Chapter 2

Closing Case: Google’s Mission, Ethical Principels, and Involvement in China

Google, the fast growing Internet search engine company, was established with a clear mission in mind: to organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable and useful. This mission has driven Google to create a search engine that on the basis of key words entered by the user will scan the web for text, images, videos, news articles, books, and academic journals, among other things. Google has built a highly profitable advertising business on the back of its search engine, which is by far the most widely used in the world. Under the pay-per-click business model, advertisers pay Google every time a user of its search engine clicks on one of the paid links typically listed on the right hand side of Google’s results page.

Google has long operated with the mantra “don’t be evil”! When this phrase was originally formulated, the central message was that Google should never compromise the integrity of its search results. For example, Google decided not to let commercial considerations bias its ranking. This is why paid links are not included in its main search results, but listed on the right hand side of the results page. The mantra “don’t be evil”, however, has become more than that at Google; it has become a central organizing principle of the company and an ethical touchstone by which managers judge all of its strategic decisions.

Google’s mission and mantra raised hopes among human rights activities that the search engine would be an unstoppable tool for circumventing government censorship, democratizing information, and allowing people in heavily censored societies to gain access to information that their governments were trying to suppress, including the largest country on earth, China.

Google began a Chinese language service in 2000, although the