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SAN JOSE, Calif. – With its “Don’t Be Evil” motto, Google Inc. has always held itself to a higher moral standard.
Now Google observers, including many longtime admirers of the search giant, say the Mountain View, Calif., company is behaving more like something it vowed never to become: a conventional company where the bottom line drives decisions.
The signs of that transformation in recent months include an illegal ad deal, a string of privacy violations, an altered privacy policy that a key regulator called “brutal” for consumers and a change in search results that appear to favor Google’s own social network, Google+, over competitors.
Google has about 12 times the revenue, 11 times the employees and arguably far more power over the Internet than it had when it proclaimed its idealism and went public in 2004. But as the Internet evolves to a more social and mobile Web where a search engine can no longer tie everything together, Google is threatened as never before. The company is locked in an intense competition with rivals such as Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., and it faces a patent-lawyer gutter fight with Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. over the intellectual property behind its crucial Android mobile operating system.
“I hesitate to think they’ve gotten ‘evil,’ because they never were that ‘good’ to begin with,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, a website that covers search news. “But I do think it marks a much more aggressive company, a company that is not hesitant to do things, even if those things might draw more criticism than in the past.”
Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice required Google to forfeit $500 million for hosting ads from online Canadian pharmacies that led to the illegal importation of prescription drugs, and the Federal Trade Commission slapped the company with an order requiring 20 years of independent privacy monitoring after a privacy breach with Google’s Buzz social network.
In January, the world’s dominant search company was accused of compromising its most basic values of fairness and objectivity by highlighting results from its Google+ social network over competitors like Twitter and Facebook.
Then, in February, Stanford University researcher Jonathan Mayer caught Google bypassing the privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser.
And, later that month, 36 state attorneys general wrote Google to complain that privacy plans the company had publicly claimed benefited consumers were in fact an “invasion of privacy.”
