Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Actually, the stated libertarian principle of "least government" more closely matches the ideology of anarchists in that a non-existant government would in fact be the government which governs least of all. But as you point out, they are not anarchists so I'm sure they don't mean exactly what they seem to be saying here.

What they do seem to stand for, however, is "don't tax me" and "I demand every personal freedom imagineable." Frankly, I find their position, as I understand it, to be so naìve as to be laughable. The idea that market forces alone can be relied upon to serve the public interest, or that private charities can be counted upon to aleviate poverty is ludicrious. Most incredible of all is the idea that people everywhere have access to all information and furthermore always act rationally upon it. You see this kind of thing when they are asked about safety regulations on childrens toys and things. "There's no need to regulate. People will just stop buying the dangerous products, therefore it is in the best financial interest for manufacturers to make safe toys!" Brilliant and compelling. In exactly the same way that a mathematical equation is. One problem. It doesn't reflect reality.

Google does appear to have a meaningless phrase on their hands. For the record, I think it might be less evil (and probably easier) to let the chips fall where they may, linkbombers and all.

So easily we slide down the slippery slope of fascism. Meet Colin Powell Jr. (Head of the FCC). Actually, I have to agree with Howard Stern here--allow everything and let people think for themselves. Sorry.

We had a relevant experience at my place of work, Oceana, that underlines your point on how "Don't be evil" doesn't really scale very well to deal with the complexities of the real world.

In February, we tried to buy 2 AdWords from Google: one directing people interested in general ocean subjects to our Web site, and the other directing people interested in buying cruise vacations to our site that describes how Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines is dumping inadequately treated sewage into the oceans because they won't outfit their fleet with treatment equipment that could clean their sewage much more effectively before their ships discharge it.

Within two days of our buying the ads, Google pulled them both -- on the grounds that they conflicted with the "Don't be evil" principle, since they were "critical" of another organization. (Never mind that only one of the two ads fits this description, or that their published terms of service for AdWords doesn't list such a restriction.)

They claimed that permitting our ads would have been "evil" because it would have forced them to take ads from hate groups as well. We countered by arguing that their policy of "only promotional speech allowed" could end up abetting "evil" more than preventing it -- after all, they weren't forcing silence onto both parties in the dispute, just one. Cruise companies can still advertise with no restrictions, because advertising low cruise fares is "positive". But advertising a site that tells people how those fares are kept low -- and at what cost -- is "negative" and therefore "evil"; which shows how limited the utility of "Don't be evil" is as a management principle.

(BusinessWeek did a good piece on our ads and came away calling for more transparency at Google.)

In the end, our ads were accepted by Yahoo!/Overture -- but even after more than 12,000 people sent e-mails to Google in protest, we're still banned from advertising on Google, even for advertising our general Web site. It's disappointing to be lumped into their definition of "evil", but I suppose that when you live by such a broad rule it's inevitable that such things are going to happen to somebody...

This is good site!!!