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against Google for raising the company’s ad rates prohibitively high. Google’s algorithms and employees found that Sourcetool did not meet its standards; it resembled a spam site, whether or not it was one. The rate increase was Google’s way of shooing off the site. Sourcetool disagreed and said Google was ruining its legitimate business. The implication was that Google could wield the power of the monopoly. But in the Google age, nothing is as it seems. The issue is not that Google is a monopoly but that it has become the marketplace—the best place for us to find information and for advertisers to find us—as newspapers were in their time and as craigslist is today. Marketplaces have the power to unilaterally charge what the market will bear. craigslist sets most of its ad rates to zero. Google says it doesn’t set rates but enables the market to do the job in auctions. Except in the case of Sourcetool, Google did unilaterally set the rate. The question is whether we trust Google with the power to do that. Is Google a monopoly? Not yet.

The next question is whether Google can live by its golden rule as it grows huge and gangly—as middle managers start second-guessing their bosses, as bonuses and greed or simple self-interest overtake the gospel according to Google. Time will tell.

Is Google evil then? On balance, I don’t think so. But its day is still young. At least Google is trying to be good. That’s more than one can say for some companies I’m sure we both could name. Wouldn’t other companies do well to make the same pledge on evil? It should be chiseled over doors on Wall Street. If only, in the poisoned process that led to the financial crisis of 2008, enough people had asked whether seeking and issuing toxic mortgages and making and selling toxic assets were evil—instead of someone else’s problem—I wonder whether we’d have reached that nadir.

Imagine if in cable company meetings on pricing and bundling or restricting internet access someone were to ask: Is this the best we can do for our customers? Are we exploiting them? Is this evil? Imagine if someone were to ask at the meeting where airlines chose to fight a New York State law requiring that passengers be given clean air and water: Is this any way to treat our passengers? Aren’t we being evil? I wouldn’t much like to be that person—Mr. Goody-Goody, director of whistle-blowing, vice president of virtue. But I do believe that if companies were to ask themselves—and employees were empowered to ask—whether they were being good or evil to their customers and communities, they would often make different decisions. It’s not a bad rule.

Wal-Mart made news early in 2008 when it sued a former employee who had been hit by a truck and left severely brain-damaged. The store wanted to recoup what it had paid for her care after she won a $1 million judgment against the trucking company. After legal fees, the victim received $417,000; Wal-Mart sued to recover $470,000, which would have left the employee’s family with nothing to pay for nursing-home care. Wal-Mart was apparently within its legal and contractual rights to recover money; that’s what the fine print said. But if just one person had asked the right question in the memos or meetings about this case—Is this evil?—the company would have saved itself horrible publicity on network news, in papers, and in blogs from people who used the story as exhibit A, proof that Wal-Mart is evil. Eventually, the company backed down and did the right thing: It dropped its suit against the brain-damaged woman. But the PR damage cost more than the money at stake. “Don’t be evil” is good business.

That was the point made by Umair Haque as he excoriated Facebook later in 2008 for preventing Google from using Facebook members’ data (with their consent). On his Harvard Business Review blog, Haque called Facebook evil. That’s a bit strong, I’d say, but he was making a business point: “What’s really going on here? There’s a massive tectonic shift rocking the economic landscape. All these players are discovering that the boardroom’s first and