How Google Is Bankrolling Friendly Academics
salon.com
salon.com
https://www.criterioneconomics.com/docs/bork-sidak-google-se...
> Google played an unusually active role in the George Mason conferences. The Washington Post has previously published emails showing Google public policy representatives giving LEC officials detailed information on what regulatory, law enforcement and Congressional staff to invite to the conference.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2014/04/12/h...
I am from academia. Nowhere do sponsors actively set the agenda for an academic conference.
Agenda is one thing but that's not what either article is claiming?
It's extremely common (the rule, not the exception) for sponsors to suggest and directly invite people to conferences (and at least in those published emails there doesn't appear to be any suggestions for speakers, just attendees).
http://media.salon.com/2015/11/GMU-email-2.png
2. They are asking people to hide the number of employees from Google attending this so that the whole thing looks innocuous.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
> e.g. http://media.salon.com/2015/11/GMU-email-2.png
That's an email from "James Cooper, a former FTC staffer and director of research and policy at the LEC", not someone from Google?
Asking someone who works at a sponsor of a conference for suggestions of who to put on a panel at that conference isn't really in the realm of that sponsor "setting the agenda"
1. Trying to diversify attendance 2. Hiding some attendees from a public list of all attendees
Trying to diversify attendance != Hiding some attendees from a public list of all attendees
Far from true. As a 40-something, I share the same viewpoint on Microsoft, but I'm talked with many 20-somethings who seemed surprised at my outright rejection of using anything from Microsoft.
For what it's worth (probably not much), Microsoft has also been on the list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for the past five years running.
So, how bothered are you personally about any bad things companies may have done 15-20 years before you were born? How bothered do you expect them to be?
If you're not familiar with him, Brett is a small ISP operator who dependably interrupts internet policy conversations to accuse pretty much everyone of shilling for Google. Lessig took the time to write a full rebuttal: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/90048838607/on-the-curious-cas...
Consider this passage:
"But before Wright’s confirmation, the FTC already decided against filing charges against Google, overriding its own staff’s recommendations. Google only had to voluntarily agree to alter some of its business practices to resolve the case.
Google’s actions between 2011 and 2013 show how they dodge legal bullets: by molding elite opinion, using the support of experts and academics as a firewall against criticism."
It's cleverly worded to make you think that Google bought off the FTC via Wright, but the chronology of events as the text describes is actually:
1) Google funds Wright. 2) Google agrees to alter its business practices. 3) FTC agrees not to charge them. 4) Wright is confirmed at the FTC.
Granted, I would not be at all surprised if Google hoped the academics they funded would help influence the FTC. But this article seems to want to cleverly word things to make the reader think there is evidence for this without actually presenting any.
As an academic, you live or die by your funding. (Teaching doesn't matter.) To become a "prominent academic," you probably want to become a chair or at least faculty at a major university. If Google "guarantees" your funding as long as you write the things they want written, you have a significant incentive to look upon them favorably.
There doesn't need to be an email saying "write a paper saying this, and we'll pay you that." All it takes is a generally-understood and well-funded "hope" that academics write the things Google wants.
Someone is funding them all...right?
>As an academic, you live or die by your funding. (Teaching doesn't matter.)
What I wrote was that your value to the department is your funding, not your teaching. If you're good, the funding takes care of itself; if not, you whore yourself to whomever you can.
>If Google "guarantees" your funding as long as you write the things they want written, you have a significant incentive to look upon them favorably.
as a type of discrediting due to the source of the "guarantee" on funding, then:
>As an academic, you live or die by your funding.
implies that all live academics are funded. Funding must come from somewhere with some form of guarantee. If we can generalize Google to stand in for any other source of funding, then you have constructed an argument that discredits all live academics.
You're correct that it's not a slam dunk indication of guilt, but that's never the case in situations like this.
At the very least it's suspicious, and everybody involved should have known better.
The FTC didn't hire Wright, Wright was appointed to the FTC by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. The FTC doesn't choose its own commissioners any more than the Supreme Court chooses its own members.
I'm also interested in difference between American and European approaches to anti-trust law. From what I understand, US regulators generally look for harm to the consumer, whereas their European counterparts try to detect harm done to competitors.
It seems that the European approach might insulate European firms from healthy competition, while leading to dead-weight loss of consumer surplus.
For example, if Google offers Yelp's reviews up on a Google.com domain, that might be more convenient for the consumer, who doesn't have to bounce around to different websites to find an answer. And it also might spur Yelp to find a way to add unique value to the consumer's experience instead of providing superfluous services.
> What the guests had not been told was that the day-long academic conference was in large part the work of Google, which maneuvered behind the scenes with GMU’s Law & Economics Center to put on the event. At the time, the company was under FTC investigation over concerns about the dominance of its famed search engine, a case that threatened Google’s core business.
I'm not sure if this would also count as "bankrolling friendly academics?"
I don't mean to single out Microsoft; I suspect many large companies do the same. And maybe the practice is defensible in principle--if academics get grants from Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur and other organizations with a pro-regulation focus, maybe companies should give grants to fund work skeptical of regulation?
They do sometimes spend more than Boeing, which I wouldn't have guessed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/21/us-google-lobbying...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University#Histor...
edit: typo
Yes. For right-libertarians, the right wing party in american politics is more palatable than the left wing party.
Someone going from unemployed to employed seems to both be a quantity improvement (one more job) and a quality improvement ($0 in wages vs >$0 in wages).
YM, of course, MV.
(After all, is it not an interesting coincidence how much we've been talking about "income inequality" lately even as liberals have been in control of the Presidency, the federal bureaucracy, and have at least split control of the other branches? And isn't it interesting how all the solutions to the problem of "income inequality" involve giving those exact same people more power? Only this time we should expect income inequality to go down instead, for... what reason again? How is giving more power (which is just another form of money) to the 1% controlling our policy and government going to solve our income inequality exactly? Clearly the wealthy liberals and those liberals who expect to be wealthy later as a result of their college degrees (many of whom are, alas, quite mistaken, but they're voting "correctly" for now so shrug says the 1%) are just pulling up the ladder behind them even as they tell everyone else how helpful they're being. I can fire the "pulling the ladder up behind them" propaganda at any major group you name.)
And yet, I have even less patience for those whose understanding of economics are "well, it'll hurt me a little, so it doesn't matter that it helps others a lot." Which I don't feel is an uncharitable description of the techno-fetishistic libertarian in action.
Everyone likes the concept of libertarianism in economics. The right wing loves the rhetoric, but actual support of the ideas is basically absent in government, unsurprisingly.