if you go to Google.com.
I’m not seeing the “evil” here.
Charlie (Colorado)
What is your evidence that Chinese users (or indeed French or German users) have access to Google.com? In my experience in Europe, it is impossible to get to Google.com from a variety of foreign IP addresses. For example, in Belgium you get a redirect to Google.be when you type in “Google.com”. It’s not a simple as typing in Google.com. Yes you can log on to a machine with a different IP address to get around that, but my feeling is that while it is simple to do that from Belgium, it is not so simple from PRC. Besides which, masking your IP address is hardly a basic internet skill.