Don't Be Evil Essay

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The overall viewpoint of the author is, well, the article is a bit of a hatchet job, running down a list of grievances collected on the Internet, going so far down the intellectual scale as to use snarky name-calling from random bloggers as evidence (p.310). There are logical fallacies contained in pretty much every point of argument the author makes. So while the overall viewpoint is clear -- the author does not like Google -- the argument is constructed primarily out of pathos, avoiding any hard discussion of ethos, and undermining its own logos by failing to resist the temptation to indulge in fallacy. It is tough to critique the article as a whole, as the author has utilized the classic shotgun argument fallacy.

The first issue, that of censoring search results in China, is a good example of fallacy -- leading the respondent. After reading about all of Google's crimes against morality, there is little doubt what conclusion the author wants you to reach. To agree that such censorship is evil, you would first need a clear definition of evil. Truthfully, Google should have had that, lest it invite just this type of smarmy hack criticism. But then you would have to accept the proposition that the policies of the People's Republic of China are evil -- the genetic fallacy - since those are the policies Google is working with. You can make a case, based on Western morality, that the PRC's censorship policies are a form of evil, but that's not an easy case to make, and the whole point of having nation-states is that one country's sense of morality is not applied universally around the world -- China has its own. It's a highly complex philosophical issue, and leads to some interesting conflicts with the other points the author is trying to make.

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As to speculating why Google did not want to supply the requested information concerning the Child Online Protection Act, Google may have been thinking about the slippery slope here. Normally, a slippery slope is a bad way to make an argument, but our legal system works on precedent. It is perfectly conceivable that allowing law enforcement warrantless search for one thing will be leveraged as precedent in the future to allow them to search for other things. In our legal system, slippery slope logic is used, so Google would have reason to be….....

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