Is Google Evil?

Google has gone from almost total obscurity to mega world domination in the blink of an eye. But have they lost their soul in the process? Read on to hear what has become of the company who pride themselves on their motto of “Do no evil”

Google has enough money to buy just about anything it wants. Just recently it paid US$1.6 billion for YouTube which, let's face it, is basically a site for idiots to post up videos of themselves falling off their bikes. That seems (to any sensible person at least) to be a rather startling amount of money to pay for any website, but then we are talking about the search engine that made $369 million profit in the first three months of 2006, and then tripled that by the end of the year. Things are getting serious.

In purely practical terms, money is power, and that makes Google one of the more powerful entities on the planet at the moment. But does such power intrinsically corrupt? Is the ultimate fate of all funky young internet startups to become a faceless corporate behemoth? Is morality poisoned by the acquisition of money?

Rebels

Well, it seems there are a few of us out there grappling with this philosophical conundrum. Take for example the folks at Googlewatch, whose aim seems to be to draw together all those who are becoming nervous about the nature of the swelling Google empire.

And they're certainly not alone, one interesting concept is the site http://google.evilornot.info/. Their approach is to gather together all the news about Google currently floating around the internet and poll their readers about whether they think the story shows signs of evilness. They even present the ongoing battle between good and evil in handy graph form, shown below.

Lefties

But has Google really done anything wrong? Are people's fears simply a knee jerk reaction to a clear example of capitalist success? While there's certainly a lot of sour grapes going around, Google (to be fair, perhaps a victim of it's own success) has been linked to some genuine evil. At the grass roots level there's things like the recent news that Google helps hackers do their job better, while at the international level Google was recently convicted and fined in a French court for failing to respect other company's trademarks. Those rotters.

Certainly they aren't squeaky clean, but then should they be expected to? Aren't we judging them too harshly? Unfortunately, Google invites criticism, by letting it be known that their corporate motto is “Do No Evil”. The problem with this admirable motto is that the company has now grown to the point where it becomes more and more difficult for such a strict code to be applied to the increasing complicated environment that they operate in. Not to mention the fact that the other companies they do business with are unlikely to be attempting to operate on the same moral playing field.

Mind control

Perhaps the root of the issue is nothing to do with the nature of big corporations and money at all. Perhaps it's more subtle, more insidious, and ultimately much more significant. Google has become easily the number one conduit for information on the internet. It's long been said that information is power, which makes Google a power broker. By having such a massive influence over what we buy, who from, where we eat, where we go on holiday, and who we talk to, Google has a discrete but real influence over our lives. If George Orwell is to be believed, whoever controls the information a population has, controls their reality. Are the online doom-mongers right to be worried that any one organisation, particularly one that we can't vote out, has the ability to control the most powerful information source ever devised?

Only time will tell...

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