Feeling Evil?

Is Google evil? That was the question last night, as the debate group Intelligence Squared gathered six Google watchers at Manhattan's Rockefeller University and let 'em have at it. Specifically, the proposition on the floor was, "Google violates its 'Don't Be Evil' motto." Representing the affirmative: Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis, University of Chicago law professor Randal Picker, and University of Virginia media prof Siva Vaidhyanathan. Ridiculously successful Internet investor (and imminent cosmonaut!) Esther Dyson, Cato Institute director of information policy studies Jim Harper, and Buzzmachine.com blogger Jeff Jarvis stood up for Google.

As is usual at IQ2 events, the crowd was polled before the debate, and just 21 percent agreed with the proposition. Thirty-one percent thought Google more or less lived up its motto, and the remainder had no clue whatsoever. OK, advantage Google. Then the shoutin' started.

Picker got things started with an assault on Google's monopoly power in the search-ad market, pointing to the Yahoo deal as evidence of the company's grasping ambition for more market share and claiming that Google deploys a number of procedures to keep its ad rates artificially high. Harry Lewis focused on Google's collaboration with the Chinese government, which would prove to be the most troubling topic of the night; he even went so far as to call Google "an instrument of thought control." And Vaidhyanathan claimed that the company violates every one of the seven deadly sins, from gluttony (free food at the Googleplex) to pride and hubris. Specifically, Google is infecting us all with a certain technofundamentalism—the notion that we will eventually invent a new machine to solve the problem the last new machine created.

Jim Harper took up Google's defense by raising the bar a bit; the question, he claimed, was not whether Google occasionally did something immoral, but whether the company's overall impact on human society was a force for good or evil. And when it comes to organizing and making accessible the world's information, Google's occasional missteps are clearly outweighed by its remarkable accomplishments. Even on China, the ugliest blot on the company's résumé, Google is far and away a more relaxed censor than its local competitors.

Esther Dyson echoed Harper's thoughts on China, arguing that Google was the most significant example of constructive engagement that country had so far encountered. Google, she claimed, naturally undermined power by decentralizing information and putting it in the hands of ordinary people; it created expectations of transparency that would inevitably lead to greater democracy and accountability inside China. Finally, Jeff Jarvis countered Vaidhyanathan's list of sins with a roster of Google's virtues, from organizing information and connecting people to treating its employees well and dabbling with solving the energy crisis.

The opposition acquitted themselves well, and while their infantilization of the Chinese people got a little annoying (Are the Chinese really just waiting for a prophet to inform them they're living under an authoritarian regime?) we thought they would carry the day. But when it came time to poll the audience again, the results were startling. Suddenly, the crowd was now evenly split on the question, with exactly 47 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed. If Google's great promise is delivering more information to more people, this didn't exactly help the company last night. The more panelists debated the company's role in China, the more people remembered that, yes, Google is collaborating with a despotic government.