That's a good point - if it were purely contractors, they'd probably say something like "some of our contractors were over-zealous; they are being dealt with". It's hard to come up with a plausible reason they'd protect contractors so strongly, since Google's reputation wouldn't really be under fire to the same degree as if an employee had done so / been told to do so.

> I have confidence that Google employees were not involved with the fraud aspects of what occurred here

How come, when Google India was obviously involved, looking at the post that you link as well?

I just had a hard time coming to grips with the idea of a billionaire company committing outright fraud for ten dollar domain names.

The fraudsters may well have been Google employees and/or contractors. I think Willful at metafilter put it best [1]:

I worked at Google for a few years. My experience is that it's like any other huge multinational corporation in that there are regional teams that get more or less supervision. They're also somewhat hamstrung in that in certain regional hiring situations, they have to focus on getting someone who can speak the local language over getting someone of their normal standard of ethics and acceptable background.

As a result I saw people working in Google who did evil things, pure and simple, especially in the more obscure markets to reach their sales targets. When they were caught they were fired, when they didn't and succeeded as a result, they were promoted.

This type of thing will always happen. Thinking it won't is a bit childish. It's Google's official response and subsequent actions that defines their culture.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/111590/Do-Not-Much-Evil#4128023

Google deals in information. It handles information from internet content and internet users world-wide, yet it doesn't have enough internal information as to let a team go rampant like this for months.

Even if they outsourced it, I can't believe Google would just black-box the process and simply expect 'x' result from the outsource company, that's just an endorsement of shady activity.

So presumably, Kenyans have neither normal standards of ethics nor acceptable backgrounds? Like most other posters speaking in favour of Google, Willful displays an arrogance I can't quite understand. I'd be really curious about what you'd have to say if this was some American (or other "acceptable background") startup.

If you were feeling generous you could interpret it as saying that 'is competent & is ethical & speaks english' is necessarily a bigger hiring pool than 'is competent & is ethical & speaks english & speaks the local language'. The identity of 'local language' is irrelevant, trying to find bilingual candidates always narrows the hiring pool.

> So presumably, Kenyans have neither normal standards of ethics nor acceptable backgrounds?

I don't know if you are trying to paint him as a racist or if you really are ignorant of Kenya's crime rate