Around the web today Google is being praised for threatening to pull out of China after the accounts of dissidents were hacked. It seems like a principled stand for human rights from the company whose motto is “don’t be evil,” but incisive tech commentator Nicholas Carr points out on his blog Rough Type that Google’s motivations may in fact be more complicated than that.

Google��s motivations are not as pure as they may appear. While there’s almost certainly an ethical component to the company��s decision - Google and its founders have agonized in a very public way over their complicity in Chinese censorship �C yesterday��s decision seems to have been spurred more by hard business calculations than soft moral ones….

Google’s overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the Internet… The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space. If our trust in the Web is undermined in any way, we��ll retreat from the network and seek out different ways to communicate, compute, and otherwise store and process data. The consequences for Google’s business would be devastating….

In this context, the ��highly sophisticated�� assault that Google says originated from China… threatens the very heart of the company��s business.

This thought-provoking excerpt is part of a much longer post, so check out Carr’s blog for his full thoughts or pick up his latest book.

  Tag: Accounting jobs | Banking jobs | Manufacturing jobs | Life Sciences jobs | Human Resources jobs | hr jobs | marketing jobs | Procurement jobs | Supply Chain jobs | Secretarial jobs | Office Support jobs | Risk Management jobs | Chemical jobs | Process jobs | Electronic jobs | Environmental jobs | Quality jobs | Quality Assurance jobs | Compliance jobs | Training jobs | IT Management jobs | Programming jobs | Systems Administration jobs | Brand Management jobs | Product Management jobs | Market Research jobs | Commercial jobs | Contract jobs | Planning jobs | Construction Management jobs | Real Estate jobs | Pharmaceutical jobs |