Google Critic Ousted from Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* Microsoft funded number backroom whisper campaigns in DC (http://www.businessinsider.com/what-an-anti-google-whisper-c...) * Microsoft and Oracle funded their own Astroturf lobbying groups and think tanks, to tie up the company in lawsuits and investigations (e.g. FairSearch) * Oracle funding numerous shills like Florian Mueller * Carriers and Cable Companies lobbying to demolish net-neutrality * Bills like SOPA.
Google used to spend very little on lobbying, and as a result Verizon, Microsoft, Oracle, Comcast, had the undivided attention of Congress.
Now to be fair, Microsoft was attacked by its competitors with similar campaigns in the 80s and 90s. It just goes to show you that corporate lobbying can play off people's populist tendencies and weaponize them against competitors.
So when you ask, "How could Google give to ALEC", a question Googlers themselves ask, or contribute to conservatives who deny client science, you have to consider that Congress has the industry by the balls. They can threaten regulation or punishment, and then hold fundraisers on pledges to block said regulation. It's a shakedown: "nice business you have there, shame if I'd have to regulate it. By the way, I'm having a fundraising dinner next week" Why would Silicon Valley serve on Trump's advisory councils when many of the members revile Trump on a personal level? Because there's a huge risk making the executive branch an enemy.
Its the market at work - at some point the marginal advantage of investing even a little in lobbying results in more X, (where X can be anything from power to profit).
And in a competitive scenario, SOMEONE will do it.
Not to mention Even a unhappy incumbent can initiate a lobbying strategy.
People in the comments seem to focus a lot on google itself, but this is the way the game is played.
Its just that tech is realizing that they can't create utopia because the laws of complex systems still apply.
Just because something is commonly done does not mean that behavior is right. A reason this post is so popular is because people are becoming increasingly aware of the power & capital concentration occurring in this country.
Google has for years successfully gave an image of a company capable of rising above the typical sociopathic behavior of other large multinational corporations, and this story helps expose Google for what they really are: just another large corporation.
The problem that technolibertarians/utopians have long had was that they imagined cyberspace as a completely separate dimension, that would not be sullied by the ordinary concerns of politics and buying influence. And perhaps for a short time, when the internet and web was new, and politicians mostly ignored it, there was good reason to believe you wouldn't have to worry about it, but after the 90s when the Web/Net was mainstreamed, with billions of people on it, and trillions in money up for grabs, the idea that the normal corrupt politician process would leave its participants alone is naive.
I mean, take net neutrality. Verizon, Comcast, and the ISPs have clearly won. They've got their guy as head of the FCC. The fossil fuel industry has won, they've got their guys running the show now.
Would you call sustainable energy companies lobbying congress and buying politicians "same old typical sociopathic behavior", it would you recognize that this is how the game is played, and they've go to fight to prevent the government from distorting the market and letting fossil fuel companies crush them.
I'm not a libertarian, but one of the reasons libertarians don't like government regulation is that if you want to "get money out of politics" it is literally impossible as long as small investments can yield huge benefits via regulatory capture.
Tech -- including "energy tech" -- has one important distinction from other industries: there are potential technological solutions that can move faster than the legislation.
For instance, the ISPs may seem to have won, but maybe some kind of wireless technology will bring true competition.
An energy company may have someone in the government, but Solar is already cheaper (batteries have to catch up), and behind the meter solutions are ever more popular.
Sometimes the legislation just fattens the target by staving off other competition.
> Its the market at work
It's economics, sure. I don't know what qualifies as a "market" here, though. There aren't standard shares of "lobbying" that people buy and sell.
If you are interested in investing in lobbying then all you need to do is buy shares in companies that engage in lobbying.
Google can certainly find other think tanks they like better.
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
Honestly, the only thing shocking about any of this is that people thought Google was "special". The reality is, when its revenues are threatened, it's going to reach like any other corporation, which it should.
Google has its tentacles into almost everything, and you should be concerned/cautious about lock in, abuse and market competition challenges that go with it.
I personally find it a challenge every day to avoid using Google Services. I use Bing instead of Google, but I'm locked into Gmail (which is a great product), Google Drive (A great product), Google Maps (a great product), etc.
With Gmail, I just forward my mail to my Outlook.com account, and I switched my email address on as many sites as I could to use my Outlook.com email address. Works just fine.
Office Online with OneDrive is a fantastic product. Sure it costs money, but if you're not paying for a product, you're not "locked in". Download your docs in Office format and save them to OneDrive, done.
I actually switched to Bing Maps a long time prior to this because Google Maps has such poor performance on every computer I use it on. Google Maps has the far superior place search, but Bing Maps works better as an actual map in my experience.
The only Google service I use regularly is Google Translate, because there really is no comparison.
There is one, since yesterday. Try https://www.deepl.com/translator
FWIW, YouTube is actually the only Google product I allow to store my history and recommend me stuff, because it's the only place I find it actually helpful or valuable, and the privacy risk of that data is of low value to me.
Not trying to encourage anyone one way or the other, but a good FYI to keep in mind.
Just say yes to diversity! ;-)
I started with an attempt to leave Google products for political/moral reasons and ended up finding superior products on the way.
The hardest part about moving away from Google around 4 years ago was migrating all my account email address to new providers.
That basically took me an afternoon. No big deal.
1. They have three tabs for emails, so to check if I have any new emails, I literally have to click through 3 different tabs.
2. When I have long email threads, new emails get lost under the clutter instead of showing up at the top of my inbox like a rational human being would expect.
3. When I actually click to open an email thread; 99% of the stuff is collapsed and I keep having to expand it out which is really annoying.
With a lot of modern web-based email clients, I always feel like the company is trying to hide my own emails from me which is creepy - That's why I like the simplest layout possible. New emails should always appear at the top and highlighted as unread.
When Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo, she changed the Yahoo email web client so that it would group emails in the Google way. I lost faith in humanity that day. I almost quit the service but thankfully at least they had a setting which allowed me to revert back to the correct way.
Maybe Gmail has a setting to display emails correctly (like Yahoo) but I haven't heard about it.
There is. I ended up setting up my Gmail where unread and read emails are in separate accordion-like sections. The 3 tabs thing makes for horrible UX
3. This IMO is good design and you can expand all (although I almost never need to do so myself).
In tech right now, if you fire any people, all the other good people will leave too.
Then you have a crowd of mediocre engineers and have no hope of competing in the future.
The Intercept reviewed the full termination email sent from Slaughter to Lynn that was cited and quoted in the Times report and found that they were reported and characterized with complete accuracy. The full text does, however, show that Slaughter threatened to make Lynn’s firing more difficult for him and his team should it generate any negative publicity for New America.
That was a real kicker for me. This seems like pretty blatant corporate censorship. Unfortunately, it's hard to make the public care about a situation like this that's so out of view.
Truthfully, I'm not so sure that this isn't being played up and portrayed a specific way by the media. I was going to say the problem was that the New America Foundation had accepted too much funding from one source, but since Google has only funded them to the tune of about 21 million since 1999, unless the vast majority of that has come in recent years, that funding probably accounts for fairly little of their operating costs on a year to year basis, since they employ more than 200 people. Even if Google had given all 21 million in the last yea alone, that would basically fund all the employees at $100k salaries and pay for building costs. I suspect quite a few salaries are much higher, and there's a lot more costs than that, so I'm not sure Google's funding really amounted to a huge amount when spread over many years.
There is a limit to this.
For example, I have the right to ask you for money. I have the right to report or not report a crime I saw you commit. But if I tie those two activities together, it becomes blackmail and is illegal, despite no single action being wrong on its own.
Google has a lot of power, and they are abusing it. It may not be illegal under current law, but they cannot hide behind the defense that each micro interaction is their right.
First, she says his work is imperiling their funding (referring to Google's complaint about its positions not being represented). Then, she says his work has nothing to do with his firing.
Do no evil indeed.
"Thanks to our last deal with Google, now we have fresh water and comfy chairs in every public transportation bus, and the ticket price was cut half!".
"Thanks to Google Books, now all kids whose family income is under X will receive a free ebook reader and free school books".
...etc.
https://www.newamerica.org/open-markets/press-releases/open-...
Do you think it's not a story, that the NY Times shouldn't have published it?
Gmail and Drive and such predominantly need to be ad-funded to survive, I suspect, and I think allowing an online services company to run ads is fundamentally okay. The monopolizing power of losing Chrome and Android would over time relegate them to losing monopoly status by default.
Those companies made their owners very, very wealthy, and the companies' decedents remain extremely wealthy and powerful. The CEO of one of the decedents, Exxon, is now the U.S. Secretary of State, for example.
Google may think that's a very acceptable downside risk.
It is a little unfair to think this problem exists only within Google. Time and time again we are reminded why corporations will evolve to become as greedy and as protective of their turf expansive of their power and monopolistic as they can get, even if good people are running them. It is the system itself that does this, corporations evolve to survive and to thrive. That in of itself isn't a bad thing but you need checks and balances. Things like the Supreme Court saying that Corporations are people or all the money pouring into our political process those are things that have to change.
Even the best of them will eventually become the worst of them. Google is now evil for sure, no doubt about that, but there have been and there will be many others.
If every significant avenue of communication used by people is controlled and censored by a group, no matter who it is, there is no option for progress. Any attempt to change social values will inevitably run up against a wall of not being able to actually express proof that societies values have changed. Imagine if tomorrow every human being on Earth woke up realizing nudity is a strange thing to get worked up about. What would happen? The idea would die, isolated, because even if people said they thought nudity was fine, they could never prove it as the communications networks they use would censor out anything containing nudity, stultifying culture and freezing it to whatever was acceptable in the early 2000s.
Because they're pushing the progressive agenda, so who in the media, government, or academia is going to stand in their way? As far as those parties are concerned, Google is doing what corporations "should" do.
I would say Shmidt's agenda is more neo-liberal than progressive. Not that I endorse it, but corporations pushing an agenda is not new[1] and not limited to the left[2][3], so not even conservative media will stand in their way either since that has been happening for a long time on the right.
1. http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/12/12338/shilling-profit-ca...
2. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hobby-lobby-wins-contraceptiv...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_same-sex_marriage_...
So where are the stories of senators saying, "those guys at Google, they're what we should be striving for." As opposed to senators raking them over the coals (rightly) for tax avoidance.
Well, the media largely only cares for agendas that fit their advertiser's preferences. Their advertiser's preferences are dictated by what they think will help their business... they're not particularly concerned with the nature of any particular agenda, only whether an agenda benefits them.
The government is the largely similar, but rather than advertisers it's political parties balancing appeal to their donors, lobbyists and other powers. To a minor degree also to their base, but hand-waving and obscurantism tends to limit this need.
Academia increasingly does seem pretty screwed up (STEM isn't free of issues, but the really nutty stuff is mostly in the 'humanities'). I suspect firing Damore will probably sate their blood-lust for a while.
Which book, and could you perhaps share some excerpts, or a link with more information?
Quote the relevant parts so people can see how hyperbolic you're being.
Google proved that all you need is a colorful logo and a stupid catch phrase ("Don't be evil") to get people to treat you as an infallible, altruistic entity - regardless of the fact that your actions tell a completely different story.
Like Apple, Google has become a religion for their fans. As with all religions, inconvenient facts are dutifully ignored by members of the Holy Order of Goog. I find the worship of corporations even more difficult to grasp than Scientology.
I don't think the logo or catch-phrase have much to do with it. Google's search engine was orders of magnitude better than anything else when it came out (that's how they won the market) and they've used their dominance of the web to improve their search to the point where the search box can read your mind. That is why people treat them as good -- because "morally good" and "usefully good" are difficult to separate.
You see Apple users (and maybe Linux users?) as religious zealots and assume they must have been tricked by a pretty logo or some CS hazing ritual. What's actually going on is that they're reacting to one very positive experience (maybe along some dimension that you don't care about) and following the human inclination to extrapolate that experience to the whole product/company.
Such individuals, if they choose to say things that the platform doesn't like at an institutional level, then they don't have that right anymore because they get removed/de-listed,banned/de-platformed. Generally, I'm a free-market person, and I'd advocate that entities should have the right to deal with their own platform how they see fit. But in this case, they're collaborating with traditional media, learning institutions and social-agenda groups in order to create a giant echo chamber. We're watching that play out right now in that certain non-left and non-pc speech behavior is condemned and those that wish to express them are de-platformed.
We may not always agree with those points, or find them palatable, but up until now I think we've been navigating a middle-line where general public opinion ebbed and flowed between the two sides. It's tipped incredibly to one side on numerous issues, and I'm afraid that a specific set of viewpoints are now pervading our society. Once it gets to a point, it's only a matter of time before entire generations are raised believing only the accepted-viewpoint. It may be a bad example, but you see it happening already in public-schools where teachers are actively pushing social-agenda issues onto their kids. It happened with anti-Trump attitudes, with transgender-activism, gender-gaps, race-activism, etc. One side is accepted, and debate is silenced, and teachers are forced or encouraged to teach those things to impressionable young minds instead of encouraging free debate.
Further, if you ask most conservatives, they actively disagree with a lot of those things even if it's from the perspective of government-meddling. Conservatives are generally half the population, so something is definitely skewed and going wrong.
This is the price for being a public C-corp. There are very few people in history who can withstand the short term mob mentality of shareholders - in my mind only Jobs, Bezos, and Musk could do it... and survive. (imo Not even Bill Gates or Edison could do it) Maybe for other companies this can be mitigated by becoming a B-corp instead i.e public benefit company
They may be able to potentially wield a big stick, but what's its use when they'll never use it and push back? they've been strong armed by Wall St to the point where they've kowtow enough to drastically change Google in not so great ways. In their defense, very few people can do better
Say an organization 'A' funds another organization 'B' (maybe non-profit, maybe not), and over time 'B' becomes very dependent on the donations they are getting from 'A'. Then say they start to have a conflict of interest, and 'A' drops funding(which probably kills 'B').
Who's the bad guy here? How should've 'B' known there might be a conflict of interest in the future if not immediately?
It is appalling how US senators are allowed to receive gifts or be compensated in creative ways by companies.
> The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.
And as for the article, it says:
> The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999.
So yes, Google did contribute. But so did Schmidt and his family foundation. I think this is mostly on Schmidt personally rather than Google as a corporation.
The primary difference in it being his personal action, is that there's a lot less regulation governing his use of it.
It is very sad that they went down the censorship path. Especially since the open web made Google Search a viable business in the first place.
Now Google has the iron grip instead, and over the entire internet.
Tell me again how this was an improvement.
Google fought a large number of very lonely fights in the early dates, all in the name of consumers, the industry, and doing the right thing. It took a very large number of lumps and made a lot of enemies for doing so, but did it anyway.
I was there, in the DC office, working next to the policy director (I started the engineering side when he started the policy side. It started out as just the two of us).
I know what the strategy was, I know why it did it, because I was in the meetings to decide those strategies, and know what leadership wanted and approved.
What, precisely, is your source of information to contradict this?
Because it neither accords with history or reality, as far as i can tell.
(I left DC in 2012, so i can't speak to anything that happened afterwards)
I'd be wrong if Google actually went out of their way and did things that were contrary to their business interests.
Google doesn't share anything in common with people like him, other than not wanting to be sued by the govt. When I was at Google, there was a lot of complaining about this support and no explanation.
They are no different than any other company and claiming that they are somehow exceptional is what seems silly in my opinion.
It betrays a certain disingeniousness, an implicit assumption of unaccountable power and a conscious decision to adopt a strategy of placating the public with platitudes up front and maybe doing something altogether different behind the scenes. Power always concentrates itself and does strange things to people.
Google, Facebook and a lot of the SV culture is beginning to look sinister, they don't seem grounded to human values and present a future vision that is cold, alienated, soulless and totalitarian in an techno-elitist way.
You can't wish away people, and unemployed people create instability and an unviable system. Whether it is robotics or AI and keeping aside whether these are possible in any realistic way, for the people who accept this the only way to keep the system stable will involve evil.
If you want to do more than that, here is some more information on the staff, story and other action items: https://goo.gl/9a7KkC
Choosing to use Google's URL shortener in this context is beyond ironic.
Because if they didn't, they would be replaced by organizations (or people within the organization) who will. (I want to say that's Stanslaw Lem's law of bureaucracy?)
Calling them "evil" is like calling a customer "evil".
The supposedly business friendly Republicans now view them as a left-wing enemy, so a party shield (regarding anti-trust intervention) will not exist going forward. Obama kept them from DOJ interest during his time in office because of how close they all were, that's also not likely to be seen again in a future Democrat administration. Should be easy to carve them into pieces, with search + adsense + adwords on one side, and one or two other companies getting everything else. The new Search Co would then be put under a ten year government dictated operational agreement that would limit some of its abusive behavior.
Regardless of the content of the article or the fairness of the court's decision, the title itself is inflammatory and nothing less than indicative of someone having a beef and thumbing their nose at Google.
The lack of self-awareness on part of whoever came up with that title is astounding.
What title do you suggest could have been less inflammatory but still convey the same message?
The article doesn't even say that Schmidt called for the guy's head. It seems to have been the Foundation's decision. That's arguably a spineless move, but then again it's probably in their interest.
And what, exactly, would be ethically wrong about stopping funding for an institution you no longer agree with? After all, every single donation to charity is based on the principle that those giving agree with the organisations' aims. If the ACLU started a large campaign arguing for the extinction of puppies, would I be ethically wrong to quit?
If you want research isolated from such pressures, your best bet happens to be government, by the way. There are layers upon layers of isolation between the funding decision and actual scientists that, apart from the occasional right-wing propaganda misrepresenting individual projects, you're measured by the only yardstick that should count: how many papers you get into high impact journals.
Corporations can't directly give money to candidates, but Google pays it's employees, who 'donate' it to NetPAC, which is a Google-controlled entity which can give money to candidates.
There's no genuine, credible anti-corporate voice in American politics. The reasons why are many, but of course they typically distill down to the incredible power of money to influence people, of which this is an example.
The side-effects of there being no credible labor party in our political system manifests, in part, in the extreme volatility we see in electoral politics.
It's just weird that there aren't at least some voices arguing strongly that super-large companies (not even conglomerates) like google or apple should be split up for economic growth.
The reason we switched off of it, was around that time, the idea was the allow more consolidation at the expense of competition.
The rationale was that the American marketplace was already significantly competitive, to the point that market growth was labor constrained, as opposed to today, where it is capital constrained. So by allowing more merges and decreasing overall competition, you could achieve multiple simultaneous goals. You could lessen the labor constraint on the market, allowing faster growth and more capital accumulation at the expense of labor, but without significantly impacting quality of life for the laborers. Additionally, the decrease in competition and increased allowance of outsourcing and international IP enforcement was expected to (and did) lower the cost of goods for many American products.
The end result was: The rich got richer. Everyone saw the price of goods drop (or the quality of goods increase, or the rate of inflation drop). And big companies became larger, faster, with minimal impact on quality of life for everyone.
The problem, is we've been doing that for 40 years now. We're back to a capital constrained economy, but capital interests have been keeping us pursuing the above agenda as if nothing has changed. Its absolutely a ripe time to go back to the pre-70s ideas about trust busting and etc, in the name of increased, local competition, as opposed to the current ideology of increased corporate merger in order to achieve greater economies of scale.
At least, this is how it was explained to me. I'm just a dev : )
From my perspective, it looks like we're in some respects in a similar situation as we were 100 years ago. Huge advances in technology have made individual workers radically more productive. Assembly-line manufacturing then, computers and Internet now. And just like back then, while everyone predicted a future of shorter work weeks and less work, employers drive employees harder, and pay them less, while society says "the machines do the real work." There is one big difference though. Back then it got solved by the New Deal stepping forward and forcing companies to essentially give their workers a 600% raise basically overnight. Going from employing a whole family, children included, 16 hours a day 6 days a week and paying them barely enough to feed themselves... to 1 person working only 40 hours a week and being paid enough that the entire family could be comfortable on just that one income. Suggesting such a socialist solution back then would elicit discussion. Nothing of the sort can be discussed today. One whisper of the word 'socialism' is followed by 'communism' and all discussion is aggressively ended.
So it's not a question of reigning them in, that horse has bolted.
>all of them (plus neoliberals and many financially conservative folks) can agree that competition is at least one of their most important economic tenants
Note that this isn't true. Lots of free-market mindset people (libertarians and otherwise) believe that if a monopoly can provide a lower price then that's all that matters. That's part of the reason we're in this mess in the first place.
It may be weird that no one is arguing that (maybe it's just no one you're listening to, or being allowed to listen to, though?), but it's not weird that it's not libertarians. The notion that some people shouldn't be allowed to form voluntary associations with others because they got "too large" is anti-libertarian.
That said, "libertarianism" and "anarcho-capitalism" are becoming too synonymous. As a libertarian (but not an ancap) I have no love lost for big corporations; I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments that monopolistic corporations are bad for society in general. However, because we must stand on principles instead of feels, the relevant principle here is that we have no right to interfere with others' affairs simply because they've chosen to pool their resources into free association, massive or otherwise (assuming they are not interfering with others' liberties, and I don't think there's a genuine argument now that they are).
All hope is not lost, however: there is reason to believe that these monopolies derive much of their monopolistic power through the state (e.g., via regulatory capture) and thus by reducing the power of the state we will actually achieve the desired benefit (breaking up monopolies) without infringing on anyone's liberties.
I note that you said "corporate" vs "capital(ism)". Thank you for making the distinction.
Most liberals I hang with favor a Sander-esque version of capitalism meets socialism. Balancing capitalism (ready access to capital), competition, open markets with a strong safety net and democracy. Balancing rewarding achievement and merit with ensuring fairness, not abandoning people.
What does that look like?
I think it looks like more democracy. Every where.
--
I've used democratic decision making in the workplace. It's very effective. Think of it as better governance meets social cognition.
Although probably not original, I just kinda made it up, mostly modeled after the USA's Constitution (balance of power) and Demming/Ford quality circles (empowerment, joint decision making).
Since, I've been keenly interested in any effort swimming in the same direction. Co-ops, worker owned companies, the political philosophy of the Occupy Movement, whatever I can find.
I recently read this book. It's good survey of our current pickle (winner takes all economy, chaotic boom/bust cycles) with an okay primer on worker self directed enterprises (WSDE). The "more democracy" prescription is the closest I've found to my experiences. But being rhetoric vs a howto, it lacks actionable steps.
Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
Bernie Sanders and the Nordic countries are Social Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Social democracy is a political, social and economic ideology that supports
economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the
framework of a capitalist economy, as well as a policy regime involving a
commitment to representative democracy, measures for income redistribution,
and regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state
provisions.
Democratic socialism is a political ideology that advocates political
democracy alongside social ownership of the means of production, often with
an emphasis on democratic management of enterprises within a socialist
economic system. Democratic socialists see capitalism as inherently
incompatible with the democratic values of liberty, equality and solidarity;
and believe that the issues inherent to capitalism can only be solved by
superseding private ownership with some form of social ownership [in the
form of democracy].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Libertarian_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy
Although "Democratic Economy" is also apt.
My issue is inequity, not capitalism. So I don't think I'm a Democratic Socialist.
I'd even be okay with corporations if they were put back into their place. Corporations are not people, natural or otherwise. They should only exist by charter, in the service of society. The current corporatism idealogy (Freedom Markets[tm]) is nutty making.
Yes and no. Trump was elected on a platform of tearing up TPP, TTIP, NAFTA etc, all of which are loved by large corporations looking to offshore work and evade taxes. There are a lot of people who voted for that anti-corporate message, and against Hillary who was obviously in Wall Street's pocket.
I mean, the guy has been in the public eye since what, the 70's? He has been photographed socialising with people of all races, he employs plenty of women in senior roles in his companies, he married an immigrant - yet the big, corporate media conglomerates are determined to paint him as a racist sexist etc etc - they all loved him while he stayed out of politics - doesn't that seem a little odd?
We have a broken system and refusing to play the game may get you a Senatorship in Vermont, but not much else.
Thankfully in the US the people have a lot of power, and Sanders is active in politics no matter how much the "powers that be" attempt to dismiss him.
Warren is also anti-corporate, though I'll admit I don't know the extent, and I think she is easier to see as a mainstream democrat than Sanders is.
My point being Sanders may not be accepted by the mainstream, but this is an unprecedented (since the 50s) level of acceptance of a class perspective. I'm not sure why you would explicitly ignore this change of events.
Bernie has/is changing that, but even then I would argue the main power structures haven't changed.
Bernie isn't / hasn't changed anything and won't. Sanders comes at the problem from a position that is considered Socialist (even though he's only a Socialist in name for the headlines), which will keep him forever in a cordoned off box. The last force in US politics with any influence in that regard, was Ralph Nader. He accomplished greater than ten times what Sanders has or will (and given his age at this point, the clock is ticking) when it comes to anti-corporate power checking. The Democrats lit Nader on fire and buried him politically for opposing their establishment one too many times.
Certainly, the people in control of the Democrats (such as superdelegates) did not choose an anti-corporate message in the last presidential election.
Could you clarify which voices you mean?
Globalization is great news for many people in the category of "workers," just not those in high-cost-of-living countries.
I'm not sure which Right you're talking about. Perhaps on taxes & redistribution the right doesn't like the government, but they will always support expansion of the military and police. And many politicians (on both sides, unfortunately) never saw a war they didn't like, because it brings home those sweet, sweet procurement contracts.
Most substantial voting blocs are pro- something. Pro-union, pro-environmental, and pro-privacy voters may support positions which some corporations oppose, but the voters themselves aren't by-and-large anti-corporation; as long as corporations behave they don't have any problem with them.
Ralph Nader? Noam Chomsky?
These people have no voice because people refuse to turn off the TV.
They are 83 and 88 years old, respectively. Where are the Naders and Chomskys of the next two generations? Do they have any influence?
Why not both? The root problem is the system, yes, but Google could choose to not take a part in that system. They both deserve blame.
There are plenty, actually. They just don't get a lot of airplay in the... corporate media.
https://twitter.com/NewAmerica/status/902929634592948224
In a subsequent tweet, Slaughter (the head of New America) claims that the quotes were accurate, "but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong". She hasn't yet said how the interpretation was wrong, or in what context the leader of a group of independent scholars could properly say "We are trying to expand our relationship with Google ... just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others".
I don't think Google is an any more moral actor than any other corporation, but why would they do something like this, which has basically nothing but downside to them? Despite Lynn's fantasies, I doubt that Google is particularly worried about his voice of criticism, nor stupid enough to think this would silence him.
Shouldn't the "disgruntled employee dismissed for cause" theory, which has at least as much evidence as the "lonely voice of criticism silenced by corporate behemoth", be at least entertained?
The whole premise is a bit flawed - it's putting most of the blame on Google. When an "independent" organization takes on average $1M/yr from any entity, and structure themselves such that losing that money is a big concern, then they've played an equal role in this mess.
It's almost as if the article is trying to make it Google's obligation to continue funding, which is a ridiculous proposition in itself.
>This year, it has donated to 170 such groups, according to Google’s voluntary disclosures on Google’s website. While Google does not indicate how much cash was donated, the number of beneficiaries has grown exponentially since it started disclosing its donations in 2010, when it gave to 45 groups.
I could equally well call it linear. Two data points does not an exponential growth make.
The premise is that Eric Schmidt's displeasure lead to some people getting fired. I don't know how else you could make that argument without blaming Google when the entire argument is about blaming Google.
I'm not saying Google is not culpable. I'm saying they're no more culpable than the folks at the think tank who are dependent on Google.
If I run a business where I take in huge chunks of money from a company every year, and adjust my spending and budgets to rely on said money, then I stopped being independent.
In the business world, no one would have any sympathy for me if the company I relied on suddenly decided to stop supporting me. I put myself into this hole. Why is it any different here?
The think tank stopped being independent long before any of this happened. They are equal partners, and deserve an equal amount of blame. They are definitely not the victims here.
The problem isn't that Google is making negative overtures to them with an implied threat of defunding them in the future. The problem is that they shouldn't have been funding them in the first place. As such, it can easily be argued that dropping funding is the right thing to do.
Is that really different from any other think tank or the NYT itself?
The spinoff is at "https://citizensagainstmonopoly.org/".
Is it a joke?
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
After all, the 'left-leaning' Google sure isn't pushing for unions, only for what will benefit them.
Google and these other companies are blowing themselves up over idiotic politics. It may be a trickle today, but it doesn't take much for a trickle to become a raging river of people migrating off your ecosystem. Are you listening Google? Or are you so tone deaf and smug that you can't hear anymore?
Maybe it's time anyways--Google and Facebook are so lame. They are so anathema to what the original Internet was all about. Hint: It's about humanity and open access to ideas, not closed plantations with no diversity of thought allowed.
There's an anti-trust suit against Google looming. The only possible challenge to Google's power is nation states; not individuals, not startups, and not even other large tech firms. Like any corporate entity (i.e. a sociopath), they'll inevitably start using their influence on the public to avoid any kind of regulation or anti-trust legislation. Therefore it's certain that the total politicization of Google is imminent.
There's an impending and complete certainty Google will begin: subtle manipulation of news feeds, outright censorship of opposing viewpoints, backdoor deals with politicians in pay-for-play schemes, insincere attempts to integrate Google services with the state (would you like to ride the Google self driving bus to work for free?)... and most ominously, given their massive ability to psychologically profile everyone on the planet (to the point of being able to infer IQ, political opinions, emotional tendencies, income, social profile) -- targeted, tailored manipulation of the human mind to suit Google's ends.
In fact they've started all of the above.
I switched to Protonmail (paid account). Then I started going through my password vaults and removing or modifying every account that had been tied to a Gmail address. Then I sold my new OnePlus 5 because just thinking about supporting Google keeps me up at night, now... and I had that Gmail account since 2004. It's good to know that I'm not the only one.
Unfortunately for me, I am tied into their ecosystem in such a way that I can't remove myself, because too many work-required and other accounts use Google-provided solutions, and it is required by clients or whatnot. Even my tv and blu-ray player are powered by Android.
We're at least two major iterations into "What the Internet is about" now.
If you don't mind paying you can use FastMail
I hope we see that happening, the company has become a monster and can literally tell the world what to think and how to feel.
Especially the employee horror stories and now slashing Whole Food prices. While its awesome for it's customers, I'm worried about long term effects.
/r
Similarly Apple wants to sell you an iPhone and a laptop and Microsoft wants to sell you an office suite and a database. Real companies with real products and services. But Google's ONLY business is stealing and selling personal data.
See also, the recent Canadian decision: Canada can order that Google do something worldwide. But the extent of enforcement ends at "Canada decides what happens with businesses that operate in Canada. Google's free to leave."
If Google really pissed off the EU, or US, they could simply force all banks to freeze Google’s assets, and seize them. This has worked in the past, and can be used again.
"Think tanks are natural lobbies w/a facade of "research" Their cover allows them to censor dissent from monoculture"
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/902859415375798274
OT: I'm curious how many hours will this post survive on the front page
It is ridiculous that either is taken serious.
The real "fight" is upvotes and substantive comments vs. people blindly flagging articles they disagree with.
Not long. HN heavily censors any criticism of Google and yet any blog post from one of the official Google sites stays on the front page for a whole day.
For sure, Googlers downvote a lot of critical comments and surely flag posts they feel are inaccurate. There are a LOT of Googlers and quite a few of them are very active here. Some are even vocally opposed to disclosing their employer.
The other thing is that many posts critical of companies are extremely controversial here. HN is a weird mixing pot of startup folks from the Valley and hackers and code enthusiasts, so there are some very pro-business and very anti-business voices.
Where this plays in is that HN tends to push threads with a lot of argument and debate off the front page much faster. Announcements of new products aren't nearly as controversial as a post about say... James Damore's memo.
Google has been doing strange things for a long time and despite that there actually are a good amount of groups speaking out against them, they stick to their guns and oust or bribe anyone in their way. The first time ever they've stumbled on a worthy opponent is when they started getting sanctioned by the EU.
Do you have a source for this claim?
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
Well, if it's the actual definition[1], then you didn't exactly prove anything.
The author tells the story of seeing Shukang stand up in front of the entire prison and refuse to "confess his crimes" -- and was summarily spat on and beaten to near death by a group of party zealots. Tortured this way for three more days, Shukang hanged himself on the fourth day after writing characters on the wall, among which -- "The victims of the Great Leap Forward will live forever in the hearts of the people!"
We must not forget the victims of the past, and we must remember that we are less than two generations removed from men being killed simply for telling the truth when the facts do not align with political convenience. The intolerance of dissenting voices and contradictory information is a dangerous slippery slope on the fall from a free and healthy society.
I think a case could be made that the firing reveals the org for what they are: more of a PR firm than a think tank.
I'd guess all their messaging on the guy's "separation" was around avoiding triggering an IRS audit more than anything else. Although losing Google's patronage might actually cost them more than losing tax exempt status, losing the status would likely mean Google would stop funding as they'd lose the tax write-off. So, losing tax exemption would basically be a death knell.
The government subsidy issue also implies a degree of actual 1st Amendment speech implications. The power to tax is the power to kill/silence/stifle/etc. I don't want to overstate that point, but this may be one of the rare instances where the "censorship" cry carries at least a little validity.
You need to evolve with time. Especially a tech company like Google failing to understand that is rather sad.
Now Google has set precedence that they will not tolerate anything critical. So, the consultants & advisor will just praise Google till the day it sinks.
if you have a media product that is monetized through ads and you put Google ads on your site, are you funded by Google?
if you are a member of a political party that Google made contributions to, are you funded by Google?
Communist repression (and fascist for that matter) WAS of the brute force variety, like in 1984, but what we are seeing now is something completely different. Not quite Brave new world, but definitely with aspects of that. Giants like google don't use violence, very likely they never will. They don't need to. They can nudge leaders and populations in the direction they want, and achieve their goals, through entirely legal and voluntary means.
Looking back at what abuse of power looked like in the past is very dangerous, we will miss the signs of the novel ways that the powerful move their positions forward.
Google is removing people that have views that differ from the progressive narrative.
It's not just about Google, it's about people who hold progressive beliefs seem to think that it is ok to remove people who express differing opinions.
There is a large number of politicians who hold progressive beliefs. The Google incident can be interpreted as a warning that progressive politicians would remove citizens that express differing opinions if they could.
The ops anecdote about China is a reminder that humans are shit and have the capacity to murder people for expressing differ in views.
It's a warning that progressive are only tolerant to surface characteristics such as skin color and extremely intolerant to anything, even the truth, that contradicts their utopian world view.
Would you please not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents? It's against the HN guidelines.
I'm even sympathetic to the criticism of Google. But for the life of me I can't figure out why this particular employment dispute gets this sort of billing... Arguably the US government (an entity endowed with something literally called "the monopoly on violence") just pardoned someone who build an actual concentration camp (his words) in the middle of the US. And had his goons start criminal investigations against journalists. And, you know, continued actually killing people after being told by a court that he should maybe not do that.
Now the victims were mostly brown and did not have enough stock options to coast for the next decade, so it maybe somewhat hard to relate to for the community. But no matter how hard I try, I can't see reason why one story is running to the top every second day, and others are nowhere to be found.
1. We work in tech, and some of us have already developed opinions on Google. We have small worlds and in them some things seem disproportionately large.
2. Most posters are American. Examining how the US state uses violence is never going to be comfortable for them.
3. Decades of misinformation have created a layer of innuendo and whataboutism around acts like whistleblowing and certain kind of political protests. Google is under fire because it simply hasn't yet operated the kind of propaganda machine available to other organs of our economy.
4. People have already been 'primed' to respond to this story by a slow buildup of other stories. Your story hits a blindspot. The good news is that continued messaging, continued posting can gradually overcome that effect if it's targeted at the right people.
That's because politics in the US requires money and no politician can rise to the mainstream without money. Not only that, if the capital interests saw you rising in local/state elections, then they could fund your opponents and whittle you down.
We are a nation ruled by money/capital. NK is a nation ruled by the kim family. The chinese are a nation ruled by the communist power. Someone in the US going against corporate interests has as promising a political future as a north korean politician railing against the kim family or a chinese politician going against the communist party.
Everyone, including the politicians, have to play by the rules of the system.
Look at the past election, both trump and clinton were pro-corporate/capital politicians. Hillary was probably even more pro-corporations/neo-liberalism than trump. But democrats will argue that hillary cared about the lowly workers.
But can you really blame the clintons, trumps, obamas, bushes or any other politician in the US? They are just playing the game within the system.
Ultimately, in the US, both the republican and democratic parties serve one master - the capital owners. The US is really a 1 party nation if you look beyond the silly social issues that the republican and democratic play off of each other to distract the masses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131729 and marked it off-topic.
Second, Trump campaigned on lowering immigration and tariffs, by far the most anti-corporate policies American president supported in the living memory.
Both of your points are seriously weakened by the 2016 elections.
> Second, Trump campaigned on lowering immigration and tariffs, by far the most anti-corporate policies American president supported in the living memory.
Sure. If a NY billionaire is the "most anti-corporate" president, then does that prove what I'm saying?
> Both of your points are seriously weakened by the 2016 elections.
No. It confirmed it as far as I can tell.
Why are google employees not threatening to quit their jobs over this? Are the progressive employees at Google only progressive when it comes to gender?
> The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999.
Semicolons aren't glorified commas. Stop it. Bad! Bad! :-p
Grammarians have spoken!
Well duh!
Criticize Google all you like. But does anyone really think companies have an obligation to fund their critics? Or that groups receiving such funding have an obligation to retain critics?
The problem is that the only way to be truly independent is to take no money from corporations. But any group that does that will be crushed by similar groups who _do_ accept corporate money (and are thus compromised).