Friday, February 02, 2007

When the Google founders talk about the decision being bad for Google, it’s purely on a business level. They could care less about ethics, about doing what’s right, about living up to their “Don’t be evil” slogan, and about principles. As long as things are good for business, they’ll go ahead with it no matter what. And this was ofcourse their motivation to help censor information at the very beginning as I wrote. But when they don’t get what they want from the Chinese government, then suddenly the “principled approach makes more sense.”

So remember, it is very important to know why Google regrets censoring information in China. Not because they came to see that it was against their “Don’t be evil” slogan and that it was a bad thing to do, but because they didn’t get the business results from it that they hoped to get.

And when you know this, it is also easy to understand why there has since been no reversal of that decision. Since this is purely about business, a reversal would mean losing even more business, so that’s not an option. If this was about doing what’s right, about living up to their false “goody two shoes” image, they would have reversed their decision a year ago already.

Labels: Google, Internet