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Justin Jessop
Mr. Johnson
Research Writing 299-02
12 April 2011

The Google Brand of Evil

Let me preface this argument with the disclaimer that, as a person who is inclined to use all of

Google’s free services and who enjoys all of their products, my point of view may not be entirely

objective. It may be that the spirit with which Google pursues their undertakings so closely matches my

own passions. However I do not feel that my favoritism necessarily precludes an honest and factual

assessment.

Every company has some sort of slogan or motto either officially or otherwise. Some companies

even have clever and unique slogans which they may or may not even try to live up to. Google’s choice

of “don’t be evil,” as stated in their code of conduct, has garnered them a considerable amount of

attention. Probably more attention than they ever wanted out of it.

The choice to make “don’t be evil” the company slogan was undoubtedly a bad one from a PR

perspective. Regardless of how strictly they adhere to the motto someone will hold every decision the

corporation makes up against the mark of evil and find that it is so, and Google has come under heavy fire

for supposedly violating this motto several times. Additionally, there will always be those who question a

company that needs a reminder to not be evil in the first place. Loudest, perhaps, will be those who

question the difference between “don’t be evil” and “do be good” and why Google chose the former over

the latter.

Evil is defined by Merriam Webster as “morally reprehensible.” While being incredibly vague

and difficult to pin down in any specific way the definition does provide a starting place. The question

“morally reprehensible to whom” that an inquisitive reader may be asking is a valid one that must
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ultimately also be answered by the reader. Ethics provides few black and white answers, and rarely is it

even a simple shade of gray.

Business strategy aside, however, the choice of mantras is commendable. In an era were

technology is granting every member of the human race fearful powers over information and Google’s

profit margin surpasses the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Iceland, business ethics are more important

than ever. The temptation and the ability to simply control the flow of information in an evil manner are

both clearly present. In spite of all of this Google does not behave in a morally reprehensible fashion.

A quick Google search containing for “Google is evil” will turn up an article written by Dan

Frommer titled “Google is Now Officially Evil”. The article is about a company named Skyhook

Wireless and its troubles in dealing with Motorola and how they feel that Google influenced the

relationship. In short the small startup company complains that Google used its ability to bar Motorola

from using the mobile operating system, Android, if Motorola chose to package their handsets with only

Skyhook’s location based software (Frommer). Another article called “Why Skyhook Is Suing Google:

Google Basically Forced Motorola To Ditch Skyhook To Pass Compliance Tests”, also written by Dan

Frommer and published thirty minutes earlier in the same day, explains that Google was, as the title

implies, enforcing its compliance rules (Frommer). Frommer’s claim that “Google had tweaked its

compliance rules to make it harder for Skyhook to pass” (Frommer) is purely speculative.

The lawsuit paints a pretty grim picture, but with a little light Goggles motives become crystal

clear and considerably less injurious. According to Skyhook’s own lawsuit Google was prepared to allow

“Motorola [to] run Google Location Service and Skyhook's … [location software] ‘side-by-side’ and

simultaneously at all times on all Android wireless devices” (Skyhook, 8). This obviously means that

Google is not concerned about Skyhook as a competitor, and isn’t seeking to push them out of business.

Google has a responsibility to ensure that the experience for the end users of Android is of the highest

quality. Many of the services that create that experience are location based and as a result Google cannot
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ensure the quality of their product without location data. Certainly Google also stands to earn a profit

from location based advertising, and the claim that profit is their prime motivation may have some merit,

but allowing the user experience to be completely reliant on a third party would be unacceptable behavior.

Skyhook’s actions, on the other hand, are perhaps less scrupulous. With Apple having developed

their own technology on their iPhone the market for third party location software on smart phones is

shrinking at what is certainly an alarming rate for anyone involved directly with Skyhook. Rather than

finding a new business model or developing a new technology the top levels of management decided that

litigation was the best alternative. Also, it is worth noting that the coverage map, powered by Google

Maps coincidentally, on Skyhook’s web site shows a fairly anemic coverage area. Essentially, users

outside of large metropolitan areas would only be covered in a handful of wireless hotspots.

Skyhook asserts in their lawsuit that 99 percent of Google’s income is generated by

advertisement. The lawsuit makes no complaint of this but most people will tell you that advertising

companies are nothing if not evil. The ecofriendly types will tell you all about the vast swaths of

woodlands cut down for all the fliers that inevitably wind up as wasted paper in landfills or cities’ gutters.

The economists will question the wisdom of spending millions of dollars on an investment with little or

no measurable return. The average television user of a past era would complain at the volume, both

audible and in number of appearances, and banality of advertisements. Now with the invention of DVR,

television ads are nearly a thing of the past, but in their dying throes many of them are worse than ever.

Last but not least are the billboards; enormous, high reaching, steel and wooden billboards which sell

their space to whoever is willing to pay.

Billboards have ignited racial, religious and moral conflagrations for perhaps as long as they have

existed. Nearly every major city has had an Atheist versus Christian debate played out in the skies over

their roadways. There was the infamous Sony ad featuring a white woman and a black woman fighting as

a means to draw attention to the fact that they now offered a selection between the two colors in their
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latest portable gaming device. Parents of young children in Dallas, Texas, can certainly attest to what a

trial it is explaining exactly why The Yellow Rose calls itself a gentleman’s club and yet prominently

features scantily clad women on all of their signs.

And yet none of these clear examples of morally reprehensible behaviors represents Google’s

actions, nor are any of them analogous. Google’s advertising efforts are all digital and therefore use very

little in the way of natural resources. Google’s ads are not obnoxious or deceptive. If you perform a

Google search for an item you will see ads that are prominently displayed, but also clearly labeled as

advertisement, extremely unobtrusive and relevant to your query. A search for “beef jerky” will provide

advertisement for popular brands of beef jerky and sponsored links to their web page. A search for

“Brown V Board of Education” on the other hand yields only two ads for political activist sites and no

sponsored links.

Participation in Google’s advertisement is also purely optional. Popular browser add-ons such as

AdBlock are not prohibited on Google’s web site or even in their own web browser, Google Chrome. No

other advertising agencies would allow you to simply turn off their ads if they had Google’s means of

controlling the decision. More so because part of Google’s strategy is a pay per click system where they

only make money if a user clicks on one of the sponsored links. This strategy is a powerful incentive to,

according to Google’s corporate code of conduct, “provide the most relevant and useful advertising.”

All of this means that Google has, perhaps inadvertently, taken an industry seemingly fueled by

malicious intent and shown how it can provide a valuable and completely benevolent service to all parties

involved. Google’s AdWords are related in some way to the material being searched for. If a user is

searching with the intent to make a purchase, that user would want to see advertisement that was relevant

to his or her interests. This certainly fails to qualify for the label of morally reprehensible. Google is

showing how an industry that is plagued by irrelevance and less than pure intent can be not only useful,
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but a service to humanity. The fact that by doing so the company has found itself drowning in cash

should serve as an example to other marketing firms.

At this point it would be easy to continue with a rundown of all the free services that Google

offers as proof that Google isn’t doing evil, but the simple fact is that Google offers those services for free

largely to keep people looking at their ads. There are quite a few activities that Google has engaged in,

however, that are purely benevolent and do not profit the company in any direct fashion.

One clear example of Google’s good will toward mankind is Google’s Summer of Code. Chris

DiBona explained in a guest appearance on the weekly podcast, TWiG, that this initiative features several

projects with three parties each. Each project is submitted to Google by an open source software

development team. The idea behind open source software being that once an original product is made the

community that uses it can then further develop and improve upon it and new products may be made from

the original. Often the open source community will offer the end product for free. Google will decide if

the project is a good candidate for their Summer of Code and will then select students, who have also

applied to the initiative, to work with each team. Google’s only role in the relationship is to match them

up and then pay the student while they work on the code (TWiG). Google will certainly benefit from the

project in the long run, as will the entire software development community.

According to Dibona the purpose of this initiative is to “productively pay them to work on coding

and retain their edge instead of having that summer drop of in learning” and Google is doing it “pro

bono.” By the end of the summer the open source project has progressed further than it otherwise might

have, the student has more experience and a great addition to their resume, and Google has established

relationships with young software developers who could conceivably provide contributions to future

software. It is a win-win-win scenario, though Google stands to lose the most. They invest $7 million

(Dibona) and months of time into the Summer of Code, and at the end of it all of the applicants could

walk away without so much as a “thank you” to Google.

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Anyone who considers Google to be an agent of evil should pause and reflect on what exactly the

company did for the internet, and by extension the world. In the early days of the internet it was nearly

impossible to find a web page if the user didn’t know the precise universal resource locator or URL.

Soon enough there were search engines that would look for the page such as MetaCrawler or Infoseek,

but they were slow and unreliable. Even with their help a user was unlikely to find relevant information

unless they had been to a site before and had some idea what they were looking for. The initiated had

found quite a few purposes for it, but to the average person it was useless. It was as if there were a vast

sea of information, rather than a highway, but man had only a leaky canoe.

Google’s stated corporate mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally

accessible and useful.” This mission statement, after careful consideration, is far more significant than

the half joking “don’t be evil” motto could ever hope to be. The successful completion of this mission

would mean that every person could have access to libraries of information more comprehensive and

more influential than any other library conceived of since the dawn of history. It may be preferable to

have them succeed in this mission while being evil rather than hold strictly to an anti-evil policy. And yet

it is impossible to conceive of an entity that could accomplish this goal with malice at its heart.

Google’s recent foray into the Mobile phone market begs the question of whether or not this goal

may not only be possible, but imminently within our reach. Ostensibly, the move was a strategic one

meant to increase the volume of ad revenue. At the risk of sounding sensational, what if Google’s actual

purpose is to take another step towards putting the sum total of all man’s knowledge into as many hands

as possible? Google gets a lot of bad press for indexing, analyzing, and collecting every piece of

information possible but if they could collect it all, even the movement patterns and locations of its users.

If Google could aggregate and organize all the world’s knowledge in a useful manner it could be of

immeasurable benefit to mankind.

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Works Cited:

DiBona, Chris. Interview with Leo Laport “This Week in Google 89: The Hidden Menu.”

TWiG. April 6, 2011. Web Podcast. < http://twit.tv/twig89>

TWiG is a weekly podcast, hosted by Leo Laport, that covers all Google news and any related
topics, such as cloud computing. Twig is occasionally critical of Google’s decisions but
generally finds few flaws in their overall strategy and behavior. This particular Episode featured
Chris DiBona, an employee of Google. Topics ranged from the Summer of Code project to the
reorganization of the upper levels of management.

Frommer, Dan. “Google Is Now Officially Evil.” Business Insider. Business Insider:

Silicone Alley Insider September 15, 2010, 5:10 PM. < http://

www.businessinsider.com/google-is-now-officially-evil-2010-9>
This article covered the actions of Google regarding a fight for location based service software on
Motorola phones featuring Google’s Android Operating System. The Author makes the claim
that Google is behaving in an evil manner.

Frommer, Dan. “Why Skyhook Is Suing Google: Google Basically Forced Motorola To

Ditch Skyhook To Pass Compliance Tests.” Business Insider. Business Insider:

Silicone Alley Insider September 15, 2010, 5:10 PM. < http://

www.businessinsider.com/why-skyhook-is-suing-google-google-basically-forced-motorola-to-
ditch-skyhook-to-pass-compliance-tests-2010-9>
This article is nearly identical to the previous. Written by the same individual and published on
the same day. This article used somewhat less inflammatory language and cited the actual
lawsuit.

“Google’s Code of Conduct.” Investor.Google.com. Google, n.d. Web. April 23, 2011.

<http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html>
This site is Google’s official Code of Conduct. It is part of a release to investors in the company
and seems to be the only place one can find Google’s famous “Don’t be Evil” motto. The page
outlines several rules for Google which maintain an admirably high moral standard.

“Our Philosophy” Google.com Google, n.d. Web. April 23, 2011. <

http://

www.google.com/corporate/>
This page states that Google’s corporate mission is “to organize the world‘s information and
make it universally accessible and useful.” It also gives a little background on the company and
their philosophy. It is difficult to find any disparity between their stated philosophy and their
actions.

Skyhook Wireless, inc. v. Google inc.. n.p. Commonwealth of Massachusetts Superior

Court, September 15, 2010. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/37511005/

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Skyhook-v-Google-Complaint>
This is a copy of the legal complaint against Google by Skyhook. The language in the document
indicates that Google’s actions were less “evil” and more of an attempt to defend their ability to
ensure that phones shipping with the Android Operating System will provide a relatively uniform
and positive customer experience.