The Google Guys by Richard L. Brandt

Author:Richard L. Brandt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-05-22T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The China Syndrome Google as Big Brother

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

—Aristotle

In February 2006, Larry Brilliant went to Google headquarters to talk to Larry and Sergey about a job, heading the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org. Dr. Brilliant spent a good part of the day in a room with Larry and Sergey, and talked very little about Google.org.

“We just talked about life and where they want to go,” says Dr. Brilliant. “And they were amazing. I had never met anyone like them before. I hadn’t worked for anybody in about forty years and was not interested in the idea of working for a big company. But with Larry and Sergey I changed my mind.”

What impressed him about Larry and Sergey was their over-the-top idealism and extreme desire to do important things for the world. When he arrived at Google to talk with them for the first time, the pair had just decided to set up operations in China, which meant conforming to China’s strict censorship rules. Thus Google had become a censor, and it grated on Larry and Sergey’s conscience. It became the topic of their conversation.

“We talked about whether Google should be in China or not,” Brilliant says. “Every question came back to, what’s the morally right thing to do?”

The topic was a sensitive one for Google. “I don’t think there’s any big company in the U.S. that isn’t constantly looking at its relationship with China,” says Brilliant. “It’s a huge business partner, and it’s an unusual business partner. It has a series of pressures that we’re not used to. We don’t understand them very well. But whatever the issue was, with Larry and Sergey, it would come down to, what’s the morally right thing to do?”

That’s one thing that has never changed about Larry and Sergey. “To this day,” says Brilliant, “we’ve been through a lot of crazy things, and never once has there been an issue where they failed to make the correct moral decision. They think about the moral issue first. Everything else is secondary—including whether Google will do well by it, or if it’s good for business. I had never seen a big company in which the two people who controlled it had such an amazingly strong moral base. It feels strange to say that to somebody writing a book, because it sounds like puffery, but it’s absolutely true. It’s why I came to Google.”

Yes, it sounds like spin, and the public is right to be wary of such claims. We’re used to such spin control from big corporations such as oil companies spouting about the great things they do for the environment without ever spilling a drop of oil. But everyone who has had close contact with Google or its founders comes away asserting it’s true. One former executive, with no reason to promote the company anymore, asserts, “Everyone in the company really does believe in it.”

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