Doing Evil.

For profit companies exist for one reason only. To make as much money as quickly as possible for the owners. That means making products as cheaply as possible and paying employees as little as possible. Nothing wrong with that. It’s called capitalism. It has nothing to do with morality. A company has none. It is, by definition, amoral.

So when a company grandly rolls out a corporate mantra that enshrines the very basics of morality, I tend to smell a giant rat. Google’s mantra is “Do No Evil” which suggests we should watch them the way a hawk watches a field mouse.

Let’s look at some of the behaviors of the Do No Evil company which are all over the press recently.

The China debacle: Having done Evil for years in China by tacitly permitting the dictators to censor web searches, suddenly Google co-founder Sergey Brin wakes up one day, recalls his poor Russian upbringing and decides Chinese censorship is wrong. “That’s what they did to us in the mother country”, he cries in anguish. Now this epiphany just happens to coincide with competitor Baidu’s market share peaking at 70% with Google’s dipping below 20%. Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

The Net Neutrality scam: Net neutrality is an awful idea. Simply stated, the concept dictates that everyone should have equal access at the same price to broadband. This naturally leads to crooks and abusers being subsidized by honest users. Take a look at some of the peer-to-peer networks out there, like Pirate Bay. (Mercifully a Swedish court has fined and sentenced the owners to gaol) Their sole reason for existence is to facilitate the theft of intellectual property – software, movies and so on. The thief dials up the network and merrily downloads the latest movie and, in doing so, makes massive demands on the cable or telco provider of broadband. Yet he considers it his divine rightf to pay the same as you and I do for that access. Google, unsurprisingly, is a strong proponent of net neutrality. It guarantees more hits on their search engine and more advertising revenues. Plus they get to deliver trashy YouTube content at no premium cost to the user. (Google owns YouTube – arguably one of the dumbest acquisitions of the decade). Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

The HTC scandal: Google’s CEO, one Eric Schmidt, who may be the luckiest person alive having accidentally walked into a $3bn fortune when he joined Google, was recently fired form the Apple board. All his acquisitions of truly garbage businesses like YouTube (pretty much impossible to monetize) have added nothing to the bottom line of a company which derives all its revenues from click-through advertising. No one said ‘fired’ because companies never fire board members. They always leave because of time pressures or to pursue other interests. But right after Schmidt left the Apple board, Apple brought a suit against one of Google’s primary cell phone hardware providers, HTC, for theft of a variety of patents, not least the ones relating to touchscreen use. Schmidt will have known more than most and earlier than most what Apple was up to with the iPhone when it was still an idea in Jobs’s skull and, wonder of wonders, who comes out with the first Android-capable touchscreen? Why HTC of course. (Android is Google’s mobile OS). Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

Making information available: Every photographer and writer should be up in arms about this one. Such is Google’s public posturing as a democratizer of information availability that it’s common to find your work available for anyone to steal. Just do a search using Google->Images and there are your pictures. No permission, no copyright, no payment for their use. Available for one and all to take as they please. Well, now they are at it with books as well, as the following from Reuters attests:

The courts can decide that one but it smells to high heaven. It’s a bit like eBay fronting for the sale of counterfeit goods and claiming innocence. “We are just providing a service and cannot be responsible” they say. Uh huh. How else is the thief to ‘fence’ his goods to a global audience then?

China lies? One of Google’s attempts at extricating itself from the decision to quit China was that its servers had been penetrated and code stolen. Wait a minute here. Your code was stolen? What about all the books, images and movies your servers store, Google? You are facilitating freedom but the Chinese stole from you? It doesn’t solve.

So Google, have you Done Any Good recently?

Update May 17, 2010: Google continues to do good.