MemeMachineGo!

Google code of conduct:

Our informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” We Googlers generally relate those words to the way we serve our users – as well we should. But being “a different kind of company” means more than the products we make and the business we’re building; it means making sure that our core values inform our conduct in all aspects of our lives as Google employees. […]

The core message is simple: Being Googlers means striving toward the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct. This is a matter as much practical as ethical; we hire great people who work hard to build great products, but our most important asset by far is our reputation as a company that warrants our users’ faith and trust. That trust is the foundation upon which our success and prosperity rests, and it must be re-earned every day, in every way, by every one of us.

So please do read this code, and then read it again, and remember that as our company evolves, The Google Code of Conduct will evolve as well. [emphasis added — Zed] Our core principles won’t change, but the specifics might, so a year from now, please read it a third time. And always bear in mind that each of us has a personal responsibility to do everything we can to incorporate these principles into our work, and our lives.

Evolution.

Google has offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine for years but users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site. The company is setting up a new site - Google.cn - which it will censor itself to satisfy the authorities in Beijing. […] Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.

I used to have a lot of faith in Google. Then they went public.

Dodge v. Ford set the precedent that the directors of a corporation are legally obligated to maximize shareholder profits.

The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto

This means any number of dodgy practices.

Simply, a corporation can’t choose to not be evil. It is fundamentally, by definition and law, amoral. Humans invented the legal and social structures in which this is so, and then made them our master, abdicating all responsibility. Couldn’t be helped. That’s just business. We’re obligated to maximize profits, within the law. We’re obligated to play an active role in ensuring the law suits our purposes. If it means access to a market worth billions, we’re obligated to aid and abet a totalitarian government in propagating their revisions of history.

In any long term, amoral means immoral. And the greater the scope and power of the amoral entity, the shorter we can expect that term to be.

Rep. Tom Lantos:

It has also been argued Internet companies are entitled to apply the same rules of engagement in China that they apply elsewhere. In Germany, for example, where denying the Holocaust is against the law, access to Neo-Nazi Web pages is impossible via Google. The company notifies its users that not all Web pages may be available. And in its new China services, Google issues a similar warning.

But as the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.

China’s appalling human rights record never was a secret. U.S. Internet companies simply cannot claim they had no idea of what doing business there could entail. The Internet has always been a vital tool for human rights and democracy advocates in China, and a vital link with the outside world of its oppressed people.

Our Internet companies should have known, because for years their most loyal customers in China have gone to extraordinary technical lengths to bypass government’s controls of the Internet.

If these companies had stood up to Beijing from the beginning, demanding that they retain physical control of their own servers by having them located outside of China, the picture would be very different today.

John Batelle:

After all, what’s the big deal? Just like a sneaker company, Yahoo, Google, et al all have to play by Chinese rules in order to do business in China. If Nike can do it, why not Google?

Well, let’s break that one down. What happens when Nike gets itself into a PR pickle over, say, child labor or issues of environmental degradation or fair wages? Why, Nike simply pledges to do better, to spend a bit more to nominally clean up the environment, or to pay its workers a living wage, or to not hire children. Such practices cost Nike a bit more money, but don’t raise any eyebrows in Beijing. Nothing wrong with a US company spending more in China, after all.

But companies like Yahoo and Google don’t traffic in sneakers, they traffic in the most powerful forces in human culture - expression. Knowledge. Ideas. The freedom of which we take as fundamental in this country, yet somehow, we seem to have forgotten its importance in the digital age - in China, one protesting email can land you in jail for 8 years, folks.

Orwell:

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

In today’s world, search engines are an instrument of control. And Google has laced up their boots.