GOOGLE’S INFLUENCE
“Current coverage of the tech world
leans heavily toward products, start-ups, and
personalities.
A website on money
and power would instead concentrate on its
growing political
might. Ten years ago,
for
example Google had
a one-person lobbying
shop in Washington;
today, it
has more than one hundred lobbyists working out of an office roughly the
size of the White House. In addition to such traditional
lobbying, Google is financing
research at universities and think
tanks,
investing in
advocacy
groups, and "funding
pro-business coalitions
cast as
public-interest projects," as Tom Hamburger
and Matea
Gold reported in 2014 in The
Washington Post.
“They described how in the spring of 2012 Google - facing
possible legal action by the FTC over the
dominance of its search engine-played
a behind-the-scenes part in organizing a conference at George Mason University, to
which it is a large contributor. It
made sure that the program was heavily
weighted with speakers
sympathetic to Google
and, according to the Post, it arranged
for many FTC economists
and lawyers to
hear them. In the end,
the commission decided
against taking legal action. Just
why could be a good subject
for inquiry. Today, Google is working
hard to protect its right
to collect consumer data and to that
end has sought the support
of conservative
groups like the Heritage
Foundation. The type of
string-pulling described
by'the Post goes on
routinely and deserves
more routine coverage.”
Massing, Michael, ‘How to Cover the One Percent,’ The New
York Review, January 14, 2016, pp: 74-76.
