They bought doubleclick, which was already doing that. I don't think Google invented this, and if they hadn't existed, wouldn't it have continued to happen anyway?
While I understand what you mean, you should state at least one reason of why you think they are deeply evil people.
To me, it's the story of how they systematically convince small firms that they want to do business, only to screw them over. Like Google Earth and Terra Vision, for example.
Also, from the beginning, the proximity to the U.S. government was very noticeable, such as Keyhole or leasing military land.
Edit: To make it very clear, I think Google is evil and was evil all the time. It is at least one step further to a brave new world dystopia.
One can make a strong argument that actively seeking collaboration with an organization that runs a global network of extralegal and extrajudicial torture centers qualifies as evil.
AWS, for example, operates a special airgapped "region" at Langley for the CIA to store and process their data, which presumably includes operational information related to the global network of assassination and torture personnel they develop, own, and operate.
Many people give the military and military-adjacent a moral pass on things like mass murder (or mass murder adjacent things like extrajudicial assassination, kidnapping, or torture), but not all of us do. You may or may not personally disagree, but it is still a reasonable and cogent argument that seeking active collaboration with DoD qualifies for the title of "evil" on the grounds that it will more effectively enable mass murder, assassination, torture, and other deprivations of human rights.
Google also rebooted their censored search project, known as Dragonfly, to re-enter
the Chinese market, which included the specific feature that would display government-provided AQI indicators/values instead of the real ones. Eventually word got out and they stopped again.
This shows that they are willing and able to collaborate with any government, no matter how repugnant their stance on human rights, if it will result in increased revenue or market access for Google. That's evil, in my book.
> This shows that they are willing and able to collaborate with any government, no matter how repugnant their stance on human rights, if it will result in increased revenue or market access for Google. That's evil, in my book.
Google actually left China and didn't go back. That's rather different to other large tech companies. Consider Apple, which not only never left China but become totally dependent on it for manufacturing the phones they sell elsewhere, and direct revenue from iPhones and the App Store. For example Apple is regularly giving user data to the Chinese authorities -- they get thousands of requests per year and handing over the data in the vast majority of cases [0]. Google has accepted one request in a decade [1].
So it's pretty odd to use China as an example of why they're evil. How can their leaving and aborting a later attempt to re-enter be worse than Tim Cook being held over the barrel by the CCP and doing little to get out?
At present, China is the only place on all of Earth that can manufacture 50,000 iPhones per hour, which is on the close order of how many they sell. There's literally no other way for Apple to come up with the 250 million units a year that they sell.
In a certain sense, the iPhone is a wholly Chinese product. Without China, there is no iPhone, and there is no Apple-as-we-know-it-in-2023.
I am of the belief that Apple is doing everything in their power to change that, as even a cold war with China would put a rapid end to that.
Apple is investing huge amounts of money in India to create a parallel supply chain for iPhones. I imagine that people in the USG are acutely aware that the CCP has, at present, ultimate control over the revenue stream of one of their largest and most profitable companies, and have coordinated a response plan to address this (ultimately untenable) state of affairs.
Yes, I agree. That makes Apple completely beholden to the CCP. If they anger the CCP, their whole business is gone.
But I fail to see how that makes any of this more acceptable. They had 15 years to diversify. They didn't, but chose to instead spent that time just becoming more involved with a brutal autocracy, gambling their whole company on it.
It was stupid (one of the rare strategic missteps by Apple), it was amoral, and somehow still this is seen as being totally fine while Google toying around with launching a single product in China but not doing it was quoted as evidence of them being evil in this very thread. And I kind of feel like your reply reinforces that point.
For me it's the extreme surveillance they have introduced. Every website activity you do hits google. Smartphones log everything to google. Look on google maps, you can see exactly where you were every day in the last 10 years. This whole infrastructure should just not exist.
Yes I know you can opt out of some of it but they make it as hard as they can and many things like google analytics just can't be opted out of.
But I edited the deeply evil part as I also thought it was too harsh :) It was only there for a minute so I'm surprised you saw it. I do really believe they made the world a much worse place though. And yes if they hadn't someone else would have (like Zuckerberg). But that doesn't forgive it.
Just judge them by their own supposed goals, organising information. They fail. And they fail not for inability, but for greed. You can quibble about what types of non-good behaviour constitutes evil, but first accept that "evil" was cute language.
They are a distorting middleman and their scale means the cultural damage is incalculable. They create a near monopoly search that offers no user control over it's behaviour and it functions to vanish small independent creators under commercial interests and adverts. Just look at one property - youtube - the inability to find title matched videos by search, the shovelling of shorts, the pruning of valuable user features etc. None of these have been about increasing user experience, user power or the access of information, it's about increasing Google's Smaug like horde of gold.
I see it as a guilty conscience in anticipation of the inevitable.
Even the naive do not take long to realise that capitalism will fill the immoral corners of an opportunity like water. If you wanted a real commitment, you don't talk to yourself about sobriety as you walk into a bar, you have to tie yourself to the mast Odysseus-like. It needed a different form of governance, a non-profit that could have created sustainable non-evil. An IPO sells your soul not just your company.
Their BS motto "Don't be evil", it makes me sick thinking of it now. They really made the world a much worse place.