Do No Evil
February 8th, 2006 by MarkI’m quite aware that some bloggers are ranting that Google must be evil just for creating a google.cn domain that filters search results according to Chinese law (and alerts users as to why results have been removed). Many of the same bloggers are simply confused or mis-reporting news. Google follows the laws all over the world, and I don’t see that as a particularly evil thing.
Every country has some things they insist on blocking. Most of Europe is still sensitive about Nazi propaganda, for example. In the US, quite a few things are blocked due to anti-pornography laws, and very strong IP laws . Yes, some search results on google.cn will be blocked if you search for “falun gong”. The same is true, (though no longer on the front page), of searching on “scientology” in Germany, where Scientology is banned. I really can’t see how not providing information to people, and telling them that they can’t due to the law, is “evil”.
Another point is, people in China can still go to google.com and see the exact same search results that US users do. Furthermore, google.cn is the only search in China that I know of that actually tells users when search results are blocked by the government. Unlike giving the government information about dissidents (a la Yahoo), not serving all search requests does no direct harm to the user. In cases where direct harm could come to the user through government subpoena, such as Gmail, Google simply doesn’t offer service in China. If this way of doing business is “evil”, then all of the frothing “let’s boycott Google” hoards need a new word to describe just what Yahoo, Microsoft and the rest of Google’s competitors are.
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February 8th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Another point is, people in China can still go to google.com and see the exact same search results that US users do.
Yes, for the time being. But many see the creation of Google.cn as a convenience and justification which will allow the blocking of normal Google.com searches.
What if Google created Google.cn knowing that regular Google searches will be blocked soon, and Google.cn was the only way to keep operating in China? Still not evil at all?
February 8th, 2006 at 3:46 am
In that case you have to decide whether it’s better to cut off a billion people from your service, or to cut them off from one small portion of your service. Unless you’re suggesting that Google spend its billions on trying to overthrow the CCP, there really aren’t any other choices.
Sergy Brin talked about this problem in an interview. He said that he’s sincerely hoping that google.com will not be blocked, and that google.cn’s primary utility will be due to the fact that it’s hosted in China. As we all know, the bandwidth between China and the rest of the world is woefully inadequate and it’s not improving. However, if google.com is to be blocked and the only choices are to present most of the of the information that Chinese people search for or none at all, making google.cn is still the right thing to do. While blocking (and notifying users they are blocking) some search results on “Tiananmen” may not be ideal, depriving 1/5 of the people on the planet of search altogether is much worse. Having grown up as a Russian Jew, I really, really doubt the guy’s insensitive to this sort of problem.
February 10th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
Mark, this is all in a respectful tone.
I think that in terms of the question you’ve asked, “Is google less evil than its competitors?”, well, yes, I agree with your opinion. But I think the question is much wider than that.
If different countries have different laws, that does not make all of them right. If Germany blocks x and China blocks y, China may still be wrong.
Do you believe that Germany blocking Nazi Propaganda and Scientology is the same as what China is doing?
If a company commits to follow all local laws, that allows a huge number of horrors. Is Shell obeying the law in Nigeria? Were the American companies that aided the Nazi holocaust obeying German law? If an individual manager who had been developing, for example, the punch card machines to track trains to concentration camps, came back to his hometown in the US and explained the work he had been doing in Germany, would people be satisfied with the defense that he had obeyed all local laws? And if they wouldn’t be, if they would be horrifed and call him a monster, why would we be satisfied with the company as a whole using that argument?
Google may be an unusually principled company. But I think it is, I’m sorry, naive to talk about big companies obeying the law - they help make the law. Laws in the West are shaped by corporations’ pressure, and they go to great length to get existing laws interpreted to their benefit. Maybe not in China, but elsewhere, Western companies decide a lot of things around the developing world. So it is not good enough for a company to say, “We obey the law” - if they are not using their influence to do something, for whatever purposes, that would be strange. I’ve read stories about how China’s own web companies are exploring what the government will tolerate, that newspapers are becoming more pushy as competition for readers increases, testing limits.
Now maybe that’s what Google is trying to do. But generally, it seems that Western companies arrive in China and bow down straight away. Why? Because it’s good for business. They, as entities, have no interest in good or evil, human rights or democracy. No wonder China feels little pressure to change, when Western capitalism is so obviously only interested in getting into the market. When, in 20 years, Taiwan is a re-conquered province, we may regret not being stronger with the CCP, and relying on the hope that “development = middle class = democracy = peace”.
Now, perhaps none of this is of relevance to Google. Maybe you’re right that it has no power over Chinese laws and should do what it can to do business there. But if, as you point out, Brin is a Russian Jew, and therefore familiar with persecution, shouldn’t he be doing more than just saying he hopes google won’t be banned?
Could Google decide not to do business in China? Or say that if google.com is added to the list of banned sites, google.cn will be taken down too? How powerful a message would that be?
Of course, Google would never do this, because our society expects companies to firstly think about making profits, and while one corporation may be slightly better than another, it is impossible to apply words like good or evil to them, because they will always do what they have to.
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I’m sure that all the above is far too idealistic, but I have to say I was a little sad that you can be so nonchalent about “some search results on “Tiananmen”” and so fervent about the need of the Chinese people to a Google search. I think they need other rights more urgently. The worst thing about China is not that the Chinese don’t have democracy, but that so many of them think the same thing, because information and education is controlled. Hundreds of millions of people agreeing with government propaganda about Japan, Taiwan, Tibet…
Google’s CEO is limited in what he can say, bloggers aren’t, and it’s a shame if we describe his compromise with the CCP as the right thing to do, rather than merely the practical thing to do.
February 11th, 2006 at 1:47 am
Daniel, from what you wrote, it looks like you may have something to say about my post about ethics and culture. I’m not a moral relativist myself, either. I wrote a lot, but decided not to post it all. The short answer is no, I don’t think that blocking information on Falun Gong is any worse than blocking information on Scientology; and no, I don’t think it’s worse to block information on Tiananmen than it is to block vendors of generic AIDS treatments. I see a lot of hypocrisy in the situation. In any case, as I’ve said, I think the “right” thing for Google to do is
That exactly what Google is doing, which is why I’m not unhappy with them. What do you think the “right” thing to do is? Should they refrain from making a .cn domain? Should they make it but, unlike in the rest of the world, refuse to block illegal content?
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February 12th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
I think under the limited question of what Google should do in today’s business world, well, what it’s doing doesn’t seem so bad (as I mentioned in my comment). I would admire them more if they didn’t build the cn domain, out of principle. I agree with you that building a cn domain and not obeying the local laws would be crazy.
I what I don’t like is the argument that company’s only responsibility is to follow the host country’s laws - or that because Yahoo is doing something worse, that makes Google automatically ok.
Jewish refugees in Britain during the 1940s encountered anti-semitism in certain places. Now, that was certainly better than what they would have experienced at home, but the presence of what was going on in mainland europe did not make that anti-semitism a good thing. Even if it was better than the alternative, it was still wrong.
(were we talking face to face, I would not labour such hackneyed points, but there’s no other way to make an argument in this format)
Just because all countries block some information does not mean that China is right to block whatever it wants. There is a point where something good, or something debatable, something acceptable, becomes something bad. What the CCP does is far more extensive and proactive than Germany’s blocking regime, so I would see China’s internet blocks as wrong and Germany’s as, well, less wrong. China’s internet policy is part of an overall control of education and thought. American control of information may not be right, but there is a diversity of opinion coming out of America that I didn’t hear while in China, and it was very frightening to be among.
I would like to see some awareness that there must be a point where the CCP becomes too bad to deal with. There must be a point where it becomes wrong for a company to deal with a government. What if google had to adjust their search results to favour some government criteria? Bringing up CCP sponsored information first, for example.
By your criteria of not returning illegal search results and not directly harming users, they would be ok by doing this.
I take your point about the West hardly being pure on this topic, and I think it’s a very powerful point that Google already blocks content around the world. And I do appreciate that you are making your case as concisely as possible in the post and commments. I hope that you are right that Google is a principled company.
On the subject of morality and culture, I read your post but didn’t comment, as although I’ve thought endlessly on this, I haven’t come to any satisfactory conclusions. Both the absolute and relative cases tend to look fairly stupid in different situations. The culture side has problems because culture is not homogenous and defined, and so saying what is in a culture and not is very hard. The absolute side has problems because ethics are not very clear either - why exactly do we not hunt/eat x animals but do hunt/eat all the rest? And if you believe in absolutes, like “blocking search results is wrong”, “sexism is wrong”, you face the awkward point that the correct moral choice is probably followed nowhere.