This article is reprinted from Bill Dembski, design theorist William Dembski’s Substack, with his permission.

My first encounter with Google occurred in 2000. I was active on Usenet newsgroups, and Google had just bought DejaVu, a search engine for these newsgroups. I was now having to deal with Google rather than DejaVu. Google quickly changed how search results for newsgroups were delivered, omitting some information I previously found helpful. I remember thinking that Google’s changes were not for the better.

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Nonetheless, I quickly did find that Google’s search of the internet as a whole was much better than Altavista, Excite, and the other search engines available at the time. Basing its search approach on the model of citation indexes, where importance of an article is gauged by which and how many other articles reference yours, Google’s PageRank algorithm quickly set the standard for internet search.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two nerds who left Stanford before getting their master’s degrees to found Google, were at the start endearing. They helped to bring order to the internet and they seemed keen to make the internet’s information freely available, unfettered by ideology or politics. Their freewheeling use of information got them in hot water with copyright violations (as when they attempted to scan and put online all the world’s books). But in its early days, Google seemed, on balance, a positive force. Even its quirky motto, “Don’t be evil,” suggested a harmless insouciance. And their mission, already articulated in the late 1990s and supposedly still in force to this day, was lofty: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

A portentous change in mottos

In 2015 Google’s parent company Alphabet retired the old motto, now substituting for it “Do the right thing.” The old motto was better. Negation has advantages that positive assertions lack. Our First Amendment, for instance, doesn’t extol doing right by allowing free speech. Rather, it simply forbids the federal government from making any law abridging free speech. Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.

In the same vein as our First Amendment, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked, “Write not so that you can be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood.” There’s a power and clarity in no that’s absent from yes. It’s no accident that Judaism’s Ten Commandments and the Buddha’s five basic moral precepts are formulated as negations. The ability to say no is the mark of freedom. “Resist the devil [i.e., say no to the devil] and he will flee from you.” (James 4:7) The mark of tyranny, by contrast, is to tell you what to think and do, and not take no for an answer. Or, as memorably captured by Don Corleone in the Godfather, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

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Affirmations on the whole, however, are more pleasant than negations. Hence the shift of mottos with Google. Who doesn’t want to say that they’re doing the right thing rather than merely avoiding evil? The power of human rationalization is such that it’s easy to convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing even when we are merely being self-serving and acting on perverse incentives.

Lord Acton’s admonition about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely has, in the years since its new motto, been borne out at Google. Doing the right thing at Google has come to mean doing right by itself. And because Google views itself as such a positive force in the world, doing right by itself is now interpreted by Google also to mean doing right by the world. But interests are never so perfectly aligned. The new motto has become a self-serving rationalization.

People as a commodity

More so, Google has become evil. Sure, it has no compunction about crushing small businesses for which its services provide crucial infrastructure. Sure, it exercises monopolistic control in violation of, if not anti-trust laws directly, then their spirit. But Google’s main evil is that it commoditizes people, both individually and corporately, treating them as “users” to be exploited and manipulated. It values users (people) only for the profit they bring to Google, which it understands not only as the money it is able to make off of users but also as the ideological and political manipulation with which it is able to sway users to advance its public policy agendas.

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At every turn, Google exploits users for profit, even if this means misleading them and, as the designation implies, “using” them. Ultimately, Google is only too ready to spit out users, demonetizing, delegitimizing, and deplatforming them when better profits can be made elsewhere, and especially when recalcitrant users need to be punished for not toeing the Google line. In Kantian terms, Google treats people as means and not as ends, fundamentally disrespecting our humanity.

To gain some perspective on just how commanding Google is, consider how SEMrush gauges its footprint on the internet. SEMrush is a service I’ve used in my online businesses to gauge how well webpages and websites are doing in terms of traffic and keyword searches. SEMrush lists the following as the top twenty sites in the world by monthly web traffic. These numbers are as of July 2024. If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube. Here are the sites in descending order of total monthly visits:

• Google: 131.2 billion visits
• YouTube: 71.4 billion visits
• Facebook: 12.97 billion visits
• Wikipedia: 6.93 billion visits
• Instagram: 6.5 billion visits
• Reddit: 5.8 billion visits
• Pornhub: 5.39 billion visits
• Bing: 4.77 billion visits
• X (formerly Twitter): 4.35 billion visits
• WhatsApp: 3.83 billion visits
• XVideos: 3.62 billion visits
• Yahoo: 3.46 billion visits
• Twitter.com: 3.31 billion visits (alternative domain traffic)
• Taboola: 3.29 billion visits
• Amazon: 3.23 billion visits
• ChatGPT.com: 3.10 billion visits
• Yandex: 3.05 billion visits
• DuckDuckGo: 3.04 billion visits
• Taboola News: 3.03 billion visits
• TikTok: 2.61 billion visits​

It’s in the nature of power to make evil more evil. So if Google has turned to the dark side, it has vast resources to be very evil indeed. Still, I want to be careful about throwing around the term evil too cavalierly in reference to Google. There’s much that Google does that’s positive, at least on the surface. Who doesn’t use and enjoy Google Maps, Google’s Chrome Browser, Gmail, and a host of other (apparently) free services that Google makes available to internet users?

True, these services are there ultimately to inveigle users into Google’s profit engine. But most of us are willing to suspend cynicism while enjoying Google’s many offerings. What’s more, nothing is totally evil. Still, there’s enough evil in Google that it is, for now, more on the side of Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Next: The utter dependence of online businesses on Google