Keep Secrets/Kill Image

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author

When the search engine god Google was asked by the Justice Department to hand over search data in an effort to revive the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), it quickly refused. That was special. The question reared its head: “What does Google have to hide?” Could it be S-E-X? Cynics sure think so.

Google’s rivals Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! were all cooperative, dishing out information on how often certain search terms get used. Some believe that for Google to reveal this information would be embarrassing and perhaps detrimental to the company since their data would surely expose how often their service is used by people to find what will get them off. It would reveal a major revenue stream for the company from a less-than-acceptable source. If the COPA were to discover how much pornography is indeed accessible and sought-after online it may have a strong case for implementing search filtering, creating restrictions on content that would hurt Google’s bottom line.

Others believe Google’s refusal indicates a cover-up in click fraud. Click-fraud is the onerous practice of clicking on search advertisements to run up the costs on advertisers. It is a huge problem and the discovery of how big it is could severely damage Google’s ad-sales business model and perhaps make it less desirable to those who give it their money.

See, you can’t talk out of two sides of your mouth when you’re in the public spotlight.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged in June of ’06 that it had compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands in a hotly talked about situation that was very similar to the one above. But Google agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service, claimed Sergey. Again, all of Google’s rivals accommodated the same demands.

All speculation cannot be helping the world’s favorite portal. It has made the biz community that much more cynical of the firm’s business practices and we now know it’s less about privacy and more about moneymaking. People who sell often forget that people expect the worst in others. Google is no exception. The company that has prided itself on being ethical has proved again that ethics and big business do not coexist. Can Google prove the cynics wrong? This issue with COPA might end up being the real answer.

I’m Richard Laermer, author of Punk Marketing and the forthcoming 2011.