The Google Guys Read Free Page B

aspirations.
    In the case of “Don’t be evil” Google, it’s the bloggers who have set out to prove, in any esoteric way they can, that Google is becoming evil as it gets bigger. Most of the arguments are along the line that money and power corrupt, so Google is corrupt. As Google collects more information about individuals, it becomes Big Brother. These concerns may be real. But the arguments are overwhelmingly “what if?” scenarios, rather than actual examples of evil.
    The latest culprit is the Web browser that Google launched in 2008, after saying for years that it was not interested in that market. But Larry and Sergey changed their minds, and people see this as a duplicitous change.
    Clint Boulton, who writes the “Google Watch” blog for eWeek, asserts that the simple fact that Google is entering Microsoft’s territory makes it evil by default. “It’s hard to be the overwhelming leader in search and not be considered a monopolist, which in business is code for ‘evil,’ ” he writes. And, he adds, “It’s impossible to be that powerhouse, then launch a Web browser to serve as the gateway to your Web services and not be considered blackly evil.” 3 Boulton argues in a later blog that as a company becomes big, it needs more revenues to feed its machine and, as everybody knows, “more money equals corruption.” 4
    The situation was exacerbated when the online site Valleywag actually read the onerous nondisclosure agreement that came with Chrome, Google’s new browser. It stated that any content that people “submit, post or display” when using Chrome automatically gives Google “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute” the information. 5
    It turned out that this was one of Google’s standard nondisclosure agreements, which slipped past without Google’s management noticing. Google quickly retracted it, replacing the agreement with the explanation “In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product.” 6
    But Google uses a very similar agreement when guest lecturers give talks at the company, a regular occurrence. San Francisco psychiatrist Thomas Lewis felt he was giving away the rights to his research in order to give an invited talk. When he complained, he was told to list beforehand everything he was going to talk about that he had the rights to, and it would be excluded. His lawyer told him to make the list huge, and wouldn’t mind if he came as close as possible to including everything in the world. He did so and gave his speech.
    Or try Matt Asay, who writes The Open Road blog for CNET. Google has a group of applications that people can download for free, called the Google Pack. These programs are a mix of software from Google and third parties. Before Chrome, Google included the open-source Firefox browser as the default browser in the pack. After Chrome, it still offers Firefox as a choice, but now Chrome is the default choice. That move, Asay says, “has Google looking more like the old Microsoft monopoly it replaces.” 7
    But, of course, it’s Google’s entry into China that gets the main criticism. In order to enter that market, by law it has to agree to censor the results of its own search engine. One alternative is to stay out of China completely, as a protest against censorship, which many Google critics insist would be the right thing to do. The other is to run a Chinese-language search engine offshore without censoring it, which would mean that access to the site would be cut off