In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a tech giant that shapes public policy debates with its enormous wealth is criticized.
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. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.
But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.
“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.”
In the end, Google is a corporation that makes an ungodly amount of money, and they use it to lobby regulators and governments just like every other corporation on earth. They just happen to have a lot more money and influence than everybody else, so the kinds of things they can accomplish with that influence can carry far more impact.
Getting an entire policy team fired from a think tank for a mean article seems a bit excessive, however. Even for a company worth tens of billions that donates heavily to said think tank.
Corporate rule of think tanks isn't new or anything, but I can't recall people getting canned over an opinion. Then again, Google pays for opinions that are good for Google, that's how think tanks work, guys.
Google is no different from Caterpillar or Union Carbide or ExxonMobil in that regard, and that's something to keep in mind.
Where Google is different is that as a tech company that influences greatly what Americans see and hear and read, effectively silencing critics like this and burying their opinions is dangerous on an unprecedented scale. An information technology company that can control information critical of it to this extent is a company that is probably too large to be allowed to exist.
I stand by that. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Comcast, Disney, Charter, they all control the flow of information in the information age to tens of millions daily. And we have the Trump regime to ride herd on them?
What do you think is going to happen?
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