Tavis: happy to chat, I've dropped you an email.
Follow up: https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1566159561148362753
Lobbying can happen in many ways, and have many different implications. It certainly sounds like it didn’t happen as a result of company/executive action (and at least Tavis believes that), and neither parent, gp or ggp claim so (in fact they agree the opposite is the case).
I rarely have casual discussions with friends working at regulatory agencies that come back to haunt other people. I also don’t think the word “lobbied” was used in a harmful or particularly egregious way, especially considering the context in which it was used (and explained).
When a person employed in the government interacts informally with their friends, relations, acquaintances, the unoffical involvement should stop with "here's the name of the office where you file that complaint" or possibly "my office handles that; send it in through the usual method and I will make sure that I don't work on it". But human nature is to make things a little easier for the people we like or are predisposed to like. That's often harmless. It is sometimes quite the opposite.
The "old boys' network" feels good to the participants but is corrosive to fair treatment.
Great. But it also sounds like a reasonably common occurrence, and hence a systematic problem.
Speaking up about events like this is hard to do as an executive and I appreciate the honesty here.
Source: trust me bro.
For a Stanford paper documenting Cloudflare widespread involvement in spreading lies see https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19292/1906....
Oh please. These are large corporations, I would honestly be flabbergasted if leadership knew every mundane detail. Particularly in the benchmarking issue you noted, it's pretty easy to understand how that could have been added as legal boilerplate, but just went too far.
It's possible to be thoughtful and introspective, and try to learn about the things you don't know, but still fail to learn literally everything. We're only human.
…On a public message board and seems interested in figuring out what is or isn’t happening.
Decisions individuals make in large organisations are, on average, downstream of institutional culture, so if a large organisation is responsible for a lot of bad decisions then the leaders are responsible for the culture which made those decisions seem reasonable.
This is really naive. Every layer of indirection misses out on details, esp in an organization (public, private, gov, even at team levels).
Surely you understand this basic concept?
Therefore it's completely implausible that even one word written there hasn't been discussed with C-level staff.
Saying the opposite is just throwing PR smoke grenades in the hope some naive people will believe that kind show.
The fish always stinks from the head. (That's why "plausible deniability" is of so great importance to those people, btw).
I think this is just proof that you are not familiar with how C-level responsibilities work at large corporations.
There's an entire wikipedia article dedicated to that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
Given the current controversy, it would be much more reassuring to enter an .onion address rather than an IP address, to be entirely sure that servers can't be unmasked. At least not without compromising Tor or exploiting the proxied-to web server.