Is Google Evil?

This question is asked in the London Review of Books by John Lanchester in his review of David Vise's The Google Story. DP's own Bruce Kesler and Trevor Bothwell have engaged in a long-term debate about whether Google's censorship at the behest of the Chinese government should be tolerated by lawmakers. But what of Google's other plans and practices?

Lanchester is most concerned about Google's implications on privacy:

More generally, the biggest single area of worry about Google involves privacy. This has been a long-running subject of concern on the net, but thanks to an op-ed piece in the New York Times in November it has begun to attract some wider attention. The paper pointed out that the prosecution in a recent North Carolina strangulation case drew into evidence the fact that the defendant had made Google searches on the words ‘neck’ and ‘snap’. This brought to wider notice the fact that Google logs all the searches made on it, and stores this information indefinitely; and Google installs a cookie on the computer of everyone who uses it, which helps log that user’s searches, and which isn’t due to expire until 2038. Because every computer has a unique IP address, every visit to every website can be traced back to the computer making it – a fact well known in geek circles but remarkably under-publicised outside them.

But other practices by the company are also disconcerting, like its lack of respect for fundamental protections of intellectual property, while being ferociously protective of its own copyrights and trademarks:

But to publishers, there is something outrageously hypocritical about the contrast between Google’s ferocious protection of its own intellectual property rights and its contempt for everyone else’s. What’s to stop Google giving free online access to the books once they are scanned? It’s probably against the law, sure, but a sufficiently ruthless company which perceived a sufficiently strong demand could find ways around that. Once the texts were scanned and stored, the only thing preventing every writer’s work from being given away free would be a few pieces of computer code on Google’s servers. At the moment Google say they have no intention of providing access to this content; but why should anybody believe them?

Read the whole review, it's not all negative, in fact Lanchester believes Google is on to something much larger than being merely a website:

These are the earliest days in a process of what may turn out to be radical change. The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google, and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the first suburbs.