Current mood:

hopeful

Google, Nation States and Positivism
So Google is fighting a US govt effort to mine its data, yet has acquiesced to China's web search censorship demands. Google has also stated its intention to "do no evil." Combine this with Google's mission to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and what emerges is pro-social, broadly positive sum behavior, me thinks.

Now, one might ask, "Isn't censorship of content wrong?" Sure, but imagine what google means to the broad Chinese population: it's their best chance to evolve their socio-economic system to the point where this type of censorship finally doesn't exist. On might also ask, "Isn't it wrong to withold info from the US government that may implicate people into child pornography?" Of course, but at the cost of undermining Google's goal to organize the world's information, because much of that information is generated by the interaction of TRUSTING users with the Google system. In other words, it would diminish Google's collective intelligence goals/philosophy. This company does not want to be associated with US gov surveillance for good reason. (Of course, it could all just be PR and the gov may have another means of accessing Google's info anyway.)

What does this all mean to me? The facts support the notion that Google wants to 1) support the world, not just the US, 2) is savvy enough to make the right moves in the right systems, and 3) is looking to MAINTAIN THE TRUST OF HUMAN USERS. This appears to be a company thinking very systematically about the broader good and MAX SUM BEHAVIOR.