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Comment by skummetmaelk | Hacker News Reader

According to the article they did offer to send someone else. Presumable the senate was not satisfied with anyone other than the top guy.

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They would've accepted either Sundar Pichai, or I believe even Eric Schmidt, who is now just a "technical advisor" but was the former CEO of Google, and former executive chairman of both Google and Alphabet, would've been acceptable as well.

Kent Walker doesn't make decisions about how Google conducts business, Kent's job is to whitewash it for public consumption. I believe his current title is "Vice President of Global Affairs", which is more or less a PR title, and of course, as others have noted, he's their head lawyer.

Anyone can look up Kent's numerous writings on Google's Public Policy blog, the Senate wanted to speak to the people who actually make those decisions, not just be informed what the decisions are.

They did seem to find Sandberg acceptable.

Sandberg is COO, on the board, and with Facebook for over 10 years. She's most definitely top level.

Google offered Walker, who was just promoted to the position back in July, and has no operational control over the company.

Kent Walker has been at Google since 2006, has testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee before[0], and just knows a lot about Google.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/01/fo...

Yes, but only promoted recently, and has more of an advisory role than a leadership one. Certainly a talented guy, but not comparable to Sandberg or Dorsey.

You have no idea. Whether it's about GDPR, the Google Books lawsuit, surveillance reform, relationships with China or whatever else the policy issue of the day might be, Kent Walker was involved. He's not a leader? He has hundreds of people under him. Your "only promoted recently" makes it sound like he's a small potato. He's been around for a long time. When Google wasn't even born, at Netscape he gave JWZ the bad news about Microsoft and bad-attitude in the antitrust lawsuit (https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html).

Source: I used to work at Google. I would have asked Kent a policy question well before Larry or Sergey.

Kent Walker had a leadership role back when I was hired at Google, which was nearly a decade ago. Titles don't necessarily mean all that much - he's been handling high-level legal issues (including dealing with governments) for over a decade.

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