Don't Be Evil

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"Don't Be Evil" is the informal corporate motto (or slogan) for Google, established by Sergey Brin, who claimed it was a powerful and benevolent principle for Google and other organizations — corporations in particular.

"Don't Be Evil" is said to recognize that large corporations can often maximize short-term profits with actions that destroy long-term brand image and competitive position. By instilling a Don't Be Evil culture, the corporation establishes a baseline for decision making that can enhance the trust and image of the corporation that outweighs short-term gains from violating the Don't Be Evil principles.

While many companies have ethical codes to govern their conduct, Google has tried to make "Don't Be Evil" a central pillar of their identity.

1 Origin of the motto
2 Avoiding conflicts of interest
3 Singular focus on users
4 Controversy
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] Origin of the motto

According to John Battelle's book on Google, The Search, the phrase "Don't Be Evil" was not coined by Brin or Larry Page, but rather by Paul Buchheit, the engineer behind Gmail:

On July 19, 2001, about a dozen early employees met to mull over the founders' directive [to elucidate Google's core values] ... The meeting soon became cluttered with the kind of easy and safe corporate clichés that everyone can support, but that carry little impact: Treat Everyone with Respect, for example, or Be on Time for Meetings.

The engineers in the room were rolling their eyes. [Amit] Patel recalls: "Some of us were very anticorporate, and we didn't like the idea of all these specific rules. And engineers in general like efficiency — there had to be a way to say all these things in one statement, as opposed to being so specific."

That's when Paul Buchheit, another engineer in the group, blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google's corporate history. "Paul said, 'All of these things can be covered by just saying, Don't Be Evil,'" Patel recalls. "And it just kind of stuck."

... In the months after the meeting, Patel scribbled "Don't Be Evil" in the corner of every whiteboard in the company... The message spread, and it was embraced, especially by Page and Brin... "I think it's much better than Be Good or something," Page jokes. "When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that's good."

[edit] Avoiding conflicts of interest

In their 2004 founders' letter prior to their initial public offering, Lawrence E. Page and Sergey Brin explained that their Don't Be Evil culture prohibited conflicts of interest, and required objectivity and an absence of bias:

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.

Because Google holds great power over the information the public relies on, the company recognizes a fiduciary duty to uphold the public trust by refusing payments that would influence the information they provide to users. The company holds themselves to journalistic standards and ethics even when they could earn more money in the short term by violating those standards.

[edit] Singular focus on users

In addition to refusing payments that would distort the information provided to users, Google also refuses to employ techniques that would take advantage of users' trust. According to their published corporate philosophy, the company believes that by focusing on the user, all else will follow:

While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site....By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another.

[edit] Controversy

Some products and actions by Google are seen by some to be in contradiction to their Don't Be Evil ethic. These include allowing advertisers to make nominative use of competitors' trademarked keywords in AdWords advertisements, lack of diligence to prevent click fraud,^{[citation needed]} copyright issues related to their Google Print Library Project, the inclusion of ethically-questionable content in Google Groups (computer intrusion instructions and password trading, for example), and the exclusion of some content from local search results in Germany and China that is restricted by local governments. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both have strongly condemned Google's China policy^[1], calling it a form of self-censorship. According to Amnesty,

[T]hese forms of censorship seem to contradict the very principles that Google - whose unofficial motto is “don’t be evil” - was founded upon. Until January 2006, Google’s Support Centre claimed that it “does not censor results for any search term”, but removed this claim after reaching its deal with China.^[2]

Google's portal in China may be accessed at google.cn.

In May 2006, New York politician Jeffrey Toback sued Google Inc. for being "the largest and most efficient facilitator and distributor of child pornography in the world." The complaint said "This case is about a multi-billion dollar company that promotes and profits from child pornography."^[3] The lawsuit was eventually dropped in June 2006.

Blogger, its blogging service, has been criticized for being used as a platform by neo-Nazi individuals and groups. In Australia, one of the blogs it hosts was cited as promoting racial hatred.^[4]

Google also falls victim to general criticism of companies that promote their corporate social responsibility, since many economists and business leaders believe that a corporation's first duty is to maximize shareholder value. This point of view holds that corporate social responsibility is either cynical and empty self-promotion (if the company's social responsibility claims are false), or detrimental to shareholder value (if the claims are true). Google, however, claims a third position, that a Don't Be Evil culture is a prerequisite to building shareholder value in the long term for a company that requires public trust to achieve its mission.