http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/02/01/is-google-evil-the-great-debate/

Nevertheless, Google fans declared victory many times while the debate was in progress, which is pretty much what you’d expect.

Do performance and profit go together?
Usually they do. If you are successful you must be good, it is not always true the other way around, if you are good you are not necessarily successful.
Success depends on many variables.
First you must be known and to be known you must be widespread.
Google was there at the right moment, at the right time and was as good as nobody else.
You tried it, you were satisfied and you were addicted.
So addicted that when you search, automatically you tape Google.com.
” I also wish that Google were more transparent about the business arrangement in its ad networks. Google demands transparency from the rest of us – if we want Google juice – but it is too often opaque itself. But opaqueness has long been standard procedure in business.”

Well the usual saying goes: We all have the same rights, as long as Google has its own rights…When you have power you also have privileges…

“Our world is a better place because of Google”

I wouldn’t say better.
More people are on the Internet. More people are connected and can easily communicate.
Google has a more effective and “independent” PR, where more or less everybody has his “right”(more or less) placement on the Internet.
Google gave the chance to companies to create products, jobs, value, and wealth.

All this existed before Google and will exist after Google, but Google gave a voice to it, created hierarchies so that more or less everybody is entitled to shout when his turn comes and if he has something interesting to say.

And if he doesn’t (or Google thinks he doesn’t), he will be after the 10 pages of the search…relegated to eternal anonymity…

Indeed.

Good point. Musing on your theme…. “Good” — or not evil — shouldn’t necessarily assume that one can reform the rest of the world. However, one does decide with whom to do business, no? I think cigarette companies are bad, so I wouldn’t work with them or help them in their work, for example. So should Google help China? That’s one formulation. But your formulation would also be right in saying that it would be impractical for Google to judge the virtue of everyone it does business with. (Hell, it does business with spammers and sploggers.) Remember that Google’s rule is intended for internal use, to guide employees and so they can guide the company. So there’s the debate: Google asking, “Should we do business in China under China’s rules?” Their answer was that some internet is better than none. Would the answer be the same for apartheid South Africa? It’s basically a boycott argument in the end, I suppose.

The whole might and power of the U.S government hasn’t been able to get China to change their policies since WWII but we expect Google to do it overnight? What has Nike or Apple done to get China to change its ways? Or a thousand other companies doing business there. What are you guys doing? Gonna to blog China free? Gee, that’s courageous. What giant risk takers you are.

Just wondering, though: Would you have been able to build ChicagoCrime.org when you did without Google Maps? Wasn’t it that demonstration that led to EveryBlock and its funding?

I’m not saying Google is the only path. But if they helped you along the way to create a new company, I do think they at least deserve the credit.

If I dare say it…. try Google domains. See Doc Searls on the topic: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/what-google-does-and-needs-keep-doing

Actually, yes! That’s precisely what I attempted to convey in my previous comment, but I guess I didn’t make the point well enough. We *have* built our own map service, and Google had nothing to do with it.

Google deserves credit for introducing the *concept* of dynamically draggable/zoomable maps, but the online mapping world has come a long way since that happened in 2005. It’s feasible, and affordable, to make your own maps — with zero code, services or data from Google. That’s what we’re doing on EveryBlock, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

Adrian

I’m a CEO of a medium sized company and would like to register a complaint about Godaddy.com as I think they have slipped to a point where their moral code is below the standards Weber writes. I believe this letter gets to the point. Fran is the internet specialist in my company, Kaffe Magnum Opus.

Fran,
This weekend I purchased two domains. ecocrisis101.com and tvadsrip.com. My purpose in writing is more than this.

I purchased these one at a time. The first check out, the bill is $5,389 or some such bullshit. I realized that the first domain I looked for, ecocrisis.com had come up as available at a premium price, something like 5350 dollars. I clicked away to search more site names for obvious reasons. I did not know, and I challenge you to find anywhere it says that you bought it, in any way. Yet, it ends up in my cart. And at checkout there was no obvious way to remove it and another. There was also a five year plan on the cart, which I did not order.

This is dishonest and not up to the moral standard of Kaffre Magnum Opus and I’d like you to find another service from which KMO can purchase domains.

I would also like to store our domains at another site.

Go Daddy has turned into a slippery slope.

I’m not kiddiing.

Bob

I agree with other commenters that the word “evil” needs to be defined first. A for-profit-company needs to do really bad things to be “evil”. So, Google can probably not be evil, by definiton.

But if you look at Google’s behaviour, I see a lot of “evil” activities. Their opaqueness is well known in the industry, and they could use it to abuse their monopolistic power. Example #1: Adsense.

You are an Adsense publisher. Wouldn’t you want to know which ads show on your site? Which ads were clicked? Which clicks earned how much? Which share is Google getting from clicks on your site? Then good luck finding that out. You won’t, because Google won’t tell you. They barely let you know anything about the ads that run on your site. You don’t know whether a click on the “God Loves You” ad above (that I am seeing right now, for whatever reason) will earn you $1 per click or $0.01, and whether Google was able to sell that click at $1.50 or $0.15 or $0.02. YOU JUST DON’T KNOW, because Google does not tell you. In other words – Google could just take the money from you as they see fit. Google faces a bad quarter? Well, Sergey, just crank up the revenue share, presto!

Evil? Not in the sense of handing over Chinese users to the Chinese legal state. But “evil” in the sense of “unethitical behaviour” – bien sur, mon copain!

Example #2: Profiling.

You run Adsense on this blog. Google knows I am accessing this page. Now. They will know when I posted this (critical) comment. They probably know who I am. If not, it is probably not too difficult for them to find out. If they decide that they don’t like such critical commentary, they just disable my gmail account, my Adsense account, my Adwords account.

But they would never do that, right?

Again, would that behaviour be evil? No (the contracts allows them to terminate whatever service I have been using at any time without having to give a reason). But would it be “unethical behaviour”? Heck, yes. It affects my freedom of speech. These days I think twice before posting a critical comment re. Google. This machine is too dangerous to risk losing an Adsense account or your search rankings.

Example #3: Copyrights.

Google has a weird relationship to the copyright. They hate it, because it prevents them to fulfil their company mission (organizing the world’s information) and to build useful services to place ads around. Copyright owners disturb here. Just look at Youtube and the massive amount of infringement going on there. Sure, it’s not Google infringing, they are just providing the platform, it’s the users. Then again – even if this is not “evil”, it’s certainly unethical. If they see that infringements are happening, they could also decide to disable the platform altogether.

And so I began to use live.com some time ago for my searches. No, I do not trust Google at all.

Thanks for responding!

OK the Internet is the means for the grassroots watchdog function to occur, but right now, for watching Google, there is no organized network for it (not even in a decentralized kind of way). Do you not see any value in this getting organized online in some way? And if so, why not?

I think the grassroots watchdog group exists for google and every company today. It’s the internet. The smart companies are realizing that.

And while you’d think a device with a built-in GPS and 3G connection would host a nice turn-by-turn navigator interfacing to Google maps, but you’d be wrong. The Google Maps API legal agreement bans real-time access, so the open source AntNav had to be re-written to use a private maps database.

Given the opportunity, Google acts even more anti-competitive than MS did in their heyday. Simply look at the facts.