Is the Google world a better place? An interview with Michael T. Jones.

• Author: Vericat, Jose
• Position: Interview

That Google is changing our world is a well-known fact. How exactly this transformation is taking place and where will it lead, is not. Google's chief technology advocate Michael T. Jones reflects on Google's global impact in conversation with Jose Vericat of the Journal of International Affairs at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Journal of International Affairs: It isn't accidental that Google has an impact on the developing world. The company has a strong moralistic tone. Google's Code of Conduct begins, "Don't be evil." (1) Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said that Google wants "to make the world a better place" and "we want to be bold--we want to make a big difference." (2) What is Google's mission and how does it impact international development?

Michael T. Jones: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The reason that is the mission, and the reason Google does well, is because information is powerful. It enables people to do new things, it educates them for a better life, it raises their expectations. It is an enabler of a better society. Just information--without funding, without medicine, without clean water--just knowing, one might aspire to those things.

People in the developing world and in Western countries use information all the time, in every decision they make. People in the most remote areas of the world use information all the time too; they just use information that is close to them. They use information that they learned from their parents, from neighbors, from their friends or tribal elders. Whether the information is from your friends, from the Koran or the Bible--wherever it is from--everyone has access to it.

What Google does is take all available information and make it accessible to each person. To do that, at least the Google way, you have to be connected to something. We are not sitting side-by-side with each person, like Socrates. The rule is: They have to be online.

Our ethic is driven by the fact that, as Google was growing up and organizing information, everyone was buying a computer and getting on the Internet. All those things worked together to let billions of people--more than a billion a week--use our product to search out information. That was good timing, as well as a good idea.

What is different in developing countries is that access to information is usually either by radio, by mobile phone or in person. it isn't as often by the Internet. So our ability to help people is limited by our ability to cross those channels or to expand access to the Internet into those places. And we do both those things. We are building software, like Android, to make mobile phones Internet gateways. We also invest in technology, like undersea cables and satellite radio transmission, so that people get Internet access that they did not have before.

Our mission is information. Our belief--our religion--is that information is good. It gets us into trouble in countries where information is more restricted, like the People's Republic of China. But in most of the world, it is considered a great virtue. We consider it a great virtue and we are proud of that. Our effort is to access more information to make it available to people. That is our future and our obligation.

Journal: Would you sad that Google's biggest impact internationally is its support of democratization?

Jones: I wouldn't say it that way. What I would say is that people who want to grow, whether it is to grow the health of their local government or learn a language so that they can participate in their local government--whatever their personal growth path is--they do better if they have access to the world's information.

Thomas Jefferson said and wrote--and I think Google is a reflection of the fact--that more information helps democracies work much better. The Sunlight Foundation believes that nothing cures ills like a little sunlight. (3) Just seeing what is going on helps people decide how they feel. It is related to the importance of the press. Just connecting people to facts allows them to express their opinion, whether in a polling place in the case of a democracy, or by petitioning the king in a monarchy. It is not democracy per se; it is that an uneducated, uninformed populace does not inspire great, kind governments. To the extent that we can help people with information, I think we make their political lives better--whether in a democracy or something else.

But in the case of democracy, the notion of letting people vote is irrelevant if they do not know what they are voting about, if they cannot read the ballot, if they don't know what the politicians are saying and if they don't know what the choices mean between yes or no. In this case, having a choice is no choice at all.

Journal: The confrontation between Google and China stands out in this regard. The debate about business and ethics has been complex and has included criticism of Google--and not just from China. In turn, Google has used strong language against Microsoft for their approach to China. How did we get here?

Jones: In most countries of the world, the idea of more information, freer access to information and a more educated populace is considered a uniformly good thing. In some countries of the world, it is not necessarily considered a good thing. It depends on whether that information is consistent with the local government view. That situation exists in the People's Republic of China and in a number of other countries as well, like Burma. So when Google, which is an open sharer of information, operates in or is accessible from a country where open access to all information isn't automatically considered a good thing by the government, there is tension.

In our experience so far, it isn't a battle to the death; it is just a dynamic tension between the government's desire to provide growth and prosperity to its people, a desire to inform and help people--always well-intentioned--and an apprehension that the wrong information can make things worse. Whether the local government's idea of what is wrong and worse is the same as other governments' ideas of what is wrong and worse isn't the point. The point is that they want the fruit of information but are a little bit nervous about its effects. They have an eagerness and reticence at the same time. That was the case when we entered China.

We saw that there were a huge number of people coming online in China, which is maybe the world's largest marketplace from a business standpoint today. But more importantly, it would be the world's largest Internet user base, and whatever is good on the Internet should not be denied those people. They can get something good out of it like everybody else does.

So there was a great deal of soul-searching when we went into China. Does going support something that is disliked about Chinese policies? Does it help in a good way? Can we help in an independent way that is neither good nor bad, but just informative? Should we be thinking of the Chinese government position, or should we be thinking about the position of the...