[governance] Google exercises its funding muscle

[parminder]

Quotes from the below article, which connects to the discussion (or non
discussion) we recently had here on Google's funding of non profit/
academic research in digital area.

            Firing Lynn and his team “raises a lot of questions,” a
            Warren aide told HuffPost. Warren, herself, later tweeted
            her concerns.

            A senior aide to a progressive House Democrat, who commented
            on the condition of anonymity, called the firings “an
            example of the way that funding think tanks is a way to
            achieve policy outcomes, in the same way that lobbying and
            funding campaigns is. It’s a business expense.”

            Jonathan Taplin, the author of /Move Fast and Break Things:
            How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and
            Undermined Democracy/, was more blunt in his assessment of
            what happened at New America.

            “It’s just classic monopoly muscle,” he told HuffPost. “This
            is the way bullies act.”

*Google Just Proved That Monopolies Imperil Democracy, Not Just The Economy*

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/google-monopoly-barry-lynn_us_59a738fde4b010ca289a1155?section=us_politics

Barry Lynn and his team of anti-monopoly researchers were fired by a
think tank after criticizing the search giant.

WASHINGTON ― For the past decade, former business journalist Barry Lynn
has used his perch at the New America Foundation to warn politicians and
the public that a new era of corporate monopolies threatened not only
American workers, but also democracy itself.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/barry-lynn-washington-corporations_us_57c8a6a7e4b0e60d31de6433>

Lynn was just proven right: New America has fired him as head of its
Open Markets program along with his team of about 10 researchers and
journalists, after they called for an antitrust investigation of the
think tank’s largest longtime donor, Google.

On June 27, the Open Markets team in a 150-word statement
<https://www.newamerica.org/open-markets/press-releases/open-markets-applauds-european-commissions-finding-against-google-abuse-dominance/>
called for the Federal Trade Commission to follow the lead of the
European Union, which leveled a $2.7 billion fine on Google for
violating antitrust laws. Since New America’s start in 1999
<http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/15/arts/silicon-valley-s-new-think-tank-stakes-out-radical-center.html>,
Google has given it $21 million. And Eric Schmidt, the executive
chairman of Alphabet, Inc., Google’s parent company, served as New
America’s chairman from 2008 through mid-2016.

According to a report on Wednesday in The New York Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html?_r=0>,
Lynn was called on the carpet by New America head Anne-Marie Slaughter
shortly after the Open Markets program praised the E.U.’s decision to
find Google in violation of antitrust law for providing preferential
placement to its own products and those of its subsidiaries over its
rivals in search results. Schmidt, the Times reported, had expressed to
Slaughter his “displeasure” with the statement backing the E.U.’s move.

Slaughter, according to an email obtained by the Times, told Lynn that
he and his team had to leave New America. The firing was, “in no way
based on the content of your work,” she wrote, while also saying Lynn
was “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Two current members of the Open Markets team confirmed this timeline of
events to HuffPost. Lynn and his Open Markets colleagues were told to
depart New America two days after the statement that supported the E.U.
antitrust fine and called upon “U.S. enforcers” to “build upon this
important precedent/. /The team, though, stuck around in an attempt to
question New America’s leadership about whether it really wanted to fire
the entire group.

“We were trying to be, like, ’Are you sure you want to do this because
it sort of seems bad,” Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets
Program, told HuffPost. “Are you sure you want to prove us right? Are
you sure you want to back a monopoly in such an obvious and clumsy way?
We were negotiating with them.” (Stoller is an occasional HuffPost
contributor.)

Despite those negotiations, Slaughter on Wednesday officially terminated
Lynn and his team. 

 

Slaughter disputed the Times story, saying in a statement
<https://www.newamerica.org/new-america/press-releases/new-americas-response-new-york-times/> that
the claim “that Google lobbied New America to expel the Open Markets
program” was “false.” Instead, she said that Lynn refused “to adhere to
New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality.” She
offered no explanation for firing the entire Open Markets team.

A Google spokeswoman denied any involvement in Lynn’s firing in an email
to HuffPost. She also said that Schmidt did not threaten to cut off
funding for the think tank because of the Open Markets statement on
Google’s antitrust fine.

“We support hundreds of organizations that promote a free and open
Internet, greater access to information, and increased opportunity,”
Riva Sciuto, the Google spokesperson, said in the statement. “We don’t
agree with every group 100 percent of the time, and while we sometimes
respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel
decisions, and policy perspectives.”

New America did not immediately respond to a request for comment to
HuffPost.

Lynn is now building an independent think tank to continue his
anti-monopoly work with his New America team. The group has already
launched a campaign <https://citizensagainstmonopoly.org/> aimed at
mobilizing public opposition to the power of modern-day monopolies by
highlighting Google’s power to quash independent research like that by
the Open Markets team.

Its supporters say this case underscores that argument.

Lynn and his colleagues “have long argued that monopolies are a problem
for the economy, but they’re also a problem for democracy,” Zephyr
Teachout, a fellow at Open Markets and board member of its new campaign
― called Citizens Against Monopolies ― told HuffPost. “This kind of
proves the point.”

It’s not as though the Open Markets team needed to get fired to buttress
their concerns about monopoly power. Their efforts already have been
influential ― more so than work by many other think tanks.

The Democratic Party recently adopted the team’s warnings about
monopolies in its “A Better Deal” platform
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-antitrust_us_5976572fe4b0a8a40e817612>.
Politicians ― including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) ― are
pushing for enhanced antitrust enforcement and calling out
concentrations of economic power more than before.

Open Markets has helped lead the economic debate to a “more populist
strain over the past couple of years,” Marshall Steinbaum, a fellow at
the progressive economics think tank Roosevelt Institute, told HuffPost.

Firing Lynn and his team “raises a lot of questions,” a Warren aide told
HuffPost. Warren, herself, later tweeted her concerns.

A senior aide to a progressive House Democrat, who commented on the
condition of anonymity, called the firings “an example of the way that
funding think tanks is a way to achieve policy outcomes, in the same way
that lobbying and funding campaigns is. It’s a business expense.”

Jonathan Taplin, the author of /Move Fast and Break Things: How
Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy/,
was more blunt in his assessment of what happened at New America.

“It’s just classic monopoly muscle,” he told HuffPost. “This is the way
bullies act.”

The internal workings of New America, though, is not the real
issue, Stoller said. The public needs to recognize Google as an
autocratic private power that is exerting itself in the economy and in
policy to increase its own power over people, he argued.

“We love a lot of the people at New America,” Stoller said. “We think
their work is great. ... This is not an issue of New America. This is an
issue about monopoly and Google.”

And Google is undeniably a monopoly. Just ask monopoly proponent and
billionaire investor Peter Thiel
<http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-google-monopoly-2014-9>, who
has said the company is able to offer so many wonderful perks to its
employees because it doesn’t have to worry too much about competition.
It controls 80 percent
<http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-search_engine-US-monthly-201608-201608-bar>
of the market for online search and 54 percent
<http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-search_engine-US-monthly-201608-201608-bar>
of the browser market in the U.S.

Google and Facebook, another powerful online platform monopoly, have
gobbled up practically every new online advertising dollar
<https://www.recode.net/2017/5/2/15516674/global-ad-spending-charts>
(thanks to their past acquisitions of online advertising companies) in
recent years while pressuring news organizations
<https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/platform-press-how-silicon-valley-reengineered-journalism.php>,
including HuffPost, to publish directly to their platforms. Google’s
control of internet search has given it the power to squeeze money away
from other websites (see: CelebrityNetWorth.com
<https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com>
and Yelp.com
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/technology/yelp-google-european-union-antitrust.html?mcubz=3>).
Google’s dominant position as an advertising seller has also given it
increasing power over newsrooms
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/business/media/google-facebook-news-media-alliance.html?mcubz=3>
(although not as much as Facebook).

The company ― which once went by the motto “Don’t be evil” ― has also
sought to replicate its economic power in political and policy spheres.

Google has previously sought to pressure a nonprofit over its criticism
of the company. In 2009, Google’s head of public policy reached out to
the foundation funding the California-based Consumer Watchdog to warn it
about continuing to underwrite the work by the pro-privacy group. That
work was critical of many of Google’s privacy policies.

In the past decade, Google also has poured tens of millions of dollars
into campaign contributions, lobbying firms, think tanks and policy
nonprofits in the past decade.

This political investment soared after 2011 when Google’s antitrust
issues first came under the microscope. Its lobbying expenses doubled
from $9.6 million in 2011 to $18.2 million in 2012, and have not fallen
below $15 million since. In 2011, Google gave grants to 44 different
nonprofits and think tanks. That number jumped to 81 in 2012 and now
sits at 170.

Goggle executives enjoyed unrivaled access
<https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/>
to the White House under President Barack Obama
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/topic/barack-obama>, visiting hundreds of
times, according to Secret Service visitor logs. Google has also pumped
millions of dollars into research at universities
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-influence-campaign-1499785286>,
often to buttress its public policy positions, and is pushing its own
agenda for public school education
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html>
across the country.

Google’s huge increase in political investment post-2011 was in direct
reaction to the Federal Trade Commission opening an antitrust
investigation
<http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/25/business/la-fi-google-ftc-20110625>
into whether it abused its market position in internet searches. The FTC
commissioners eventually dropped the investigation in exchange for small
concessions by the company, despite a report by the agency’s legal team
that labeled Google a “monopoly”
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274>
and supported a full investigation.

“The ‘A’ word is the one thing that can stop the music,” Luther Lowe,
Yelp’s vice president of public policy, said of Google’s interest in
antitrust issues. “It’s the one that’s an all-hands-on-deck situation.”


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