How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
It doesn't seem inherently shady to fund research relevant to your area of business. Did the outcomes of research at these institutions change after receiving money from Google and Facebook?
Perhaps not the outcomes. But some PI could have said "let's not research that, because Google might not like it".
I think you should read Sapiens by Harrari, he writes about the interaction between universities, capitalism and democracy. Very illuminating to me.
[Citation needed]?
Just take a look at this search query for “academia” on HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I strongly disagree. It has always been as difficult as today (if not more), it's just that these days were aware of it.
Science is very very difficult, a journal will try to only publish things it thinks are true however papers (especially in the more informal channels some journals have/less prestigious journals) which are merely interesting or could-be-right are published all the time. That mostly isn't a bad thing - something has to be published properly to be considered properly and fleshed out, dead ends are still ends.
What do you mean? Academics routinely do disclose their funding. In practically every paper published they list where their fund comes from.
If someone publishes papers without disclosing sources, that's a newsworthy exception in my opinion. Not proof that it's routine.
Google based lobbying actions in the European Union are no less intense: 249 meetings! Its amazing how much time EU officials seem to have.
https://www.integritywatch.eu/organizations
From their results looks like Google is not getting back their money worth...
> 249 meetings!
The parliament alone has more then 700 members, idk. if 249 for one of the largest tech companies is really that bad. The problem are less the number of meetings but a lot of other things around it.
This represents a meeting every week, for 5 years in a row. There are 27 EU countries, and approximately 25 million active enterprises in the EU. Not all these companies are of the same size but for large companies you have more than 25,000. That is a large footprint. Are these EU officers able to cope with all that and still provide so much attention to a few companies ?
"Lobbyists and Bureaucrats in Brussels: Capitalism’s Brokers"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326878033_Lobbyists...
"...With over 30,000 lobbyists in town, Brussels is often called the European capital of lobbying. Despite this, little is known on how this political system works in practice. This book offers an unprecedented window into the everyday relationships between bureaucrats and interest representatives. Where the media only shows lobbyists as they meet MEPs and submit amendments, the book argues that the bulk of their work is done in close contact with EU bureaucrats - a form of 'quiet politics' developed by the business community, targeting officials with little public exposure..."
I mean, the US has a ton of industry funded "think tanks" that are effectively unregistered lobbyists. If they spend >50% of their time lobbying, they have to register. Some probably cross that line and don't register.
Spending money on lobbying makes a lot of noise, but donating to a "think tank" can be stealthy.
It could be interesting to scrape / crowd-source the public calendars of house/senate committee members and agency commissioners to identify these orgs and the scale of their lobbying activities. The results might surprise you.
Politicians need a media strategy in order to do the things that they're paid to do by private interests, and think tanks provide that strategy.
As the article notes (and as is true) there are issues in the regulation of platform markets and network goods in economics which are still quite unclear, even in theory. It isn’t clear what the right (theoretical) model is or what the welfare costs or benefits are, so the best way to regulate these firms or do competition policy in this area is similarly unclear.
What’s more, even if you have a model, that’s not enough to convince people. You will generally need data to estimate it to get an idea of what the costs or benefits of different market structures or regulations would be in practice. These firms are the only firms that can provide that data. (Exception: the government can demand it as part of an antitrust investigation, but that is generally locked down and unavailable for research.)
Anyone accepting their money should absolutely disclose that relationship in any project remotely related to those issues, but you can generally find such disclosures, at least with economists.
I also very much doubt that a research grant of the size of academic research grants I’m aware of is enough to “buy” someone’s opinion.
This is not some nefarious conspiracy!
They might, however, not be that excited to give you the data for a second project if they don’t like what you said in the first one? That’s possible.
So overall: maybe a small conflict?? But I don’t think the effects on the conclusion of the research are likely to be that strong. Not in economics anyway. No one’s research agenda is so tied to any one industry.
Most of the firms can comfort themselves with the thought that the readership of whatever journal you publish in is probably measured in tens or hundreds.
Rather than argue if the $$$ does or doesn't affect their research, or if they should disclose, let's do a thought experiment:
Dr. Recent Hire, who lacks tenure, thinks "hey, I'd like to do a study on Internet Censorship. YouTube does a lot of that, don't they?"
If you honestly believe the department chairman will just wave that through, knowing how much Google will hate it, you are pretty naive.
Thanks for speaking up, more people who have been inside need to be telling it like it is on what these relationships do.
But yeah, Big Tech is not going to subsidize its enemies, anymore than Big Tobacco was. They may not tell you explicitly "don't publish that" but they certainly can cut back or cancel your grant.
He does not. Not even the smallest amount. This is the case across (at the very least) every economics department at any US university, and likely most other academic departments too. There is nothing for him to “waive through,” and certainly no option for him to not approve of something.
Furthermore, if I get a good publication out of a project, the department chair will be pleased for me whether Google likes it or not.
Your use of "waive" where I said "wave" sent me to the dictionary [1]. I think either is OK but probably "wave it through" was preferable the way I used it.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-of-wave-...
For what it's worth, it looks like most of their funding comes from individuals: https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2019/index.html
https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/digit...
https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/journalism-emergency-r...
The question is why should we be fine with the European Commission pushing their agenda? Being a politician is a job, like it is being a manager of a trillion dollar company. It doesn't magicaly guarantee that you are protecting the social greater good.
It is actually quite sad how little democratic power people hold inside the companies and jobs they work at, especially compared to mid to late 20th century.
> The question is why should we be fine with the European Commission pushing their agenda?
Because they're a public body and subject to a lot of strict accountability rules (and, ultimately, to the ballot box). For example, you can make FOIA-style requests to find out about their internal documents and decision-making. Good luck doing that with Google.