Sat, 07/15/2017 - 19:31
In September
of 2011, Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt testified
before Congress that Google was not manipulating search results to favor its own
shopping service (it was). Schmidt also denied allegations that the
company was a monopoly, citing a
research paper written by David Balto, former policy director of
the Federal Trade Commission. What Schmidt neglected to tell the Senate
Judiciary antitrust committee was that Google had
funded that research paper.
And that’s
not the only one, according to a recently
published report by the non-profit, non-partisan watchdog organization, the Google
Transparency Project, which identified “329 research papers published between 2005 and
2017 on public policy matters of interest to Google that were in some way
funded by the company.”
What’s more,
the academic research funded by Google covered “a wide range of policy
and legal issues of critical importance to Google’s bottom line, including
antitrust, privacy, net neutrality, search neutrality, patents and copyright.”
GTP’s report
reveals a shocking list of sources that Google paid off.
They include:
“[A]cademics,
think-tanks, law firms, and economic consultants from some of the leading law
schools and universities in the country, including Stanford, Harvard, MIT,
University of California Berkeley, UCLA, Rutgers, Georgetown, Northwestern Law
School, and Columbia.”
Internationally,
GTP reports, “Google-funded studies were written by academics at some of the
most prestigious universities in Europe, including Oxford (U.K.), Edinburgh
University (U.K.), Berlin School of Economics (Germany), Heinrich Heine
University (Germany), and KU Leuven (Belgium).”
The Wall
Street Journal took their research a bit further, and
what they discovered is astounding. WSJ reported:
“Some
researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give
suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal
in public-records requests of more than a dozen university professors. The
professors don’t always reveal Google’s backing in their research, and few
disclosed the financial ties in subsequent articles on the same or similar
topics, the Journal found.”
University of
Illinois law professor Paul Heald neglected to disclose the $18,830 he
received from Google to fund “an idea on copyrights he thought would be
useful to Google.” When he was questioned in an interview about his
failure to mention his sponsor, Heald replied, “Oh, wow. No, I didn’t.
That’s really bad. That’s purely oversight.” The professor also claims
the money had no influence on his work.
Google has
paid anywhere between $5,000 and $40,000 per paper, and the number of studies
surged the highest in 2012 when the company was being investigated by the
Federal Trade Commission and European regulators for antitrust violations. At
least 50 studies on antitrust issues authored between 2011 and 2013 were bought
and paid for by Google.
According to
a former employee and a former Google lobbyist, Google officials in Washington
compiled wish lists of academic papers and then searched for willing authors to
complete the desired work. Google often provided working titles, abstracts, and
budgets for each proposed paper. Upon completion, they were pitched to
government officials. The former lobbyist told the Journal that
Google would “sometimes pay travel expenses for professors to meet with
congressional aides and administration officials.”
Google’s massive
influence on academic research should come as no surprise given the former
CEO’s openness in discussing the company’s hand in writing legislation. At the Washington
Ideas Forum, Schmidt described his experience working with the U.S. government,
revealing that “The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws
are written by lobbyists…and it’s shocking, now, having spent a fair amount of
time in the system – how the system actually works.”
Shocking is
an understatement. It’s absolutely terrifying how the system works. A
multi-billion dollar company with a monopoly on the internet not only writes
the laws, but funds academic studies to shield them from further laws that
might prevent them from becoming even more dangerous, all while harvesting
private data from over a billion
people and developing AI technology that allows two neural networks to
communicate using inhuman cryptographic language indecipherable to humans.
And the
executive chairman of this disturbingly powerful corporation is a man who has stated that Google’s famous “Don’t be evil”
slogan was “the stupidest rule ever.” This is the same man
who told an
audience in Washington, D.C., that “We don’t need you to type. We know
where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re
thinking about.”
What could go
wrong?
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