Larry and Sergei's Exit from Google: How did they get from 'Don't Be Evil' to 'Get Rich or Die Trying'?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have left the building.

The two founders who built the information empire Alphabet Inc. have left Google. As they noted in their farewell post, Sundar Pichai will now become CEO of both Google and Alphabet Inc. They also pocketed a couple billion or so for their troubles.

I write this post with mixed feelings.

As someone who started at university the year the Internet became commercialized, I witnessed the rise of Google from a number of many search-engine to the only one that you use. And I've written previously about this experience.

But reality is reality: Google doesn't look like the company it used to be.

They began with their motto: "Don't be evil". As noted here the idea, per Paul Buchheit (Googler #23). was not to be evil like "those other companies":

"It just sort of occurred to me that “Don’t be evil” is kind of funny. It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."

And now it's arguable that Google has become one of "those other companies".

In fact, they officially abandoned the "Don't be evil" motto to the less aspirational "do the right thing."

Sure, we could hypothesize that the legal, risk and other compliance experts advised Google to abandon this slogan due to risk aversion. But the problem with that theory is that Google has been raking up the fines, not in the millions but in the billions.  According to The Verge, "Google’s total EU antitrust bill now stands at €8.2 billion ($9.3 billion)". Not sure how that fits in with "doing the right thing". Perhaps it has more to do with "get rich or die trying".  It's no wonder politicians think they can get votes by promising to break up Google and the other tech giants. 

But the fines are just the tip of the iceberg. Google was one of Obama's top campaign contributors in the 2012 election. As noted in this article by the Intercept, the coziness between Google and the Whitehouse went beyond just the election. They visited the Whitehouse 128 times over Obama's tenure. More troubling:

"Most notably, Google has faced questions for years about exercising its market power to squash rivals, infringing on its users’ privacy rights, favoring its own business affiliates in search results, and using patent law to create barriers to competition. Even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch have called out Google for its practices.

In 2012, staff at the Federal Trade Commission recommended filing antitrust charges after determining that Google was engaging in anti-competitive tactics and abusing its monopoly. A staff report that was later leaked said Google’s conduct “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google’s White House visits increased right around that time. And in 2013, the presidentially appointed commissioners of the FTC overrode their staff, voting unanimously not to file any charges.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the administration “has been a huge help” to Google both by protecting it from attempts to limit its market power and by blocking privacy legislation. “Google has been able to thwart regulatory scrutiny in terms of anti-competitive practices, and has played a key role in ensuring that the United States doesn’t protect at all the privacy of its citizens and its consumers,” Chester said."

So now they are using their capital to subvert laws and investigations to maintain their dominance.

What happened? Why did Google take a taxi ride to the dark side? 

Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor, has a theory.

In The Master Switch, he calls this type of thing the Kronos Effect. The idea is that yesterday's scrappy start-up - who defeated the evil ogre's of their day - only to becomes today's evil ogre. For example, he explains how Adolph Zukor and the other avant-garde filmmakers of his day fought the tyrannical Motion Picture Patents Company, which required you to pay royalties for just using a camera. Who did they end up becoming? The major studios of today - who sue people for copyright infringement of their content. Similarly, we can see Google, who was able to defeat Yahoo, Microsoft and others, has become arguably the Microsoft of our times.

But I think Douglas Rushkoff, ironically in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, has a better theory. 

When start-ups that emerge from the "operating system of Capitalism" the end-up being defined by that system's code or DNA: growth, profits, market share and shareholder value - these are the only things matter. Capitalism doesn't pay attention to humanitarian values, moral values or spiritual values because, well, they don't add to the GDP. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters in a Capitalist society. 

I would never push anyone to adopt the motto "get rich or die trying". 

But as we can see, Google or otherwise, companies end up with this as their mantra when they want to get to the top. 

Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else.

Blogging for bitcoins? A look at the crypto-change alternative to paywalls

Another interesting talk at the American Banker conference discussed how cryptocurrency more broadly could address the issue of advertising, ad blockers and paywalls.

One of the presenters, Victoria Van Eyk, wrote a post on medium that essentially summarizes the issues as follows:

• Advertisers loses one to many medium to the Internet: Although not explicitly mentioned in her post, our journey begins with the Internet displacing the incumbents - TV, print and radio - as the advertisers destination of choice. It was the Internet that enabled the "attention merchants" (as Tim Wu puts in his latest book) to better target us in terms of ads.
• Targeted Ads, Privacy and the Invasion of our minds: The post does a good job in terms of summarizing the creep factor of the ads - in terms of how technology has been developed to actually follow you around on the web to get you buy something based on your habits. The other aspect is the whole idea of advertising itself or as Tim Wu puts the "sale of attention". In his talk at Google, which summarizes the history of how both public and private enterprises used the media and "sticky eyeballs" to attract attention; see this video below for a quick snippit of the type of things he discusses.

• Ad Blockers - the remote control of the Internet: Of course technology is a double-edged sword. So like the remote control that enabled people to skip commercials (which Tim Wu explains was invented by the eccentric owner of Zenith, Eugene F. McDonald, as an electronic device that would literally zap the commercial), ad-blockers came to be our best friend in terms of protecting us from these unwanted ads.
• Media companies strike back: Just when you think the consumer rebellion would succeed against the corporate empires, they strike back. Companies make you turn off the ad blocker to use their website. As the hold access to the material, they ultimately have the power to withhold the content unless we comply with their demands. 
• Enter crypto-currency based micro-payments: The solution to this tug-of-war? Micropayments. When I heard the panelist discuss this, I thought this made a lot of sense. Being someone who has given into paywalls, I would most likely have a media budget set aside that would allow me to pay for articles - 10 cents here or 25 cents there - to consume content. This is much better than being on the hook for hundreds of dollars a month for subscriptions you may or may not use. In Victoria's post, she mentions a number of services that are working on this model, including Brave (which uses cryptocurrency) as well as Patreon (see video below). 

As I mentioned in my last post, the bitcoin represents the world of open and this is one of the use cases that illustrates its potential. With bitcoins micro-payments can be potentially cheaper, friction-less way of making these types of payments that were prohibitive in the credit card centric world that we currently inhabit. For example, Brave notes that they charge 5% in their FAQ. However, without bitcoin they would have to charge a 2.5% credit card fee on top of that for their business to be viable.

Although it would be nice for us to see this hit a critical mass, I think one of the challenges beyond the cost is the underlying psychology that prevents people from paying out: I think many would rather sell access to their mind to the attention merchants instead of paying out digital cash.