Google's hypocrisy

Generally speaking, individuals don't like to admit when they're wrong. It takes a certain level of integrity to admit to making a mistake or consciously committing a wrongdoing. Maybe I'm jaded, but it seems that often a natural human instinct is to make excuses and displace fault, rather than to retract a decision and apologize.

In this way, decision makers at search engine giant Google are no different than anybody else. After ousting the small news corporation Inter City Press from Google News for its criticism of the UN in 2008, Google used every weak excuse in the book in its attempt to distract from the reality — which was blatant censorship.

Google's initial reasoning: Inter City Press was a one-man operation, which violated Google News' rule that outlets it lists must have two or more employees. According to Inter City Press' founder, Matthew Lee, the site has at least one full-time employee other than himself, plus many other volunteeers — making Google's first claim dead in the water.

When Google began to see backlash (from the non-profit Government Accountability Project, among others) for de-listing Inter City press, it offered to retract its decision and reinstate the site... but a Google representative said that would involve a weeks' long process because of a technical error; thereby placing fault on a glitch, instead of an individual, and saying in not so many words, "It's out of our hands." Anything to avoid taking blame.

But what bothers me most about this entire ordeal is Google's hypocrisy. Before the company's controversial deal with Verizon in August, Google was an open advocate for net neutrality and very much a part of the Free the Internet movement. It sold out and left that ideology behind before the ink dried on the Verizon deal. (Though Google of course dismisses that claim as a "myth.")

Yet another example of Google's hypocrisy — the company maintains that it "generally [emphasis mine] does not sign petitions or join coalitions." However, in November 2007, it announced a partnership with the Ugandan People's Defense Force (part of a UN program) but did not sign a global human rights and anti-censorship compact as part of the UN's Millenium Development Goals.

Why the double standard? Why break the "general" rules to join one coalition and not another — especially when they both come from the UN? It seems to me that Google breaks the standards it sets for itself just as easily as it makes them, and uses them to its advantage whenever applicable.

Today, Inter City Press shows up as the first listing on a general Google search, but fails to appear on a Google News search. At least now Google seems to have chosen a side, and that side is not net neutrality.