Google's Identity Crisis: Don't Be Evil Is No Longer Enough

Democratic societies have generally taken action against corporate entities that appear to be getting too big. Especially when they deny their power. JL

Dieter Bohn reports in The Verge:

An organization as powerful as Google that isn’t willing to admit its size, influence, and power is bound to stumble into problems. If the first era of Google was developing the technology, and the second era was growing to a massive scale, the third era is contending with the effects of that scale. That reckoning isn’t happening because the founders formalized their already reduced roles by handing over the CEO title. It’s happening because both internally and externally, we don’t know how to deal with a company as big and powerful as Google.

The biggest tech news is that the former Google human rights chief says he was “sidelined” over the proposed, censored Chinese search engine known as “Dragonfly.” Ross LaJeunesse, the executive, knew how to ensure his story would make an impact. He spoke with The Verge’s Colin Lecher and many other media outlets, published a Medium post with frankly shocking details, and dominated tech news all day. Good. His story deserves attention.

An idea that I’ve been kicking around as we prepare for season two of the Land of the Giants podcast (about Google, naturally) is that until very recently, Google was a special kind of naive. It is a powerful, massive company that used to see itself as a utopian collective which just so happened to make oodles of cash.

If you get annoyed that Google has pivoted its way through launching and killing a dozen messaging apps, that open, freewheeling culture is why.

That kind of naiveté would be endearing if it wasn’t also so dangerous. An organization as powerful as Google that isn’t willing to admit its size, influence, and power is bound to stumble into problems. I think Dragonfly was one result of that disconnect.

Even if you could believe that Google could have made a moral case for Dragonfly (and I’m leaving that judgment for another time), the telling thing is that Google didn’t try — it was not openly discussed with employees like so many other Google products.

Here’s an important paragraph from Colin Lecher’s story on LaJeunesse:

As Google pushed for deals in authoritarian Saudi Arabia and launched the Google Center for Artificial Intelligence in Beijing, LaJeunesse says, he pushed for a company-wide human rights program that would bring new oversight to product launches. But Google rebuffed the idea, and eventually brought in a colleague to oversee policy issues related to Dragonfly.

Assuming LaJeunesse’s account is accurate, there are any number of motivations you could ascribe to these decisions. But I want to home in on just one: I think that dealing forthrightly with the Dragonfly decision in a more traditional, open, “Googley” way would have forced the entire company to contend with the uncomfortable truth that it is a massive, geopolitical entity. It would have popped the bubble of Google’s self-image.

Well, it popped anyway. Which means that Google is a company without a clear identity anymore. And the truth is that it was never as defined as it should have been in the first place. The old one — “Don’t be Evil” — didn’t scale, to borrow a classic Silicon Valley phrase.

The operative verb in “Don’t be Evil” is “to be.” You can’t live up to “Don’t be Evil” if you don’t know what you are in the first place.

I don’t think that the massive size of Google fully accounts for the things that LaJeunesse experienced, but I do think it’s an important factor. Almost exactly a month ago I published an essay I titled “Google’s Third Era,” pegged to the news that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also becoming Alphabet’s CEO as Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back. Here’s what I wrote then:

If the first era of Google was developing the technology, and the second era was growing to a massive scale, the third era is contending with the effects of that scale. That reckoning isn’t happening because the founders formalized their already reduced roles by handing over the CEO title. It’s happening because both internally and externally, we don’t know how to deal with a company as big and powerful as Google.

It’s troubling to think that as a society we don’t know how to deal with institutions as large and powerful as Google (or Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft). It’s even more troubling to think that nobody inside Google knows how to contend with Google’s size, either.

Google’s old mantra was about defining itself by saying what it it wouldn’t be. Now, Google has to figure out what it will be.