How to become evil

You have to remove “Don't be evil” from your corporate tagline. Next, replace it with an unspoken rule: “Do the right thing (for myself).”

Then start providing a free service. Well, almost free. in exchange for your user’s souls, you give them the ability to search for whatever they desire, every day.

You crawl the Internet for every piece of information and place that information strategically next to the ads you are selling to the highest bidder. Since your objective is to maximize the revenue from these ads, you need more content. No problem! You’ll pay nothing for it.

If the content you see in results is a bad match for your search, even better! The more that happens, the more people will search using your service. Does this sound terrible? You’re wondering why people don’t just use an alternative service? Remember that early step of providing a “free” service. Most people will stick with you, simply because they’ve formed a habit.

Australia is putting this business model from Google to the test: trying to force Google by law to pay to display content from news publishers. Of course, Google is not happy with this:

'At a Senate hearing in Canberra on Friday, Google (GOOGL) Australia Managing Director Mel Silva said the draft legislation "remains unworkable," and would be "breaking" the way millions of users searched for content online.

"If this version of the Code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia," she told lawmakers. "That would be a bad outcome not just for us, but for the Australian people, media diversity and small businesses who use Google Search."'

In the end, Google may simply stop providing search functionality to Australia.

The company which prides itself in its ability to find, manage and organize data suddenly meets a real engineering challenge. I am not sure that Ms. Silva hears how ridiculous she sounds.

Here’s my advice for Google, if they are listening:

Governments are after you. They like nothing more than to show how good they are at punishing bad actors (with the exception of themselves). It helps politicians win re-election. As much money as you have, you are vulnerable. Australia will be a test case - and the first of many.

Try to remember how good it felt not to be the corporate evil. Start doing the right thing for others as well.

Create transparency with your algorithms and pay your share to authors who helped you to make your billions. This may sound counterintuitive.

I assure you “Don’t be evil” is still a good business practice.

And that’s the recurrent pattern.