The article seems to rest on the idea that if Google wasn't funding these guys, there wouldn't be any academic opinion in their favor. But no less of an authority on anti-trust than Robert Bork was also against the FTC action[1]. Article also doesn't seem bothered by the fact that the pro-FTC-action group, fairsearch.org, is a puppet group of Microsoft. If the people spurring FTC investigations are Google's corporate enemies, it only seems fair for Google to defend themselves with a bit of academic funding.
Everyone knows Microsoft does not always play nice. Also funding a group is nowhere the same as manipulating academia slyly (fixing academic conference speakers). Yikes. Did not expect this from Google.
> Google played an unusually active role in the George Mason conferences. The Washington Post has previously published emails showing Google public policy representatives giving LEC officials detailed information on what regulatory, law enforcement and Congressional staff to invite to the conference.
> Nowhere do sponsors actively set the agenda for an academic conference.
Agenda is one thing but that's not what either article is claiming?
It's extremely common (the rule, not the exception) for sponsors to suggest and directly invite people to conferences (and at least in those published emails there doesn't appear to be any suggestions for speakers, just attendees).
That's an email from "James Cooper, a former FTC staffer and director of research and policy at the LEC", not someone from Google?
Asking someone who works at a sponsor of a conference for suggestions of who to put on a panel at that conference isn't really in the realm of that sponsor "setting the agenda"
That reads to me more like trying to actually diversify the attendance, rather than trying to hide the overrepresentation of Google. Google faces the same problem at other conferences, for what it's worth. There were some Lisa / USENIX type things focused on "site reliability engineering" where Google was noticeably overrepresented.
> Everyone knows Microsoft does not always play nice.
Far from true. As a 40-something, I share the same viewpoint on Microsoft, but I'm talked with many 20-somethings who seemed surprised at my outright rejection of using anything from Microsoft.
For most of their lives, Microsoft has been operating under the close supervision of the US Justice Dept (in the person of US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly), and she said that the company had been "overwhelmingly cooperative". It's also had the European Commission on its back, trying to extract any fines it could possibly get. So, it's been obliged to play nicely enough to stay within the law, and it's had to pay heavily for any lapses.
For what it's worth (probably not much), Microsoft has also been on the list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for the past five years running.
So, how bothered are you personally about any bad things companies may have done 15-20 years before you were born? How bothered do you expect them to be?
I think it would be more correct to say that he was against the kind of antitrust action they practice in Europe, which protects the competitors, and in favor of the kind we practice in America, which is focused on protecting the consumer, which makes sense because Bork set the agenda for modern antitrust enforcement in America. As your article states, Bork is the most-cited author on the topic. He defined antitrust.
If you're not familiar with him, Brett is a small ISP operator who dependably interrupts internet policy conversations to accuse pretty much everyone of shilling for Google. Lessig took the time to write a full rebuttal: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/90048838607/on-the-curious-cas...
My gut reaction to this article's premise is to believe it. However, it's evidence seems to be pretty lacking.
Consider this passage:
"But before Wright’s confirmation, the FTC already decided against filing charges against Google, overriding its own staff’s recommendations. Google only had to voluntarily agree to alter some of its business practices to resolve the case.
Google’s actions between 2011 and 2013 show how they dodge legal bullets: by molding elite opinion, using the support of experts and academics as a firewall against criticism."
It's cleverly worded to make you think that Google bought off the FTC via Wright, but the chronology of events as the text describes is actually:
1) Google funds Wright.
2) Google agrees to alter its business practices.
3) FTC agrees not to charge them.
4) Wright is confirmed at the FTC.
You're leaving out a key issue, which is that the FTC made their decision not to file charges based on papers and arguments from academics (including Wright) who were being paid by Google.
I might be missing it, but I don't think the article ever actually offers any evidence that academic papers funded by Google influenced FTC decisions.
Granted, I would not be at all surprised if Google hoped the academics they funded would help influence the FTC. But this article seems to want to cleverly word things to make the reader think there is evidence for this without actually presenting any.
> Granted, I would not be at all surprised if Google hoped the academics they funded would help influence the FTC.
As an academic, you live or die by your funding. (Teaching doesn't matter.) To become a "prominent academic," you probably want to become a chair or at least faculty at a major university. If Google "guarantees" your funding as long as you write the things they want written, you have a significant incentive to look upon them favorably.
There doesn't need to be an email saying "write a paper saying this, and we'll pay you that." All it takes is a generally-understood and well-funded "hope" that academics write the things Google wants.
I apparently misunderstood. What did you think was my argument to discredit all academics?
What I wrote was that your value to the department is your funding, not your teaching. If you're good, the funding takes care of itself; if not, you whore yourself to whomever you can.
>If Google "guarantees" your funding as long as you write the things they want written, you have a significant incentive to look upon them favorably.
as a type of discrediting due to the source of the "guarantee" on funding, then:
>As an academic, you live or die by your funding.
implies that all live academics are funded. Funding must come from somewhere with some form of guarantee. If we can generalize Google to stand in for any other source of funding, then you have constructed an argument that discredits all live academics.
The academic would certainly be writing in Google's favor, but the question is, is there any evidence that this academic's writing convinces anyone on the FTC? That is not offered in the article.
> It's very unlikely the FTC hired Wright without being familiar with his work, meaning they had to read it and be influenced by it in some way.
The FTC didn't hire Wright, Wright was appointed to the FTC by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. The FTC doesn't choose its own commissioners any more than the Supreme Court chooses its own members.
Thanks to the author for highlighting the insidious effect of soft lobbying.
I'm also interested in difference between American and European approaches to anti-trust law. From what I understand, US regulators generally look for harm to the consumer, whereas their European counterparts try to detect harm done to competitors.
It seems that the European approach might insulate European firms from healthy competition, while leading to dead-weight loss of consumer surplus.
For example, if Google offers Yelp's reviews up on a Google.com domain, that might be more convenient for the consumer, who doesn't have to bounce around to different websites to find an answer. And it also might spur Yelp to find a way to add unique value to the consumer's experience instead of providing superfluous services.
> In May 2012, the law school at George Mason University hosted a forum billed as a “vibrant discussion” about Internet search competition. Many of the major players in the field were there — regulators from the Federal Trade Commission, federal and state prosecutors, top congressional staffers.
> What the guests had not been told was that the day-long academic conference was in large part the work of Google, which maneuvered behind the scenes with GMU’s Law & Economics Center to put on the event. At the time, the company was under FTC investigation over concerns about the dominance of its famed search engine, a case that threatened Google’s core business.
Let's not forget about Microsoft's Techpolicy.com, which it describes as "a forum for academics." Note this is not funding, say, basic research in computer science; it's a pure policy focus.
I'm not sure if this would also count as "bankrolling friendly academics?"
I don't mean to single out Microsoft; I suspect many large companies do the same. And maybe the practice is defensible in principle--if academics get grants from Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur and other organizations with a pro-regulation focus, maybe companies should give grants to fund work skeptical of regulation?
This isn't all that important, but what is important is that Google (unless this has changed) spends the most lobbying of any U.S. company. They don't want to fall victim to what happened to Microsoft in the 90s.
Do you have a source for this? According to opensecrets.org, they're in the top 2 for tech companies (their major rival is Comcast), but they spend much less than Blue Cross/Blue Shield or the National Association of Realtors. This has been true since at least 2010 (as far back as I checked).
They do sometimes spend more than Boeing, which I wouldn't have guessed.
George Mason University (formerly George Mason Community College) is a right-wing lobbying organization. Their "Law and Economics Center", to which Google donated, says "The vision of the LEC is that if policymakers understand economics, they will be more likely to make sound decisions that support the rule of law and the free enterprise system, thus advancing innovation, job creation, and economic growth. ... LEC is uniquely equipped to positively affect national policy outcomes."
If you're going to smear a school, at least get it right. GMU was never known as a "community college." It was founded as an eastern campus of UVA and then promoted directly to being an independent research university. The only two names it has ever been known by are "the George Mason College of the University of Virginia" and "George Mason University."
Right wing also refers to "weed should be banned", "abortions are illegal" type religious lunatics as well. Libertarians often do not like to be called right wing because they are not.
There are reasonable cases to be made for both keeping weed illegal and banning abortions. Labeling people as lunatics because you disagree with them is a very dangerous road to go down.
I'm sorry that capitalist libertarians don't like being associated with social conservatives. They should have thought of that before entering a political alliance with them in the 80s.
What do you mean by quantity, not quality in terms of jobs?
Someone going from unemployed to employed seems to both be a quantity improvement (one more job) and a quality improvement ($0 in wages vs >$0 in wages).
Quantity means jobs, any jobs ... shitty jobs, no minimum wage peanut for pay jobs, that sort of thing jobs ... Where quality cares more about aspects like the employee welfare in terms of wages, overtime, paid vacations, paid paternity leaves ...etc etc
A university that describes itself in the language of a polictical "think tank", conducting research in support of pre-announced conclusions, is a bit fishy.
US contemporary libertarianism for all intents and purposes is right-leaning. Globally, it's the complete opposite with a lot of similarities to anarchism.
Some issues where libertarians disagree with the American right wing: immigration, drug legalization, government surveillance, abortion, gay marriage, jury nullification, right-to-die, foreign wars, ...
Do the libertarians you know vote on those issues? The ones I know, chiefly but not exclusively technical, don't. They vote on "I climbed the ladder, now I'm going to pull the ladder up behind me."
To a first approximation, nobody sits in the voting booth and tries to "pull the ladder up behind them". At most they're thinking about what might benefit them but (again, first approximation) nobody's sitting there thinking about how to screw everybody else. If that's your best understanding of anybody's voting logic, you might want to consider upgrading your understanding, because what you've got there is just propaganda. Propaganda I could trivially repurpose to fire against any ideology; believe me, liberalism is not immune to that either.
(After all, is it not an interesting coincidence how much we've been talking about "income inequality" lately even as liberals have been in control of the Presidency, the federal bureaucracy, and have at least split control of the other branches? And isn't it interesting how all the solutions to the problem of "income inequality" involve giving those exact same people more power? Only this time we should expect income inequality to go down instead, for... what reason again? How is giving more power (which is just another form of money) to the 1% controlling our policy and government going to solve our income inequality exactly? Clearly the wealthy liberals and those liberals who expect to be wealthy later as a result of their college degrees (many of whom are, alas, quite mistaken, but they're voting "correctly" for now so shrug says the 1%) are just pulling up the ladder behind them even as they tell everyone else how helpful they're being. I can fire the "pulling the ladder up behind them" propaganda at any major group you name.)
Your definition of "liberal" and mine probably do not line up too well, in no small part because I don't consider the mainstream Democratic Party to be meaningfully liberal except where required to include parties to get their votes. (Income inequality is an issue not least because the Democratic Party is a center-right organ controlled by monied interests.)
And yet, I have even less patience for those whose understanding of economics are "well, it'll hurt me a little, so it doesn't matter that it helps others a lot." Which I don't feel is an uncharitable description of the techno-fetishistic libertarian in action.
This is just projection. Most "progressive" policies are white-knight-ism that ends up empowering the status quo by consolidating political power in the hands of elites, who have climbed the political ladder and are pulling it up behind them. If I had to choose, i'd much rather have people try to pull up economic ladders than political ones, one game is zero sum, and the other is not.
All of these issues albeit, crucial and important, are social not economic. A liberatarian in the traditional sense of the word would favor a more egalitarian economic system without the interference of the state than the established casino capitalist system of today.
Yeah but that isn't at all what mainstream "right-wing" politicians support.
Everyone likes the concept of libertarianism in economics. The right wing loves the rhetoric, but actual support of the ideas is basically absent in government, unsurprisingly.
...corporate welfare, tax breaks for favored companies / industries, patents & copyright, eminent domain. I take your point though, and I think is a valid criticism in a lot of cases.
Interesting -- I know nothing about non-US libertarianism. In the US, it has been filtered through a two-party system of roughly "public/economic control and private freedom" (D) vs. "public/economic freedom and private control" (R). The result is that it has been largely coopted by the (R) side to promote public/economic anarchy.
https://www.criterioneconomics.com/docs/bork-sidak-google-se...