Wow, not much shows the intersection of money, politics, religion, and technology than something like this. Is Google's motivation for information freedom, and then implicitly more ad sales? Or have we really put our foot in the door for a corporation designed around information-as-profit, and does that imply support for the business models of say Wikileaks?
I often wonder why Google is giving stuff away for free. Can a publicly-held corporation do something just because it's cool, interesting, or The Right Thing To Do?
Here's something they give away that I use every day: a reliable DNS server. (Much more reliable than my ISP, and yes, I cache DNS locally).
Imagine a small company, that is profitable. Now imagine that that company can also provide a service for free that in the opinion of the people of this company would make the world a better place and this service does cost much (relative to the profits). Why would this small company not provide this service? As the company grows and goes public, there is more scrutiny over how the company spends its money. However, why not spend that <made_up_number>0.000001%</made_up_number> of the profits on something like this?
I would hope that this is justified under the idea that if they can provide customers with faster lookups, results, page loads, etc, then they get more business.
Google is smart enough to play the long game. And the long game is where the real money is. You can make money in the short term by abusing and misusing your users and maximizing short-term profits, but it's insignificant next to what can be made by building a highly trusted brand on the scale of google.
