don’t be evil…ish

It appears Google may be rethinking its decision to kowtow to China’s demands that they censor their search results on www.google.cn. Sergey Brin described China’s censorship demands as “a set of rules that we weren’t comfortable with.” But they did it anyway. Brin said they knew they were compromising their principles, but thought they could “provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference.” Ahem, not to belabor the point, but also make a ton more money, don’t forget that one, yeah.

I hope they’re coming back into the light. Sergey’s statement seems promising, but isn’t really ringing with confidence:

“It’s perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, ‘Look, we’re going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.’ That’s an alternate path. It’s not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.”

Sergey, if you can sort of see, then kinda get a spine, and maybe drop the deal you made with the devil and get back to your stated core principles.