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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Google Fails to Fulfill Own Standards, Spiegel Says

This is my translation of a German Spiegel article by Frank Patalong. It’s titled “Google turns evil”, and right now it’s at the top of Germany’s biggest mainstream news site:

“Yahoo a few months ago had it a bit easier [than Google], never-mind the strong criticism: the company argued that censorship and cooperation with the local authorities was a necessity in order to do business in China. If you don’t play along nicely, you’re kicked out.

Even though that’s wholly immoral, in a way it’s just honest and transparent. While Google is struggling to find good arguments, their competitors are simply admitting they’re plain greedy. (...)

Google wanted to be different and has so far been taken seriously with their higher ethical standards. Only that this contract [of self-censorship and more] doesn’t bode well with the same standards (...)

Even though the managers down in the Google headquarters are still trying to convince themselves they aren’t evil – by bowing to the Chinese government, they’ve lost a whole lot of the sympathy of people that they build up over the years in which they became the most important online brand.

The high standards that the Google guys are measured by today are the ones they put up themselves.”

[Thanks Gary.]

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