As a former Google employee, I always took the “Don’t Be Evil†mantra as a sincere gesture to be taken with a grain of salt.  The slogan was a reminder of the company’s humble and idealistic beginnings, but not an iron-clad indication of its post-IPO mindset.  After all, a corporation open to accommodating censorship in China is willing to put practical limits on principles that hit the bottom line too hard.
Many long-time Google advocates were surprised and disappointed with last week’s Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal, and I was among them.  While the company defends the move as a necessary practical decision given political realities, it in many ways marks the completion of Google’s gradual transition from wunderkind start-up to new-millennium corporate superpower.  Continue reading “Did Google abandon net neutrality?”
